How UConn’s creamery turned to cheese during the pandemic

At the height of the pandemic, the UConn Dairy Bar couldn’t stay open. Students, essential for the ice cream operations, were sent home.

“They rely heavily on student labor,” said Dennis D’Amico, associate professor in UConn’s Department of Animal Science. “With social distancing, and not being able to scoop, because they didn't have employees, I think they just decided that it was best to shut the Dairy Bar down.”

The Dairy Bar has been a fixture on UConn’s Storrs campus since 1953, and the creamery that supplies it with ice cream since the early 1900s.

“Normally, in the summer, the line for the Dairy Bar goes around the building,” D’Amico said. “Actually, it’s funny, they're open now. There's a queue, and it looks like Disney World now. There's a sign, it says you are this many hours away from getting your ice cream, like they've actually timed it out now.”

The iconic ice cream couldn’t be sold, but D’Amico saw an opportunity when operations were shut down. There was milk, there was time and there was his own experience and education.

D’Amico is a microbiologist. His master's and Ph.D research was on cheese microbiology. He later helped found the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese.

So D’Amico did what he knew. He made cheese.

The UConn creamery has made cheese in the past. When it was founded in the 1950s, it supplied cottage cheese and milk to local prisons and schools. But, over time, the experience dried up and the creamery was shut down in the 1990s.

“There was a big public outcry because it did become a symbol of the university,” D’Amico said. “Students that went through remember drinking UConn milk and eating UConn cheese.”

When the creamery and Dairy Bar reopened, the footprint was far smaller than it had been and all the cheesemaking equipment was sold.

Since then, a few creamery managers have been in charge. One, D’Amico said, “started making cheese on a very small scale.”

“He bought a 1,000-pound cheese vat, which is very small, that produced about 100 pounds of cheese at a time,” he said.

But when another manager took over a few years later, ice cream took center stage. The recipe was tweaked and improved, and sales continued to grow. The Dairy Bar had sold about 13,000 gallons a year. D’Amico said it now sells close to 60,000 gallons of ice cream every year.

But D’Amico is a cheesemaker, a specialist in how cultures of bacteria create enzymes that transform fresh milk into brie or cheddar or Roquefort.

“When I came in, I said, ‘Let's make cheese,’ and they said, ‘Sure, we'll sneak it in when we can and there’s some downtime,” D’Amico said. “But the demand for ice cream since I got here has been on this crazy trajectory and we got to the point where the downtime was almost non-existent.”

There was ice cream in the freezer and milk being produced by the herd that lives behind D’Amico’s office. And the pandemic offered time in the creamery to make cheese.

There wasn’t, however, the space for aging lots of cheese. But the temperature inside the creamery was perfect for a process called “forced curing.”

D’Amico explained that temperature is of primary factor when making cheese. If, for example, you have a block of cheddar, “you'd hold that at like 50 Fahrenheit, and in like six months to a year, you'd have like a sharp to extra sharp cheddar.”