Monforte Dairy Company

It is a testament to the success of Monforte Dairy Company that for months now I have been chasing its owner, Ruth Klahsen, for the opportunity to chat with her about her cheese.

When I first emailed her early in the spring, Klahsen was enthusiastic, but warned me that she was “drowning in milk.” She encouraged me to be persistent, and I was. And a recent visit to the dairy in nearby Millbank confirmed that she is, indeed, insanely busy.

Upon arrival, I was handed a hairnet, white coat and rubber boots and cheerfully encouraged to tag along as she cut wheels, wrapped and priced cheese, packed her son’s car with coolers headed for the farmer’s market, showed a couple of visiting Toronto chefs the ropes of making ricotta and generally dealt with anything requiring troubleshooting along the way.

Klahsen started Monforte (pronounced Mon-for-tay) in 2004 after having spent years as a chef in and around Stratford. She figured making cheese required the same skills “without the intensity” of restaurant service, and so she started with two cheeses – Paradiso (a semi-soft, washed rind cheese) and Toscano (a sharp, hard one).

Four years later, Klahsen is making roughly 20 types of sheep milk cheese and 10 kinds of goat. She is also the darling of chefs, food writers and gourmands alike. “The best cheeses in Ontario. Full stop,” Toronto Life recently trumpeted. Many of the province’s most buzzed-about menus include her products. And one can hardly open a magazine or newspaper that talks food and not encounter the Monforte name.

Klahsen has an artisinal approach to cheesemaking. She insists on small batches made by hand, and says she’s extremely picky not only about what goes into her cheese but about how the shepherds (19 Amish farmers near Ingersoll) handle the sheep. “They’re treated pretty naturally,” she says. “No herbicides or pesticides.”

Though everyone else is gushing, Klahsen remains modest, chalking her success up to simply being in the right place at the right time. She is also her own worst critic, insisting her cheeses are “not good enough yet. They could get way better.”

Sadly, Klahsen has not had a great deal of success in the Kitchener-Waterloo market. She had a small booth at St. Jacob’s market for awhile, but pulled the plug when she couldn’t cover the rental costs (more than she pays at St. Lawrence Market, interestingly) due to poor sales. A persistent expectation that food should be cheap, she believes, is part of the problem.

“I’d make less than $1000 in two to three days,” she told me. Meanwhile, she recently cleared $6500 in one day of sales in Toronto. She (with help from her son Ben and eight to 10 employees) covers 12 markets there on various days, and also has a strong presence at both Stratford and Guelph’s farmer’s markets.

And that, unfortunately, is where K-W cheese lovers will have to go to check out the full spectrum of Monforte’s products. Vincenzo’s in Waterloo does carry a select few, as does Knechtel’s Cheese at the Kitchener market.

Do be sure to try the herb-covered Piacere (pee-uh-cherry), which made Toronto Life’s list of 100 Tastes to Try Before You Die last December. And if you get your hands on a little tub of the spreadable, lemony Blossom, it’s total heaven smeared on a piece of crusty baguette and topped with a drizzle of honey.

As for where she sees Monforte going, Klahsen says she hopes to branch out into making more goat cheese and wants to experiment with water buffalo and cow’s milk, too. A slow food advocate, she has no plans to send cheese outside Ontario, preferring to stay local.

What makes her proudest, she says, is her collaboration with farmers – and the fact that 19 shepherds are thriving thanks to Monforte.

“When I’m dead and gone,” she says, “I hope people will say, ‘She helped save some family farms.’ And maybe, ‘She made good cheese, too.’ But mostly, ‘She helped save farms.’ ”