Tillamook Cheese Factory

Jill's Journal: Yesterday, after enjoying our morning in Portland, we headed to the coast with the Tillamook Cheese Factory as our destination. Wherever we are, we try to eat as “local” as possible, using local products when we can. While in Oregon, we have become absolutely smitten with the Tillamook dairy products: all sorts of cheese, plus yogurt, sour cream, and butter. (Madelyn even calls the Tillamook yogurt I use in our daily breakfast smoothies “the good yogurt that I like.”)

Dairying has a long history in Tillamook County. The first Northern European settlers settled in Tillamook in 1855 and brought dairying with them, a fortunate thing since, after clearing land for crops, they quickly learned the area is too cool and wet for traditional crops. However, all that rain and temperate climate meant the grass grew and kept growing all year long. Cows thrived on the lush pastures. Today, there are around 120 dairies in Tillamook, mostly second-generation. Several go back farther than that with a few of the same dairy families dating back to the 1850s in the same area, so the dairy tradition is especially strong here.

A bit of trivia: the first dairy cows to arrive in America were in 1611 at Jamestown, Virginia. The first dairy cow to make it to the Pacific Northwest was in 1838 in Oregon territory.

Massive vats turning milk into cheese...

Originally, butter was the main export from Tillamook Valley. But storage was challenging due to the amount of salt needed to preserve it and transport was difficult from this remote area. In 1893-94, everything changed. Two dairy entrepreneurs built a creamery and brought an experienced cheddar cheesemaker named Peter McIntosh to Tillamook. Cheese was far easier to store than butter and the dairy farmers quickly switched from butter-making to cheese-making. The recipe McIntosh created is still used today.

These freshly-made big blocks of cheese are ready to be aged. They're somewhere between 41 and 42 pounds, but called "forties."

In 1899, only five years after McIntosh arrived, a sign at the Tillamook Headlight proclaimed, “There is a richness and fine flavor about Tillamook cheese which is peculiar to itself…for this fine flavor cannot be found in cheese manufactured in other parts.”

By 1902, there were 40 small creameries in Tillamook, all making cheese. By 1904, cheese from Tillamook had won its first award, a first place, at the St. Louis World’s Fair. In 1909, 10 of the creameries banded together and the Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA) was formed. Over the years, more and more of the smaller, independent creameries joined the TCCA, with the final six merging in 1968.

Workers are cutting aged "forties" into more convenient sizes ready to be packaged. 

The TCCA was a success from the start. The railroad had eventually come to the small town, which quickly expanded Tillamook Cheese's marketplace far beyond Oregon. By 1917, nearly one-third of all cheese sold in Los Angeles was from Tillamook. Today, Tillamook is the #2 brand of natural chunk cheddar cheese in America. TCCA’s member dairy farms and the creamery make up around 25% of the local economy.

For all of its humble beginnings, Tillamook is not small potatoes anymore. Around 1.7 million pounds of milk arrive at the factory daily. It takes ten pounds of milk to make one pound of Tillamook cheese. Approximately 167,000 pounds of cheese are made here each day, with about one million pieces of cheese packaged here each week. Many of the cheeses need to be aged; Tillamook’s cold storage warehouse has a 35-million-pound capacity. This is not small craft cheese, but big, big business.

After a few cheese samples, we headed north on the Oregon coast. Oregon doesn’t have anything like California’s wonderful Pacific Coast Highway, so views of the ocean are fewer and more far between, but this is what those views look like when you do get them. Pretty spectacular.

We landed for the evening at the very “top” of the Oregon coast in the town of Astoria with an unusual (for us on this trip) stay in a hotel. It worked out better and more economically for us to leave the fifth wheel in Portland and just come for one night. More tomorrow, but the girls were completely overjoyed about the opportunity to spend the night in a hotel. They look ready for a pajama party, don’t they?