Family sticks to traditional cheese making
AS soon as her supply of fresh carabao’s milk arrives, 43-year-old cheese maker Carmela Calo buckles down to work inside her home in Compostela town, northern Cebu.
First, she uses a mesh to strain the milk into a metal vat. Then she heats it up under burning wood.
Carmela then adds some vinegar and stirs until the mixture thickens or curdles.
Iodized salt is sprinkled on to the curdled milk, removing moisture and preserving the product for the maturing process.
Carmela then takes a fistful of the salted curdled milk and wraps it in banana leaf strips. That’s how she makes cheese in five minutes or so.
The end product is what she calls “queseo,” creamy white and a bit salty. It is common fare in the town’s farflung mountain barangays.
“Dili ra na madaot dayon kung isulod og (It won’t spoil right away if you put it in a) refrigerator,” she told Cebu Daily News in their family eatery at the public market in barangay Poblacion.
Carmela learned the traditional cheese-making process from her father-in-law. She now makes 50 pieces of queseo which sells for P35 each.
Upon the death of her father-in-law, Carmela’s brother-in-law takes over the family tradition and goes around town to personally sell their products.
“My husband, Absalon, is only good at milking carabaos,” she said in jest.
Three other relatives also go house-to-house, even as far as Danao City, to sell queseo. Carmela said her queseo is also used in restaurants in Liloan.
Many families in Compostela earn a living through cheese making, but Carmela said her family is the only one in Poblacion who does it the traditional way.
Other cheese makers now use machines.
To promote the product, Compostela town has been celebrating the Queseo Festival annually since 2013.
This year, Carmela said she earned P2,000 during the festival. Production depends on the availability of milk.
Carmela said her family depends on only two carabaos for milk. They used to own 10 carabaos, but eight got sick and died.
Carmela said they also buy milk from farmers in mountain barangays for P50 per liter.
“Sometimes, there are days when we don’t produce anything at all,” she said.
Traditional cheese making in the Calo family goes back a long way. Carmela said her father-in-law made cheese traditionally for as long as she can remember. His forefathers had done the same, too.
The business, augmented by the income from the family-owned eatery, has helped send Carmela’s three children to school.
Her eldest would have been a third year Hotel and Restaurant Management student at the University of Visayas (UV) had she not dropped out due to financial constraints.
“Our earnings from cheese aren’t enough. When my father-in-law was still alive, that was when the business was really booming,” said Carmela.
Carmela’s middle child, a nursing student, stopped after her first year in college. Her youngest child, eight, is still in third grade.
None of them know how to make cheese, but Carmela is not worried.
“They’ll learn in no time once they really get into it,” she said.
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