Jonathan Gaugler's Cannonball Curds are a Pittsburgh-made cheese with a Wisconsin heritage
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Jonathan Gaugler stirs the curds in the cheese room of his Lawrenceville basement. -
Arsenal Cheese's Cannonball Curds. -
Mr. Gaugler begins the cheddaring process, stacking the slabs of curds.
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The Doctor of Cheeseology is in.
No, he doesn't call himself that, but you can't help thinking it when Jonathan Gaugler dons his white lab coat and opens the door to his Lawrenceville basement.
He has, after all, learned a lot about cheese in a short time. It wasn't that long ago -- a little over a year Â-- that Mr. Gaugler was living in Brooklyn and working in marketing for Cambridge University Press.
"We were pretty comfortable there," he said. "But we found ourselves being kind of homebodies and the point of being in New York is to live in a tiny, miserable apartment and go out all the time."
Instead, Mr. Gaugler and his wife, Becky, had dinner parties and he dreamt of learning to smoke meat and make cheese.
"Owning a historic house in Pittsburgh becomes more attractive after a few years," said Mr. Gaugler, who grew up in Upper St. Clair. So Jonathan and Becky, a museum educator and Edgewood native, packed up and came home.
Most people buy a historic house for its character -- the marbleized slate mantels, the generously scaled rooms, the carved newel post in the entrance hall. The Gauglers' house has all that, but they bought their Fisk Street house for its basement.
"The ceilings are nine and a half feet high," Mr. Gaugler says as he leads the way down the narrow wooden stairs. "I could build a room in and enclose and waterproof it and it wasn't too difficult."
The L-shaped cheese-making room is white and startlingly bright, with a long stainless-steel sink, two stainless-steel tables and in one corner, a decagonal pasteurizer that, for the most part, is where the cheesemaking happens.
But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves.
Once Mr. Gaugler decided to make cheese, the next question was: What kind?
As a graduate philosophy of religion student in Cambridge, England, Mr. Gaugler lived around the corner from a cheesemonger and was exposed to a brave new world of European cheeses, including "the true cloth-bound cheddar, the lard-rubbed, traditionally English, ancient cheese."
First Published February 3, 2011 12:00 am
