A buffalo charmer
Cheese maker’s gentle farming style carries creamery forward
Sometimes, when Audrey Hitchcock looks into Linda Ronstadt’s deep chocolate eyes, she can see her husband, Craig Ramini. Linda was one of his favorite Italian water buffalo, one of the dozens he handraised to supply milk for the couple’s Ramini Mozzarella dairy farm and creamery in Tomales.
All the buffalo are named for musicians, and now, just five months after Ramini died of cancer, as Hitchcock watches Linda grazing with Sarah McLachlan, Janis Joplin, Shakira and all the other animals Ramini referred to as “his girls,” she thinks of Ronstadt’s 1988 hit, “Goodbye My Friend.”
“Oh, we never know where life will take us/ I know it’s just a ride on the wheel/ And we never know when death will shake us/ And we wonder how it will feel.”
At the moment, as Hitchcock races around the 25-acre property she leases at the Stemple Creek Ranch cattle farm, she feels exhausted. It’s a Saturday, the day she gears up for public tours, and she still has to do the milking and creamery cleanup, in addition to setting up picnic tables next to the pastures. She had been making her artisanal, farmstead cheese until 3 a.m. the night before, and this morning, some of the girls have been pushing her patience, fussing about coming into the milking chute.
Suddenly, two of the girls spin away through a gate that a visitor has left open and take a romp around the picnic area. Fortunately, they don’t upset any of the freshly scrubbed wooden tables set with redand-white checked cloths, freshly arranged flowers in mason jars, wineglasses and plates that soon will be filled with her high-butterfat delicacy, thick-sliced tomatoes and freshly torn basil leaves.
Hitchcock sprints up the hill, tapping a skinny white training stick on the ground and calling, “C’mon, girls! Who’s a good buffalo? C’mon, let’s go see your babies.
And amazingly, the 1,500pound horned creatures turn and trot back to the barn, where the calves — Chris Isaak and Stella Star — await.
When Tiburon residents Ramini and Hitchcock dreamed up the mozzarella dairy idea six years ago, it was an ambitious — and, as many of their friends said, “ridiculous” — idea. Yet Ramini, who had been in software development for 20 years, had found himself wondering if there was more to life The two had traveled a lot, seeing Cape water buffalo and rhinos in Africa, and knew they loved big animals. Hitchcock’s brother, meanwhile, had fallen in love with authentic mozzarella di bufala while living in Italy and asked her one day, “Why can’t Americans make really good buffalo mozzarella?” Hitchcock, then a full-time home designer, mentioned the
comment to Ramini, “and his eyes lit up, and that was that,” she recalls as she attaches a custom-made milking hose to the buffalo, now contentedly chewing alfalfa and grain in the chutes that Ramini designed himself. (He discovered that buffalo will not tolerate the type of head-confinement setup for regular cows.)
She stops to brush Stella, the month-old calf, who is trying to clamber through the side bars of the chute to steal some milk from her mother.
This, too, was Ramini’s vision: In traditional cattle dairies, calves are taken quickly from their mothers and fed formula so that the farmers can harvest more of the milk. But the babies here suckle all through natural weaning, so they gain the nutrients found only in the natural milk. They are separated by a fence only at night, so that their mothers can replenish enough milk to make cheese.
As California’s only source of authentic mozzarella di bufala, the farm, once considered a ridiculous idea, had finally become successful two years ago, with Ramini growing from a base herd of five then-feral animals to now providing coveted, small-production batches to customers like Vignette Pizzeria in Sebastopol, Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco and Farmshop in Larkspur.
The couple had just begun to turn a profit when, last spring, Ramini, then 56, began feeling dizzy, with increasing muscle pain. He was diagnosed with what he was told is considered a very curable blood cancer.
Hitchcock jumped in, increasingly taking over all aspects of the ranch, from learning how to lay electric fence to monitoring mating and pregnancies to crafting and delivering the cheese.
“I’d have Craig on speakerphone to walk me through things like what to do when the smallest thing like a broken thermometer changed the cheese consistency,” she says, as she moves a gate to allow Van Morrison, the 2,000pound stud bull, to enter the dairy and join his girlfriend of the day. She coos at him and directs him with a brush, continuing Ramini’s philosophy of never forcing his animals.
With the help of a few family members and friends, Hitchcock kept things cobbled together. And after six months of intense chemotherapy, Ramini was declared in complete remission.
Yet around Thanksgiving, cancer appeared in his brain and spine, and by mid-December, Hitchcock had to suspend production, shuttering the dairy to tend to Ramini in his San Francisco hospital bed. Customers such as Vignette chef-owner Mark Hopper turned to imported mozzarella from Campania, Italy, and Hitchcock established a GoFundMe campaign to patch together money for buffalo feed.
After Ramini’s death Jan. 17, Hitchcock evaluated her options for managing a herd that has grown to 40 buffalo, with more calves due in spring. The word “ridiculous” came up again and again, as did “slaughter.”
Yet, saddled with debt from the halted cheese production and medical bills, she managed to hire a part-time ranch manager, Hector Romo, and started cheese making again in March. Clients leaped back in.
“The Italian cheese is great,” Hopper said. “But it’s not Ramini. The flavor, mouthfeel and melting quality of their cheese is exceptional. It makes my pizzas complete. Plus, it’s very important to me to personally know who is making my cheese and where it’s coming from. ”
Hitchcock, 49, has recently increased her cheese production to twice a week to help pay bills, is hosting Saturday tours and tastings, and has restarted her design business.
“It was a labor of love between the two of us,” she says, as she readies herself to give the two-hour tour. “Carrying it on gives me a purpose.”
After the visitors have snacked on the cheese, gone into “calf town” to brush and play with the babies, and departed, Hitchcock will wash the dishes, do a final dairy cleaning, then deliver fresh cheese from Sebastopol to San Francisco. She may make it home by midnight.
“It’s just got to be done,” she says. “But it’s more than just cheese. The animals were our family, and we always put them first. I owe it to them now to take care of them.”