The serendipitous story of one of Cowgirl Creamery’s most popular cheeses

With its orange-red exterior, creamy center and deliciously pungent aroma, Cowgirl Creamery's Red Hawk cheese is one of its most unique offerings. And the lore of how it came about is now a deeply engrained part of the company's history.

A line of windows at the Point Reyes Shop & Creamery gives visitors a glimpse at the process behind the Red Hawk cheese. The process is a complicated one given that it is, in essence, a calculated and careful growing of bacteria into a pleasant and palate-pleasing food item.

The operation at Cowgirl, however, is a finely-tuned one. The knowledgeable staff is aware of the tiny nuances that give the cheese its flavor. Production manager and cheesemaker Eric Patterson knows this. Ask him about any time of year, and Patterson can rattle off some of the changes in taste the cheese can undergo. The weather, the milk, practically anything that the cheese is ultimately exposed to from cow to brine can play into how Patterson and the Cowgirl crew will tweak its process.

"Over the different seasons we're gonna have different mixes of organisms on the rind, so you'll get a slightly different cheese in the summer and the spring, than you will in the fall and the winter, just depending on the time of year," Patterson said. "If we're heading into winter, the milk is going to be different than if we're in the spring and the cows are out eating grass; all those things will affect how the how the rind develops on the cheese."

A selection of cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery, including Wagon Wheel, Red Hawk and Mount Tam. A selection of cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery, including Wagon Wheel, Red Hawk and Mount Tam. Photo: Alix Martichoux / SFGATE Photo: Alix Martichoux / SFGATE Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close The serendipitous story of one of Cowgirl Creamery’s most popular cheeses 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

The process to getting that 45-day old cheese in your hand is what Patterson calls a "slow-moving train." Each step is done with purpose, at a certain time, to a certain end, producing a specific cheese; Patterson and the cheese teams work 6,000 gallons of milk from partners such as nearby Bivalve Dairy to produce the 6,000 pounds of cheese that Cowgirl makes each week.

"Every cheese has a different set of steps happening at different times, so our challenge is every day the milk is slightly different, the environment in here is different," said Patterson. "So you want to keep a strict timeline and you have to react to what's happening. We do really pay attention to the time, but we also pay attention to the cheese that's developing."

The timer, so to speak, begins when the culture is added to the milk and cream. The process is pretty standard, in terms of cheesemaking, but the unique quality of the washed-rind Red Hawk is ultimately a byproduct of the region and Point Reyes itself.

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Cowgirl's signature cheese began, like many good food origin stories, as a happy accident.

While Mt. Tam perhaps wins as the most recognized cheese in the company's repertoire, Red Hawk could perhaps be considered the upstart younger sibling. The Red Hawk cheese is Mt. Tam taken a few steps further by the Point Reyes air.

It wasn't first known what exactly created the signature Red Hawk look and taste. It started with a batch of Mt. Tam cheese that didn't age correctly, was tossed into the aging room and forgotten. Two weeks later, it blossomed into the first of what eventually became Red Hawk.

In those early years of the cheese, it wasn't yet scientifically proven what was happening at the Point Reyes facility that helped the cheese age in such a distinctive way. A visit by UC Davis scientists helped clear up what was giving the cheese its unique qualities and added another fun tidbit to the already growing backstory: the special bacteria in the air from Cowgirl's location near the ocean gave the cheese its distinct flavor and smell.

The UC Davis team "came in and tested every nook and cranny of the creamery to see what they could find, and they really found a huge diversity of organisms that both love salt and also love cheese," Patterson said. "So when we looked at the rind of the Red Hawk, we actually found that a lot of these organisms in our creamery environment are growing on the surface of the cheese — and these are organisms that are found in washed-rind cheeses made in coastal environments all over the world."

"The environment out there is so unique, that it really provides an interesting story about Red Hawk," said Cowgirl Creamery co-founder Sue Conley. "Red Hawk is really affected by the ecosystem out there and the different yeast and bacterias that blow in off the ocean across the bay and into our aging room, and really are what make that particular cheese what it is."

Brevibacterium linens is typically used in cheesemaking, but while other cheesemakers have to purchase a culture to make their products, the bacteria is naturally occurring in Point Reyes.

"It couldn't be the same [if made somewhere else]," Patterson said. "The rind, it changes throughout the season, it varies the moisture content of the cheese. We find that [depending on] how strong the breezes are blowing, it changes the flavor throughout the year."

In the 17 years since Red Hawk's accidental discovery, the cheese has become a staple in the Cowgirl Creamery lineup. It is the second aged cheese that Cowgirl produced, after it first launched on fresh cheese.

The flavor of each Cowgirl cheese is just one part of the relationship the cheesemakers have with nature. Cowgirl's approach to making cheese by Conley and co-founder Peggy Smith was formed while on a trip to Europe before they started the company.

"We did learn by traveling in Europe and England that good cheese is dependent on the quality of the milk," said Conley. "After those travels we realized that we were living in an area with some of the best milk imaginable."

"The affineurs and the fromagiers, the first question they'd ask is, 'What kind of cows are they?' or 'What breed of animal are they?' and 'What are they eating?'" Smith recalled of that early trip.

"So it wasn't about, 'Are you going to do a washed-rind cheese, or a triple crème cheese?' It was really, 'What is your source of the ingredients?' Just going off of that, the whole idea was to stay true to the ingredient and not try to fancy it up too much."

The region has blossomed into a full-blown cheesemaking region, with Cowgirl just one stop along what is now part of the Sonoma-Marin portion of California's Cheese Trail. It's all a part of what Conley and Smith imagined for the region following that trip through Europe.

"The other thing that we observed [in Europe] is that cheesemakers could stay small and still have a good income if they were making something very special, if they were in a region that had other cheesemakers," Smith said. "So the idea of a cluster of cheesemakers really works because then the infrastructure could be shared. When we first started there were five or seven cheesemakers in Sonoma and Marin, and today there's 30 — most of them are on the farm, so that's really the biggest dream come true that we could imagine is that there would be cheesemakers around us that add to the fabric of the community."