How Music Inspires the Cheeses at This Petaluma Dairy

Soyoung Scanlan is one of California’s most celebrated cheesemakers, but growing up in South Korea, she never imagined this career. In fact, cheese wasn’t even part of her early life.

“I didn’t eat cheese until I was like 18 or 19 because cheese was not available,” she said. “From the U.S. Army, we could get processed cheese, like Kraft singles. Yellow plastic-looking things.”

She was born in Seoul in the late 1960s. Both her parents had experienced the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and poverty. They connected over their shared love of classical music, Scanlan explained.

“The only place there were pianos was in the churches. So the way my father met my mom was he was playing Chopin, and my mom walked into the church, and they fell in love.”

Growing up, Scanlan said that their house had no refrigeration, but it did have a garden and lots of music. Her father was her first piano teacher.

“I read music first,” she said. “I learned how to read music before I learned the alphabet.”

Scanlan studied chemical engineering, got a graduate degree in biotechnology, and worked in a cancer research center. She came to the U.S. to get a Ph.D. in molecular biology. Her first week in Boston, she went to the symphony, and ended up sitting next to the man who would become her husband.

The couple went on a trip to France, rented a farmhouse and took a fateful visit to a farmers market, where Scanlan met a cheesemonger who gave her a perfectly ripe piece of goat cheese from the hill town of Rocamadour.

“It was almost melting on my hand, like ice cream,” Scanlan said with a kind of reverence. She remembers the near-liquid center almost oozing out of the delicate rind. She basically had to drink it out of her hand.

“That was the first goat milk cheese in my life,” she said, “and it had so much flavor. I said, ‘I need to go to the place where it was made because I think I can actually taste the rocks and the air and something very dry. I can taste it.’ ”

They spent a day driving to Rocamadour, where she said the rocks and the hills and the air did smell like that cheese she’d tasted.

The experience was an epiphany about the power of milk.

Scanlan said she read hundreds of books and articles about milk’s biophysical properties and about its history. In the late 1990s, now living in Northern California, she met other cheese obsessives and started making a cheese that used milk from both goats and cows. She found it fulfilled her scientifically curious mind more than life in a lab.

“But I had no clue if it was good or not,” she said.

She took a few pieces to Napa’s Oakville Grocery, the North Bay’s go-to gourmet store of the time. People there shared it with folks who worked at the revered restaurant, The French Laundry. Scanlan was invited to prepare a tasting for chef Thomas Keller.

It’s a day she said she won’t forget. She remembers shaking when she entered the busy kitchen, asking for the famous chef.

“All the prep tables were full of salmon and lamb.”

But when the chef announced it was time for a cheese tasting, staff cleared the tables and put out a tablecloth and formal serving plates and utensils. Everyone in the kitchen removed their dirty work aprons, put chef’s jackets on, and held their breaths while Scanlan presented Thomas Keller with a tiny box holding only six pieces of cheese.

He tasted, smiled, and walked away from the table. Everyone else in the kitchen knew that meant he liked it.

“And they serve my cheese every day, ever since,” Scanlan said.

It was only after that day that Scanlan named her company Andante Dairy and decided to give each cheese a musical name. She explains that sometimes, an aspect of the cheese makes her think of the musical inspiration for its name. Sometimes, she has music on her mind, and she decides to create a compatible cheese.

One of her first was Nocturne, a blue-gray, ash-covered, truncated pyramid inspired by Chopin’s composition, meant to be played at dusk.

There’s Minuet, a triple-cream goat’s milk cheese, finished with a cow’s milk crème fraîche. Scanlan created it to be eaten while sipping champagne.

“I wanted to do something pretty and elegant, like the dance, minuet.”

Her cheese called Piccolo is, appropriately, tiny. Even though Largo is made from the same curd, it’s four times the size and ages so long that it develops a deeper flavor.

Cheesemaking is hard on the body, and Scanlan knows she can’t do this forever, but she still has cheeses she wants to make inspired by music. Like Rubato, the tempo mark for forgotten time.

“You are free from any directions. There is a melody, but you can do whatever you want, whatever speed,” she said. And that metaphor appeals.

She said she dreams of being able to just put aside the commercial time pressures of orders and budgets, forgetting time while she is making, and just helping the cheese become what it’s meant to be in its own time.

Given the huge role music plays in Scanlan’s life, it’s kind of surprising that there is no music playing in the Andante Dairy workroom on the day of our visit.

“I have very, very sensitive hearing,” Scanlan said. “Sometimes, when it is a little too much, it interferes in my brain.”

So the small workspace is quiet – no pumps, only the buzzing of a paddle spinning in a vat of milk. It’s sourced from the goats that graze on the rolling hills just out the door.

Scanlan monitored the temperature carefully and added milk by hand.

“I’m still fascinated by this whole process,” she said. “It’s like magic.”

Letting the milk in the vat agitate for a bit, Scanlan moved to a cheese press, where rounds of her newest cheese, Ballade, were squeezed overnight. She removed the 5-inch discs from their cheesecloth wrappers, flipped each round, and put them back in the mold for more, even pressing. She’ll finish the rind with pomegranate molasses inspired by the tree just outside the window.

Next, she turned to tall buckets filled with cow’s milk that she pasteurized the day before, for a slow curdling.

Scanlan is just over 5 feet tall. In her workroom, every waist-high bucket of milk is on wheels, and every work table is on casters so that the tiny cheesemaker can move them herself.

She scooped the slow-curdled Jersey cow’s milk into cheesecloth bags, nestled in a draining tray that looked like a trough, and it became clearer why Scanlan prefers a workspace with few distractions. Her sensitivities help her tune into the cheese. She said she feels the weight, the density of the curds when she scoops. She can smell the difference between goat and cow milk – she said if cow milk is cotton, goat milk would be Irish linen, a bit finer.

Of course, for someone with a highly trained ear, Scanlan pays attention to the sounds in the cheesemaking process.

“The sound tells you so much. The sound of curd falling into the bag, it actually tells you how much is solid in the milk.”

Scanlan said that when she’s working, the only music she needs is the constant drip of the whey draining out of cheesecloth.

“This is my temple. Yep,” she said. “And I guess cheesemaking, it is my prayer.”

This story is part of the series California Foodways, about food, agriculture, and the people that make both possible in each of California’s 58 counties.