Petaluma, CA — This town is still the kind of farmstead place where, on a winding country road just outside the historic area, traffic stops for a hefty wild turkey hustling across the road, head down and red wattle flying.
The area has long been a center of cheesemaking. The legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher loved Petaluma’s cheese factories. In a 1979 article for Food & Wine magazine, she wrote rapturously of the Camembert and brie of Rouge et Noir, which she claimed “[outdid] much that is now shipped from Normandy to Paris and Provence.’’
Today, Rouge et Noir continues to be made by the Marin French Cheese Co. at its Petaluma-based Cheese Factory. The facility has been turning out hand-crafted cheeses since 1865, and is the oldest producer in the country specializing in soft ripened cheeses.
I made my way to Petaluma with a carload of friends on a kind of safari to taste the new and old in cheesemaking here. Our first stop was the Achadinha Cheese Co., an artisanal goat cheese dairy and creamery about three miles from the town center.
Though the Pacheco family has owned Achadinha — named for a town in Portugal where the family patriarch was born — since 1969, the farm has gone through several iterations. After being a cow dairy for almost 30 years, Achadinha made the transition to goats in 1997. In 2001, it began making its own cheese.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Boston Globe.