Published on December 9, 2009

Although he is perched on planking in this photograph, Barry Shaw will be able to walk to the door of his new cheese cave when it is back filled. The rounded black part of the structure that forms the actual cheese cave will be buried five feet deep soon. The concrete wings will keep the ground from caving in and blocking the door to the cave. Photos by Joseph Gresser

WESTFIELD — On a small, neat farm laid on a Westfield hillside a windmill idles in the weak breeze of an uncharacteristically warm late-November day.  A comfortable barn shelters a herd of 40 milking goats.  In a small outbuilding Laini Fondiller pours cultured milk into molds, an early step in making the cheeses that have won Lazy Lady Farm its renown.

Not far away are some big piles of earth.  In the large hole between them sits a concrete structure about five feet below grade level.

A tar-coated room with a rounded vault extends about 15 or 20 feet back from a wedge-shaped concrete structure.  If one walks around the edge of the excavation a door six feet up on what turns out to be the front of the structure becomes visible.

Standing on a precarious plank walkway is a bearded man wearing a couple of shirts for warmth and sporting a pair of hard knee pads.  Barry Shaw, Ms. Fondiller’s partner, is putting some finishing touches on Lazy Lady’s second cheese cave before the heavy equipment comes in to bury it.

When finished the cave will be buried at least five feet underground, Mr. Shaw said.  Then he won’t need the planks to reach the cave entrance, which will be at grade level.

After the spell of cold weather in early October, Mr. Shaw said he worried about completing the cave this season.  But he and his helper Don Estes kept working and lucked out when the weather turned unusually mild.

Taking a visitor down a couple of steps into the cave, Mr. Shaw pointed out the ridged interior of the cave’s curved ceiling.  The concrete below the arched roof was poured by trucks, he said, but the roof was built by hand.

Mr. Shaw said he and Mr. Estes hauled the wet concrete in five-gallon buckets and were able to pour about a yard a day.  A yard of concrete weighs about two tons, he said.

This is the second cave Mr. Shaw has built on the farm to age the cheeses Ms. Fondiller makes.

“She kept saying that she wished she had a cave,” Mr. Shaw said.  “I thought she meant she wished she lived someplace where there was a

Mr. Shaw stands inside the new cheese cave at Lazy Lady Farm. When it is outfitted with racks it will be the new home for the farm’s line of soft rind cheese.

cave.”

Eventually he realized Ms. Fondiller wanted him to build her a cave so she could mature cheeses as she had seen them cured in France.

Unlike the newly built cave complex at Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Ms. Fondiller’s cave depends on the insulating power of the earth to control its temperature.  The result is that temperatures vary inside the cave as the year progresses.  At the coldest point of the winter they may dip as low as 40 degrees, Ms. Fondiller said.  In the summer they rise as high as 56 degrees.

“That’s why I have to vary my cheeses throughout the year,” she said.  “The washed rind cheeses at 55 degrees get really strong.  The quick blooming rinds and hard natural rinds, they can stand up to anything.”

“If I had a controlled cave I could make the same cheese year-round,” she said.

With a cave with geothermal temperature controls, “things come around and help me know what season it is,” Ms. Fondiller said.

Laini Fondiller ladles curds into molds in an early stage of cheese production. She makes a wide variety of cheeses that find their way to elegant tables around the country.

Right now Ms. Fondiller and her goats are preparing for winter.  She said the goats will soon be dried off and ready for their winter vacation.  “They get full benefits, room, board, housekeeping privileges and full health benefits.”

During her goats’ vacation Ms. Fondiller makes cheese using milk from the farms of two of her neighbors.  From Lyle Edwards she gets the Holstein milk that she uses to make her Lady in Blue blue cheese.  Jason Randall supplies milk from his Jersey herd that Ms. Fondiller transforms into such cheeses as Oh My Hart.

For some double cream cheeses Ms. Fondiller also incorporates cream from nearby Butterworks Farm.  She hauls the cows milk in cream cans.

For her natural rind and her washed rind cheeses Ms. Fondiller uses raw milk.  Under federal regulation such cheeses must be aged at least 60 days before sale.

The soft or blooming rind cheeses take pasteurized milk and mature more quickly than the hard cheeses.

She said she uses about 200 to 250 gallons of milk a week to make 230 to 240 pounds of cheese.  The whey from the cheese production goes to feed her pigs.

Anyone who has seen Lazy Lady cheeses in a store cooler realizes that Ms. Fondiller has a wry sense of humor that comes out in what she calls her cheeses such as Tomme de Lay, a washed rind cheese that plays off the name of the former majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, or Barick Obama, a brick cheese.

With her new space Ms. Fondiller will have more room to explore the seasonal possibilities of milk and to fill our her calendar of cheese.