“I learned it from watching my Mom, helping my Mom, and it’s a feel. You just know when the cheese is not melting right or stretching right. You can’t squeeze it too hard or too light. It’s difficult to explain, but I know by feel when it’s ready,” Fred explained.
His Mom and Dad still live in the house with Fred and Cristina and the couple’s two young sons. Fred admits that his Mom will stick her nose in every now and again “and boss me around — make sure I’m doing it right!” he said with a laugh. “But she’s the master, so I always listen!”
They carry five flavors: traditional, garlic, hot pepper, black pepper and their newest addition, smoked. All of the spices and herbs are also grown locally and organic, and are mixed into the cheese before it is hung to age and dry so that the flavor is steeped into it. Fred said that they choose to use Jersey cows because “the milk is higher in butterfat.”
As fate would have it, a friend of theirs through the specialty food shows, who sells sausage to Whole Foods, asked if he could bring the company a sample of the Destefanos’ caciocavallo. They heard back from the specialty food store giant within a few weeks, asking for a meeting. “They were really excited about our cheese, the fact that it’s handmade and produced in the Hudson Valley,” said Cristina.
The issue was how to distribute the cheese to Whole Foods. “We were so lucky that they hooked us up with Regional Access, who distributes all over the Northeast. And they will come to us!” said Cristina.
Getting into Whole Foods is one thing, but now it will fall on Cristina to promote the cheese, meet with Whole Foods managers and stores and try and push the product. “I’m excited. This is what we’ve dreamt of, but at the same time, we will never mass-produce. That’s not what we’re about. We will make it by hand — no machinery, all local ingredients. That’s what makes the cheese so good. It’s not processed, there are no hormones in our milk, there are no preservatives and it’s a super cheese. You can use it as a traditional table cheese, as a snack to enjoy with fruit and bread and wine, or you can melt it onto any dish. I make grilled cheeses with it all the time for the kids, or make pizza with it.”
Fred was excited because they finally found a shrink-wrapping machine that will help the cheese keep for upwards of a year. “We always used the netting, and I was afraid of shrink-wrap because it might let air in. But we tested it out with this machine, and it’s amazing!”
Asked what the meaning of caciocavallo was in Italian, Cristina explained that cacio means “cheese” and cavallo “horse.” “It is such an old traditional Italian cheese that it was made long before there were cars, so the way they transported it from the farms to the stores and delis was by horse or mule,” she explained. “They would tie several pieces to both ends of a sturdy rope, and then hang the rope over the horse or mule’s back, which gave the cheese a shape that looked like a tiny snowman with a head and body. Today we continue to age caciocavallo by hanging it from a rope!”
While they will begin to sell their brand of cheese at Whole Food stores beginning in early June, locally you can purchase their cheese at Adams Fairacre Farms of Poughkeepsie and Newburgh, Scarborough Fare in New Paltz, the Culinary Institute in Poughkeepsie and Cosmo’s in Newburgh and Central Valley as well as the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival, the Woodstock/New Paltz Art and Crafts Fair and the Hudson Valley Wine and Food Festival.
To learn more, go to their website at www.casadelcaciocavallo.com.
