“I’ve been a self-sustaining artist most of my adult life,” said 64-year-old Victor Chiarizia, whose hand-crafted residence is situated on six-plus acres in an Appalachian Mountains’ “holler,” just 12 miles from downtown Asheville, N.C.
A step inside his expansive workshop, which he also built, attests to his artistry. Dozens of tall, graceful glass vases in myriad muted hues line shelves and window ledges, and massive equipment for his ongoing glass blowing endeavor takes up about a quarter of the 3,600-square-foot workshop. Yet increasingly, Chiarizia’s focus has been on cheesemaking.
His late father, a 1940s immigrant from the Italian province of Molise, planted the cheesemaking seed when Chiarizia was just a boy. “It sparked an interest then,” he said, “but it wasn’t until I went to Italy with my family about 13 years ago and tried so many different kinds of cheeses that I realized I could make cow’s milk cheese like my father did. I wanted to make it the old way, the traditional way, the pure way—with mostly raw milk.”
Chiarizia was able to tap into his father’s cheesemaking knowledge for a year, from 2010 to 2011. He visited his father in 2011 just before he died, taking homemade cheese for him to taste. “He was a man of few words. He tasted the cheese, nodded his head, and said, ‘good.’ I knew he was pleased.”
Fresh Start
Just prior to 2010, Chiarizia took a few foundational cheesemaking classes through North Carolina State University. He signed up for a year-long cheese vat loaner program and began “playing around with simple cheeses and some blues.” He also took classes in Vermont and calls cheesemaker and educator Peter Dixon a mentor.
A Lengthy Process
Chiarizia makes cheese weekly, in order to have enough to sell at various farmers’ markets and to individuals and local chefs.He prepares the milk by heating it to around 90 degrees F; acidifies by adding bacterial cultures, which results in fermentation; and curdles it by adding rennet, enzymes that act on proteins in milk, causing a reaction. He cuts the curd with knives and heats it to further separate the curd and whey (remember Miss Muffet from the nursery rhyme?).
He then processes the curd through stirring, cooking, and washing, and continuing to acidify and dry it. The exact process varies depending on if the cheese will be a soft, semi-firm, firm, or hard cheese,” said Chiarizia.
The whey is drained, to leave only a mat of curd. “Animals love the whey,” Chiarizia added, “and it’s great as a fertilizer for the garden and for making foods like kimchi.” He salts and flavors the curd, shapes it into molds, and moves the resulting young cheeses to a cool, dark space to age.
Better With Age
To age his various blue cheeses, Chiarizia has a walk-in cooler he dubbed the Blue Room, where they develop for a minimum of three months. Some of the cheese is wrapped in colorful, thin foil, which provides more moisture for softer blue cheeses; leaving cheese wheels unwrapped makes them harder. To allow for oxygen to penetrate the blue cheeses and grow healthy, edible mold, he fabricated a device that punches holes in the blue cheese wheels.
His Old World-style cheeses are aged and housed in an 18-by-18-foot cave, carved into the mountain, that Chiarizia excavated and built himself. “I wanted to emulate how cheeses are aged in places like Italy and France,” Chiarizia said. “To get the terroir, the characteristic earthy taste and flavors … to achieve deeper flavors because of the rain’s moisture that seeps into the cave naturally through the bedrock.”
Aside from the hand-hewn, vaulted ceiling cabin that took him 12 years to build and features his largest glass creation—an elaborate chandelier—he considers this his apex. It took upwards of 40 hours of backhoe digging into the hillside next to his cabin to construct the cave. He then had to jackhammer the bedrock and secure the area with concrete walls, leaving the back of the cave naturally exposed. The ceiling is held firmly in place with concrete-filled metal roof decking.
Inside are numerous wooden shelves for holding the cheese wheels, as well as industrial fans for circulation. The cave’s temperature is a consistent 50 to 51 degrees F, with humidity at 98.3 percent.
In order to make the cave’s exterior aesthetically pleasing, he hired workers to stack Appalachian blue stone on the front side and around the door. Inset over the door is a face sculpture of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine and vegetation. Copper flashing decorates the exterior door. Two other doors inside the cave help to maintain the cave’s temperature and keep out critters.
On the well-organized shelves within the cave are dozens of cheese wheels—each pinned with a tag that notes the type of cheese, date made, pH monitoring information, and more. The cheeses in the cave age for up to one year.
Creative Concoctions
Just as each of his hand-blown glass vases are one-of-a-kind, each wheel of cheese is as well. Chiarizia calls his cheesemaking efforts “food art … where art meets science.” Each wheel bears his creative stamp.Among his signature cheeses are ones that Thai chile-embedded, espresso-crusted, or stouted-oatmeal-porter-flavored. He assigns each cheese a unique name, too. The espresso-crusted Johnny Valdez is named for a caffeine-loving uncle, and the mild, blue-veined Ridge Blue is a play on the Blue Ridge Mountains. All in all, he typically makes at least a dozen different types of cheeses and regularly sells out of his inventory.
“It’s so satisfying to go into the Blue Room or the cave and look around and see the fruits of my labor,” Chiarizia said. “What I like doing is making stuff, and everything on this property was made by me. And then for others to be able to enjoy the cheeses I make—that’s rewarding.”
