Pam Hodgson is one of the world’s few certified master cheesemakers – a title that requires a decade-long commitment to the art of cheesemaking to achieve – and only the second woman to ever hold the designation.
At Plymouth-based Sartori Cheese, Hodgson is tasked with developing new cheeses and flavor profiles. The composition of milk varies from season to season, which makes crafting a cheese with a consistent taste in each bite challenging.
As Hodgson describes it, cheesemaking is a biological process involving living organisms that need to be kept healthy and controlled to grow at the right rate. The cheesemaking process, she says, can be compared to a spider’s web – when tweaking a variable, the whole web vibrates, impacting certain elements of the final product.
Sartori, a family-owned business, produces 12 cheese varieties and sources all of its dairy from farms within a 60-mile radius of its production facilities in Plymouth and Antigo.
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