Nuns Have Real Gouda Thing Going With Their Cheese Business : Religion: Trappistine sisters support themselves with their work. But they are deliberately limiting their output.

WHITE HALL, Va. — Every 10 days or so, the sisters of Our Lady of the Angels monastery ply their handheld harps.

But their effort produces no celestial-like music. These harps are wire-strung metal frames moving through 6,000 pounds of warm milk.

Three sisters bend over the vat in the monastery’s cheese barn, using the harps to keep the milk from turning into cheese too soon, breaking up curds into small bits.

The milk, which arrived the day before in a tanker truck from the Shenandoah Valley, already has been pasteurized, and the bacteria that make milk into cheese--in this case, gouda--have been added.

Sister Barbara Smickel, the monastery’s cheese-making expert, keeps constant track of the details of batch No. 77, writing down times, temperatures and acid levels.

“We don’t change anything we do” from batch to batch, she says. As with life in their Cistercian order, cheese-making has its fixed rituals.

The Trappistine nuns alternate contemplation with work, prayer with cheese. They live by the rule of St. Benedict, which requires them to support themselves through manual labor.

They’ve been making the mild gouda they call Monastery Country Cheese on their Albemarle County farm in western Virginia since November, 1990. For the first time last year, the 10 nuns were able to live entirely off the proceeds. They won’t let the enterprise get any bigger than that, Sister Barbara says.

“While the cheese is important, we don’t want the tail to start wagging the dog,” she says. “We can sell all that we’re making and I don’t want to create a demand we can’t fill.”

The sisters sell the cheese through the mail at $15.95 for 2 pounds and $37.95 for 5 pounds, to restaurants and at a few Virginia stores and wineries.

The sisters are the female counterpart of a group of Trappist monks in Berryville who urged the motherhouse of Mt. St. Mary’s Abbey in Wrentham, Mass., to start a satellite monastery in Virginia. Our Lady of the Angels, founded in May 1987, is the fifth and newest American Trappistine monastery.

In 1985, the order bought the 507-acre property 12 miles northwest of Charlottesville from a woman who had operated a gouda cheese-making business called Lansdale Farm. The six original sisters bought a pasteurizer and other equipment, but none had ever made cheese.

“Our motherhouse has a dairy herd, so we knew a little bit about that,” Sister Barbara says. “The motherhouse is supported by a small candy-making business with quite a customer list, and we asked those people if they would be interested in buying cheese.”

With equipment and a potential customer base, Sister Barbara studied with Jim and Margaret Morse, who were then making cheese on their farm in Brookneal.

“I went there several times, and they were here the first three times,” she says. Sister Barbara also traveled to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, Ky., where the monks make Port du Salut cheese.

Each cheese-making day, two nuns arrive about 4 a.m. at the red-painted cheese barn downhill from the monastery. They raise the temperature of the milk from 37 to 145 degrees to pasteurize it, and the barn begins to steam up to temperatures in the 90s.

The sisters buy the milk from the sole Guernsey herd associated with Shenandoah’s Pride Dairy Cooperative in Mount Crawford.

With a butterfat content from 4.5% to 5.1%, the Guernsey milk produces more pounds of cheese per gallon than the lower butterfat Holstein milk the sisters first used. Plus, the Guernsey milk gives the gouda a rich, yellow color, Sister Barbara says.

After pasteurizing, piping the milk into the cheese vat and mixing in the gouda culture, the sisters use the harps on and off for the next 2 1/2 hours.

The whey is drained off twice and saved for fertilizer. A very thick cottage cheese-like substance is left in the vat, and the sisters pen it in with large, heavy screens before lunch.

That’s when the rest of the sisters arrive, along with the Rev. Paschal Balkan, their chaplain. The meal includes, of course, the house cheese.

By the time they finish eating, the mass in the cheese vat has become a semisolid block of curds. It’s time to “hoop” the curd--cut the block into sections and pack it into 2- and 5-pound plastic bowls with lids called hoops.

Sister Barbara and Sister Mary David DeFeo lean over the waist-high vat, cutting the curd and putting blocks of it in the hoops, which are lined with fine nets.

“We wear the habit to hide our bulging muscles,” says Sister Mary David.

Two sisters weigh each hoop, adding or removing curd. The rest of the sisters put the lids on the hoops, draining a little more whey off.

The sisters load the hoops into a pneumatic press, where they are pressed for 30 minutes. When the hoops are unloaded, the light-yellow substance in the bowls has knitted into what looks like cheese for the first time.

When the cheese comes out of the press for the final time, it soaks for 24 hours in brine “saltier than the Dead Sea,” as Sister Barbara puts it.

Each batch produces about 750 pounds of gouda, which is cured for about 2 1/2 weeks in the barn’s refrigerated rooms and waxed in the traditional red covering. A black-and-gold foil label designed by one of the sisters depicts the monastery bell tower.

The other days of the sisters’ lives are spent marketing and shipping the cheese and taking care of their brick monastery and grounds at the base of Pigeon Top Mountain. They intersperse work with seven daily sessions of hymns, meditation, psalms and prayer.