Loleta Cheese Factory

Jill's Journal: After our brief insider’s look at making soft French cheese a few weeks ago in Petaluma, 5-year-old Madelyn has declared she wants to be a cheese-maker when she grows up (or perhaps a chocolate-maker, as she says she’s not quite ready to commit). So, today we visited the Loleta Cheese Factory in the tiny little hamlet of Loleta (population 750). Loleta, by the way, has got to be the quietest town in all of California – it was cute, quaint, and eerily silent.

Unlike the soft cheese factory we’d visited, Loleta specializes in block cheeses. They make 38 different varieties and all are available for sampling at the factory. In fact, they encourage visitors to try every single one. I don’t think we came close to trying them all, but the ones we did try were heavenly goodness.

Unfortunately, the good folks at Loleta were just wrapping up their cheese making for the day when we arrived, so we weren’t able to see as much as we would have liked. Regardless, what’s not to like about a place that feeds guests amazing, all-you-can-eat cheeses for free? Loleta is a family operation which started in 1982 when the owner was teaching agriculture class at the local high school. He led his students through the cheese-making process and enjoyed it so much that he and his wife went into business for themselves. These days, the tiny factory turns 5,700 gallons of milk a day into just under three million pounds of cheese annually. Around 80% of their cheese is sold under other labels, but they retain about 20% to sell in their own name.

Interesting fact of the day: if you’ve ever noticed American cheeses are a different color than European cheeses, there’s a good reason for this. During the Revolutionary War, Americans began coloring American-produced cheese with something called bixin, a bright yellow to orange/red dye (that only comes from the seeds of a small, ornamental Latin American evergreen tree called the annato tree). This was, of course, part of a patriotic way to be distinguished from Great Britain. It became so common and Americans grew so used to it that we still expect our cheese to have that coloring over 200 years later.

Here’s the booty that somehow followed us home. These were our favorites – that garlic jalapeno is especially mouthwatering. Yum, yum, yum. Until undertaking this RV journey, I had no idea we enjoyed food so much. But man, oh man, there’s a lot of good stuff all over this fantastic country of ours.