RUSSIA’S CAMEMBERT CAPER
A ban on European delicacies creates a thriving cottage (cheese) industry,
DUBROVSKOYE, RUSSIA— The dream is Russian Parmesan.
When President Vladimir Putin banned most food imports from Europe in 2014, Russian dairy farmers rejoiced as deliveries of French and Italian cheeses ceased.
Now, they believed, they could compete. Since then they’ve tried to duplicate all sorts of famous varieties, from Camembert to Emmenthal.
But one global delicacy remains largely beyond reach, a product of rich milk, know-how, and at least 18 months of aging.
“It would be like winning the Olympics,” said Oleg Sirota, an entrepreneur turned cheesemaker so enchanted with the idea that he named his new creamery “Russky Parmesan,” or Russian Parmesan. Then, in a slight at competitors substituting palm oil for real milk, he added: “It’s hard to win without doping.”
Cheese is more than just cheese in Russia these days. For travellers carrying up to five kilograms of permitted “zapreshyonka” — contraband — back from European vacations, it is a defiant, smelly reminder of Russians’ adoption of European tastes in recent years despite a deepening political conflict with the West.
“We aren’t afraid of sanctions,” goes the conservative battle-cry, repeated by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and printed on patriotic T-shirts, but some upscale restaurants and cheese-importing websites are still doing a brisk, quiet business in European Goudas and cheddars (all at a healthy markup).
For Sirota, a stout 28-year-old with the wispy beard common among Russian Orthodox believers, cheese is a symbol of national revival, and sanctions are his gospel.
An agronomist by education, he was running an IT business with 30 employees when Russian troops quietly seized control of Crimea in February 2014.
He had wanted to travel to Crimea, then east Ukraine, as a volunteer to fight in the conflict there but “got scared,” he said.
When Putin signed countersanctions against the European Union and the United States in August 2014, calling on Russian farmers to make the country self-sufficient, Sirota saw a chance to make his patriotic contribution. He sold his IT business and cars, borrowed money from family members and cut a deal with the Moscow regional government to rent discounted land.
“I felt this call to the land, back to farming,” Sirota said over a cup of instant coffee at his farm.
On the first anniversary of the sanctions, Sirota opened Russian Parmesan for business, installing a plaque in honour of the sanctions and hoisting the flag of Novorossiya, the separatist regions of southeast Ukraine, out front.
Sirota is saving the first wheel of cheese he made for Putin, a man he once protested for helping Russia join the World Trade Organization. In 2012, he brought a cow to an opposition demonstration to voice his anger. Now he offers full-throated support. “Without sanctions we would not exist,” Sirota said. And if sanctions are repealed, he added, he’ll have to close down.
For now, there is no Parmesan at Russian Parmesan, but there is his version of a Swiss Emmenthal, and Gorgonzola, and plenty of yogourt topped with sweet jams, the farm’s bestseller. The problems are legion: It is hard to get a steady supply of milk in Russia, so Sirota wants to buy his own cows. During the lean winter months, he came close to bankruptcy.
Still, the ravenous market for fresh cheese was evident this summer when thousands of gourmets and curious shoppers descended on Sirota’s farm for a festival dedicated to the second anniversary of Russia’s food import sanctions. Sirota, who expected no more than a few hundred visitors and only takes preorders, sold out until October.
Reactions were mixed. One customer made a wry face as she tried a slice of Gubernsky, Sirota’s signature cheese named in honour of the regional governor. Then she shrugged. “It’s a bit salty, but you can eat it,” said Larissa Fomenko, a former accountant now living on a pension. Sirota said it “goes with everything,” including vodka.
His farm sells as much as two tons, or more, a month, he said.
Farms such as Sirota’s are still only “a drop in the bucket,” said John Kopiski, a former London coal and steel trader who moved to Russia in 1992 and has since married, taken citizenship and opened a dairy farm in the Vladimir region, about 130 kilometres east of Moscow.
Kopiski has created new names for his cheeses, such as “Red October” and “Tovarishch,” or “Comrade,” to help market them against Western cheeses, particularly if the sanctions end.
“We’ll be able to make a Russian Parmesan,” he said, adding that it would take time and taste different.
“I would call my Parmesan, ‘Johnezan,’” he mused.
Russian, Belarusan and foreign creameries, including from South America, are making up the 300,000-tonne per year cheese deficit left by sanctions, said Andrei Danilenko, chairman of Russia’s National Association of Milk Producers, which has studied the market. Most Russian cheese, sold in blocks, is bland and, to Western tastes, a bit rubbery. High-end cheeses account for only 2 to 3 per cent of the market, Danilenko said.
Sitting at her dining-room table in Mos- cow, Katya Parkhomenko, a liberal journalist, recalled the strange path that brought her family into the cheese business. An immaculate Camembert, slightly stale but nonetheless gooey and mouldy, lay on a blue-and-white checkered tablecloth in a spacious kitchen overlooking Moscow’s Novy Arbat.
If Sirota’s entrance into the cheese market was an embrace of the political zeitgeist, then hers was the opposite, an escape.
After the annexation of Crimea, Parkhomenko, now 58, travelled to Israel and contemplated emigration but found she was “too old to change my identity.”
In Israel, she met a computer engineer making goat cheese. “It was soft, great,” she recalled and decided to try it at home. She and her brother Dmitry researched online and began making Camembert in May 2015 from their dacha in the Kostroma region, several hundred kilometres from Moscow, where the Parkhomenkos have spent their summers since her childhood.
Parkhomenko sells about 200 kilograms each month, largely through Facebook, but also to some elite restaurants, promoted by a positive story in a Moscow lifestyle magazine: “How Moscow’s intelligentsia learned to make the tastiest Camembert.”
Food sanctions have helped, she said, although the possibility of their reversal hardly keeps her up at night. Her only help from the government has been “getting the French cheese off the shelves.” Hardly pro-Putin, there is still a note of patriotism, the kind rooted to land and country and not its leaders, in her thinking.
“Russia could be a food power really, but it isn’t,” she said. “Why not try?”
“It would be like winning the Olympics.” OLEG SIROTA A CHEESEMAKER HOPING HE CAN MAKE A DOMESTIC VERSION OF PARMESAN