When Amy Blondin was immersed in the world of artisan cheesemaking, she would occasionally hear people say they used to make cheese as well.
The words “used to” horrified her, as she could not imagine her life without the craft.
It took a bout of “maxing out” and a desire to return to the University of Michigan to wrest her from artisan cheesemaking, but she looks back upon her time doing so with gratitude, as she grew with the blossoming (now burgeoning) business and continues a deeply meaningful relationship with a farm that’s spanned over half her life.
“After 10 years of hard work and waking up in the middle of the night to frequent thoughts like, ‘How am I possibly going to sell 42 wheels of ripening cheese?’ I decided I wanted to go back into administrative work and an office job,” said Blondin, who since June 2023 has served as study abroad scholarships and communications coordinator for LSA Scholarships.
“I know a lot of people have this kind of bucolic fantasy of quitting their office job and working on a farm, and I encourage people to do it. As I was getting older and imagining my future, I couldn’t sustain that. It was a lot.”
Blondin’s first foray with what is now known as White Lotus Farms in Ann Arbor was back before any business was started. First called Wishing Tree Gardens, the community grew produce to donate to Food Gatherers, and Blondin volunteered gardening on the farm.
She graduated with a fine arts degree from Eastern Michigan University and worked for JSTOR, a digital archiving effort founded by the Mellon Foundation in 1994 and launched at the School of Information a year later. Blondin spent 12 years there before becoming program director for the Ann Arbor Arts Center.
All the while she continued volunteering at White Lotus Farms, spending evenings milking the Nigerian Dwarf goats the farm had grown to acquire.
“The founder of the farm decided we were going to become a 501(c)(3) educational farm business and open up a Grade A dairy, creamery, bakery, and get the farm certified organic,” she said. “I was hanging a show in the gallery for the art center and got a life-changing call asking, ‘How would you like to make cheese for a living?’ I was like, ‘Yes, but I need to learn how.’”
That sent her to the University of Vermont for a month for intensive training through its certified artisan cheesemaking program where industry experts and scientists introduced her to the craft. She took courses along with employees from the famed Jasper Hill Farm.
While the Ann Arbor Arts Center fanned her artistic flames, learning how to make artisan cheeses tapped into a previously unknown passion.
“It’s a lot of chemistry,” she said. “I’m a total chemistry geek and didn’t know it. It’s alchemy really. You take liquid milk, which is mainly protein, fat, sugar and water, add the live cultures and enzymes, heat and ferment it, add salt, and voila! You’ve got a solid cheese that tastes entirely different and delicious.”
Once back at White Lotus Farms, Blondin put her training to work. At the certified “farmstead creamery,” the cheese was made on site from goats, raised on the farm, which she tended to as she had in a volunteer capacity.
After chilling the milk that the goats produced at the dairy, Blondin had to walk it down the sidewalk to the creamery next door where the cheese was made, all by hand.
“Literally, if I spilled milk, it was worth crying over because it’s like liquid gold,” she said. “Artisan cheese is hand-crafted using traditional recipes and methods, so it’s not all done by machines. You delicately pour the milk in the vat and you’re stirring it by hand. You’re putting in the cultures and yeasts and molds and following very specific recipes that we had to learn. The ladling and pressing was all done manually, much like in the old ways over a fire-heated kettle.
“It’s a lot of trial and error. Timing, persistence and attention to detail is everything.”
She learned quickly that errors can happen at any point during the process. If the goats ate kale, the milk would carry a slight brassica scent that would come across in the fresh cheese. When the temperature dropped in the fall, the curd didn’t drain as well and produced wet chèvre.
The seasonality of the milk was also critical, since after giving birth in the spring, the goats would naturally nourish their kids with a rich fatty milk that yielded the most cheese. Then, in the summer months, as they weaned their young, the milk would become more watery, making less cheese per gallon.
“As a cheesemaker, you’re constantly responding to this kind of thing. Your raw materials change daily. It’s a very delicate process,” she said. “For everything to work out, there are a lot of factors, both environmental and operator.”
When it did work out, the result was mouthwatering. Blondin’s favorite artisan cheese to make and eat is Bella Luna, a French crottin-style, bloomy rind cheese, aged about a month. The length of time to bring a cheese to market depended on the type. A fresh chèvre would only require about three days while an aged feta would need six months.
The farm businesses, the cheesemaking process and how deeply Blondin cared for her craft was a source of pride.
“When I would sell the cheeses at the market, I would say, ‘This cheese was grass on Tuesday. The goats grazed in the pasture, were milked that morning and now you’re eating this fresh, sunshiny grass-fed cheese today,’” she said.
“I submerged myself in the cheese culture, world and language. I was able to take a trip to Paris and ate every cheese I could get my hands on.”
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Despite her passion, she needed a change. She still volunteers at White Lotus Farms and even stepped in to help at the farmers market one day in August, which she said she enjoyed.
She’s also still involved with cheese but in a different capacity. She now makes breathtaking cheese boards with all sorts of accompaniments and brings them to parties.
“I am one of those people who said they used to make cheese that I never thought I’d be. I had an identity crisis when I stopped. It was shocking,” she said. “It makes me teary thinking about that time — it was transformative in many ways. I am immensely grateful.
“When people ask me what I’m most proud of, I would say helping to launch an incredible business with incredible people and having crafted this beautiful product that people love.”
