Port Chester-based 5 Spoke Creamery looks to bring cheese-making to Westchester

Alan Glustoff of Rye Brook, owner of 5 Spoke Creamery, holds a wheel of Talcott, a cave-aged cheese, and two other varieties of his company’s raw milk cheeses as they are packaged for sale

By Jananne Abel

It came to my attention that there was a cheese business based in Port Chester and that its cheeses were being served at some of the finest New York City restaurants. That led me to visit the website of 5 Spoke Creamery, call the local telephone number listed there and speak to owner Alan Glustoff. As it turns out, he’s lived on Betsy Brown Road in Rye Brook since the mid 1990s.

While his office is in Port Chester—and he wouldn’t tell me where—Glustoff spends much of his time at the farm in Lancaster County, Pa. where the raw milk cheese is made or at the warehouse in Wood Ridge, N.J. where it is stored and then shipped to 20-25 states. He goes to the farm frequently for several days at a clip to make the cheese and says “it would be nice to have it closer by.”

That is, in fact, his dream—to bring the cheese-making process to Westchester County where dairy farming is a thing of the past. He’s hoping that moving his operation to Westchester might even be possible by this summer.

Glustoff, 55, is looking to lease land from the county at Hilltop Hanover Farm in Yorktown Heights. He would have a small operation there with 35-40 cows, as he does today in Pennsylvania.

There is land at Hilltop Hanover which is sitting vacant and a barn with milk lines in it. “I don’t know if they work,” said Glustoff. “It was a dairy farm and probably one of the last ones in Westchester County.” The county has owned it for about 10 years.

Glustoff had been in negotiations with the county and even had a contract, although it had not yet been signed. Then the administration changed and he was back to square one. So now he’s talking to several parties about leasing or buying 20 to 40 acres in Westchester or Putnam County.

Part of Glustoff’s plan is to have an educational component to his farming and cheese-making operation and work with area schools.

He has been working with his local representative, County Legislator Marty Rogowsky, and is somewhat frustrated with government bureaucracy. It’s a lot easier to deal with private individuals, as he is doing now, than a public entity, he said.

“This process has been going on two years which is a long time,” said Glustoff. “My opinion is it has taken too long.”

Rogowsky said the negotiations had gone on about a year and a half, and there was some disagreement over the terms, so the lease didn’t happen during the Spano administration.

Recently Rogowsky had a passing conversation with the new budget director about Hilltop Hanover Farm and the fact that it was losing money. He told her he had a possible solution.

So now the county is “reassembling a team to go back to the table to see if we can resurrect the deal,” said Rogowsky. “The new administration didn’t know anything about it. Hopefully the new administration will be more amenable.”

The deal, said Rogowsky, “was so close and at the last minute fell apart. Hopefully fairly quickly we can bring the lease back on the table.” He’s hoping that could happen in the next few weeks.

The county legislator said Glustoff planned to make an investment of about $300,000 at Hilltop Hanover. “I think it will be good for the county and good for him and would be good for the kids,” said Rogowsky. “It would be a win-win-win.”

“We can’t give away the farm,” said the county legislator, “but it can work if it is fair to both sides.”

Getting started

A food chemist by training, Glustoff said “I’ve always loved cheese.” After 30 years in the food business, having worked in marketing and product development at General Foods and at Unilever in Holland, “I decided a few years ago to devote all my energy to cheese.”

His small batch raw milk cheeses are handcrafted in the farmstead tradition, which means they’re produced on-site with a closed herd of grass-fed cows. Since the cheese is made from unpasteurized milk, according to state law, it must be aged a minimum of 60 days to eliminate pathogenic bacteria. Some of the cheeses are aged 12 or even 24 months.

“The last 12 years people like me have tried to bring back natural cheeses,” said Glustoff. He said he first thought about going into the cheese business six years ago and it took a couple years to find land and someone to work with him. Pairing up with an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, he started 5 Spoke Creamery more than 3 ½ years ago.

The company name came about because Glustoff is a bicyclist and “I encourage everybody else to use things like your feet and bicycles more often,” he said. “We promote a physical lifestyle as well. The two work well together.”

He is also part of the sustainable farming movement. “I speak at various gatherings and conferences about that.”

Having been in the food business for a long time, Glustoff knows many chefs and restaurant owners. When his business was in its infancy, he had meetings and tested early cheese batches at Sonora in Port Chester with chef and owner Rafael Palomino.

Healthier cheeses with deeper flavor

It take 8-9 gallons of milk to make a pound of cheese, said Glustoff.

The natural cheeses made by 5 Spoke Creamery from the raw milk of grass-fed Holstein cows free of pesticides and hormones have a greater depth of flavor and are healthier than processed cheeses produced in large quantities, he said.

He explained that with raw milk cheese you get all the nutritional benefits cooked out of pasteurized cheese. “We don’t take any fat out or add any.”

Raw milk cheeses, he said, help with digestion. In addition, your body absorbs 20-30% more calcium from raw milk cheeses than from processed ones. And eating more natural foods like these cheeses works to eliminate allergies.

5 Spoke Creamery cheeses are also kosher. The labels of those I purchased this week read: “Kosher for Passover and all-year-round.”

Seven varieties

There are seven varieties of 5 Spoke Creamery cheese on the market: herbal jack (made with mixed garden herbs, chives and garlic, it’s delicately tangy with a crumbly texture), Welsh cheddar, Talcott, Tumbleweed (Cantal style cheese aged 12 months, crumbly with a medium strong flavor, a precursor to cheddar), Redmond cheddar (aged six months, this buttery cheddar has a strong flavor and smooth texture), Browning Gold (aged 24 months) and Port Chester.

The Port Chester variety comes as a 22-pound wheel that looks like a big cake. “I only sell it by the wheel,” said Glustoff, explaining that Port Chester cheese is close in taste to Tumbleweed, cave-aged 22 months with mold on the outside.“It’s close to a traditional English cheddar,” he said.

Glustoff hopes to make more European style cheeses in the next year.

Locally you can buy 5 Spoke Creamery cheeses at Whole Foods in Greenwich and White Plains. I found herbal jack and Redmond cheddar at the Greenwich location this week for $14.99 per pound. Mrs. Green’s Natural Market in Larchmont, Eastchester and Mt. Kisco also carries them. In New York City, you can buy 5 Spoke Creamery cheeses at Murray’s, Zabar’s and Fairway.

Success involved hard work and luck

How did Glustoff get his cheeses into the finest restaurants in Manhattan?

“Some of that was luck,” he said. For example, he was doing a demo in New York City and a man came by asking a lot of questions about the cheese. As it turns out, he was the chef at Per Se.

But his products are in the hands of specialty cheese distributors and he can’t tell you every location where they are available. He said some restaurants have them on the menu all the time and some change the cheeses they serve periodically.

Besides having some luck, Glustoff attributes his success to a lot of hard work. And he admits that his cheeses have had a good deal of early acceptance.

5 Spoke Creamery is a young company that is still growing. Last year sales were up 34% while “most people were lucky to get by,” said Glustoff. He feels the best restaurants were not affected that much by the recession. “We had enough business from top tier restaurants, so we grew last year,” said Glustoff, adding that “we’re in the hiring phase” and he just posted some job listings. Thinking optimistically, he said: “When we move to Westchester, we will hire people locally to run the farm and will take interns in the summer.”

Glustoff and his wife moved to Rye Brook about 15 years ago. They were living in the City and thought Rye Brook would be a nice place to raise kids. Their twins are now seniors in high school at Solomon Schechter School of Westchester in White Plains.

This is part of the online edition of Rye Brook Westmore News.

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