Saveur

Photo: Constantino Pittas

It is noon when I arrive at the factory, and the day's production cycle is well under way. The four tons or so of ewe's and goat's milk that Langas buys daily from some 63 local shepherds arrived, as usual, at around 8:30 a.m. It has already been checked for contamination, skimmed slightly—about 15 percent of the fat is removed to help give the final product a firmer texture—pasteurized at about 150°F, and cooled by being pumped through a contraption resembling a radiator. It now resides in the three enormous vats in the center of the feta room.
  

You can't tell by looking—the vats' contents seem deceptively still—but the rennet and starter necessary to make the curds set have already been added, and the milk is now in the midst of ferocious fermentation. Every few minutes, Theodoratos runs his arm, and then a thermometer, through each vat. The temperature has to remain constant, somewhere between 95°F and 100°F, depending on the weather and on the final texture desired. "It's a delicate balance," he says. "One degree off and you've ruined the cheese." At one point, he adds salt—big crystals of it, scooped up with a slotted cup and rinsed in a barrel of water. "I can't tell you how much I add," says Theodoratos. "I just know by looking." Takis Langas, who is watching, interrupts. "It's about four kilos per vat," he assures me.
  

It takes about 45 minutes for the milk to be transformed into  the curds, or pasta—a sweet, warm, soft substance, thick and white like yogurt and about as tenuously solid as Jell-O, bathed in deep yellow whey. The next step in the feta-making process is to cut the pasta. To do this, Theodoratos takes a long, stainless-steel, paddlelike frame outfitted with rows of wire evenly spaced about an inch apart, and runs it horizontally, then vertically, through each vat, forming a grid. "If you want very firm cheese," he explains, "you coagulate the milk at a slightly higher temperature and cut the curds very small. If you want soft feta, you do the opposite—lower temperature, bigger curds." Next, the cheesemaker stirs the curds with a long wooden oar docked with several large holes. Finally, he runs his hands through them, breaking up the mass from the bottom of the vat; this is literally handmade cheese.

Feta is relatively easy to produce. It doesn't require long and careful aging; and because it has no rind, it doesn't need to be methodically rinsed like camembert or brie. In fact, it is made pretty much the same way whether in a huge factory or in a smaller operation like Langas's: Set the milk with starter, drain and salt the cheese, place it in molds to drain further, and then leave it to mature in brine. One obvious difference, besides scale, is that the larger manufacturers are automated. At the ultramodern Epirus cheesemaking factory in the Ípiros (Epirus) region, for instance—where annual feta production is about 3,000 tons—1,000 liters of milk are processed every four minutes on a production line. There are minor differences in technique, too, depending on whether the feta is to be packed in barrels or in tins. Tinned feta is a recent invention; the first country to produce and export it may have been Romania, in the early 1960s. Feta packed this way tends to be firmer and a little saltier than its barrel-aged counterpart. To aficionados like myself, the barrel-aged version is unquestionably superior.

As theodoratos's feta sets, he weighs down the thickened curds in each vat with the round slotted molds in which the cheese will eventually be shaped—placing as many as will fit on the surface of each vat, then pumping out the golden green whey. Next, he fills the molds with the pasta, patting down and distributing the curds evenly so that all the molds are filled to exactly the same height. "If the pasta is too soft," he explains, "it won't drain properly." He salts the molds. In about an hour, he will flip them, salt them again, and cut each mass into three triangular wedges. The curds are flipped and salted by hand three times over the course of the day. By the next morning, the cheese will be solid enough to be placed in a barrel for the first time, in five salted layers.
  

After three to five days in the barrel, the cheese is removed, washed down with brine, and placed in other barrels whose interiors have been steam-sterilized, then rubbed with soft whey cheese to insulate the feta from the taste of wood. Each one holds 50 kilos (over 100 pounds) of cheese. The feta now rests for anywhere from two weeks to 40 days, to ferment, mature, and exude its own brine. Finally, it is refrigerated for a minimum of two months (by law). Then it can be sold—to be eaten in slices, crumbled into salads, used as a filling for savory pastries, even cooked into sauces. 
  

"Isn't it an amazing thing?" Theodoratos asks me as I'm leaving. "A few hours ago all this was just milk."