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The Farm and Dairy
Our Bleu Sunshine cheese has the distinction of being the FIRST raw milk cheese produced in Florida. Raw milk from Jersey cows makes the best cheese. It has the highest butterfat content of the dairy breeds and is ideally suited as a premium cooking ingredient or as an appetizer paired with fine wine.
The Green family has farmed the land surrounding spring fed Lake Florence for 4 generations. Citrus was king and the Green groves produced oranges, tangerines and grapefruit for over a century until the back to back freezes of 1983 and 1985 laid permanent waste to the fruit and trees. So that the farm could continue to produce fresh food for the community and a living for the family, David Green and Dawn Taylor-Green started Winter Park Farm in 2001 to breed and raise Angus cattle. That’s how they became acquainted with the Cow. The Cow is an extremely cool animal. Calves, Bulls and Heifers too. As such, it seemed a dreadful shame that their only destiny was to be fattened and slaughtered by the age of three. The short meaningless life of a Beef Cow. Not our kind of farming.
Dairy Cows. Being a Dairy Cow is the way to go. You have human servants - “Farmers” – attending to your every need, every day. They feed you all natural grains, hay and pure water to your heart’s content. You, in turn, produce five gallons of fresh butterfat rich milk every day. Working together in harmony under the Florida sun to create the Sunshine State’s only raw milk artisanal cheese, all thrive. Grazing on green lakefront pasture year-round, a Dairy Cow’s life is an eternal Spa visit. And they get to live a good long time to enjoy it. Our kind of farming. Winter Park Dairy was born.
Winter Park Dairy is the first licensed dairy to be built in the last decade and the only one producing 100% natural raw milk artisan cheese. It is also the smallest, least mechanized and most urban. No pasteurizers or milk pumps to heat, batter and destroy the integrity of the milk. Land development in Central Florida rapidly gobbled up the last family farms and Florida dairies became massive industrial enterprises milking tens of thousands of confined cows every day. The milk is processed in mega-sized food plants that would make NASA envious and shipped hundreds of miles to a grocer’s shelf near you.
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The Cheese
“Bleu Sunshine” is handcrafted and fully aged in only 60 days. It is the freshest raw milk product that can legally be purchased. Produced in small wheels, Bleu Sunshine ages to perfection quickly and maintains the closest possible connection to the cow and farm. Fresh From Florida means just that – Fresh.
Raw milk from Jersey cows makes the best cheese. The milk is yellow, not white, due to the extremely high butterfat content. Because our cheese is hand-made, there will be variations in color, flavor and texture from one batch to another or even between wheels from the same batch. These variations serve to emphasize the unique nature of the product, but have no effect on the quality. The cheese is cut by hand and package sizes will vary slightly from one package to another.
The cheese is made in a traditional hot water heated vat imported from Holland. The temperature is slowly increased from 45 to 90 degrees F. No Hotter. Gently agitated by hand, the fresh raw milk undergoes the ages old tradition of becoming cheese. Really fresh and natural cheese from Farm to Table.
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