Two kilometers from the Valladolid town of Ramiro, and following a rather desolate path, is Granja Cantagrullas, an artisanal cheese factory that makes dairy products with raw milk. The architects of the project are Rubén Valbuena and Asela Álvarez, a couple of geographers who left everything to give a peaceful home to their four children.
When you arrive, behind the fence, four dogs are frolicking on the ground, and the chickens are running around loose. We are clearly in the field. Rubén was born in Sabadell (Barcelona), but his mother’s family is from Navarra and his father’s is from Tierra de Campos (Castilla y León). His wife, Asela, is “half Spanish and half French.” Both, due to their careers, had to travel a lot around the world. But after having spent a few years outside of Spain, studying and working, and with four children, they decided to return. and start a new life in a town of no more than 40 inhabitants.
Because here? Because Rubén’s sister had married a rancher from La Seca and they had an extensive farm of Castilian sheep, so they thought of taking advantage of that potential and creating a cheese factory. “We tried to be as close to the sheep, but the DO Rueda was very expensive,” explains Asela, “so in the end we ended up here, it was a big change because I have always lived in an area with many trees (there are none here), and The first thing I did was plant some.” “He is an entrepreneur and has millions of ideas, it could have been anything,” says Asela, “in fact it was going to be wine,” says Rubén, “but my wife wouldn’t let me, and then it was cheese.”
They started their Granja Cantagrullas project in 2011, “we didn’t know it was going to be so complex to set up a company,” remembers Rubén. At first, with only basic knowledge, they created based on trial and error, and things did not go as expected, so they had to train, and it went well because they have been in the business for 13 years, during which time they have followed the philosophy of making its cheeses with raw milk applying a series of technologies foreign to the region, such as soft cheeses, blue cheeses and large formats.
Already in the beginning they had a great media impact, which allowed them to come into contact with hoteliers and sell in Michelin star restaurants, mainly in Madrid. Although not everything went well, the project entered a period of economic difficulties and they decided to open a point of sale in the capital, a small store on Conde Duque street called Cultivo.
“That allowed us to redirect this adventure, by having our own point of sale and being able to talk to customers. And from then until today, the momentum has been mainly motivated by the development of Cultivo, three stores in Madrid and a distributor from which we serve all of Spain.” “We currently work with 80 Spanish producers similar to us, and as far as possible they work with raw milk and milk from their own farms,” says Rubén.
What differentiates them?
Asela: There are many cheese factories here that are very good, when we lived in France and Rubén was writing his thesis, what he did to rest his mind was go help the cheese makers in the surrounding area, and that is where he learned to make different types of cheese. cheeses, and different from those here, this is how we make them, with raw milk and in a French way. At first people didn’t understand them very much, we have had to educate them so that they like them. At that time they told us that they were rotten, because seeing a cheese with mold on the rind was not the most common thing, they were used to other types of cheeses, cleaner.
Rubén, who taught you how to make cheese?
I was helping in three artisan cheese factories that had limited knowledge, but I thought they would be enough, and I came here, and we got going, that’s when we realized that making cheese was not that easy. And I returned to train, in France, at the ENILV, the National School of Dairy Industries. I like learning and teaching, and I immediately became a trainer. I have traveled a lot, since 2012 I have been training people in Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Guatemala, Peru,…in addition to the cheese factory and the stores, we have a consultancy that has taken us all over the world, where 20 people work in total.
So, you also had to learn how to make Asela cheeses?
Yes, of course, at first I liked it because we had two workshops, one for enzymatic preparations and the other for lactic preparations, and it had to be at about 23ºC, and since I am very cold, I loved it, although later we stopped doing it and I had to make butter in a terribly cold environment.
How many people work in the workshop?
Rubén: It is a very small workshop. Asela does the accounting and there are two of us in the factory.
To visit the farm you must wear white overalls and hats. Everything is very aseptic, stainless steel vats to transform milk into cheese, whether from cow, sheep or goat. In the background the background music and the noise of the machines. There are large, smaller, round, square molds… there they not only make cheeses for Cantagrullas, they buy blank cheeses to refine them and sell them at Cultivo, and they also make cheeses for other companies without refinement.
“There is a great diversity of cheeses, well made. We try to make cheeses with different formats and textures,” explains Rubén.
Taray is large format and smoked, Gamón is large, cheddar type but with sheep’s milk, Masiega is a blue cheese, and Carrizo is soft paste, tomme type, traditional mountain cheese, among others.
Which is your favorite?
Asela: The Taray, and the one that sells the most is Junco.
Rubén: It depends on the time of day, at night a softer one, a soft pasta, paired with a champagne or a white wine, not red wines, the tannins of the red wine mean that you will not enjoy the cheese, and the cheese being so fatty it will make you not enjoy the wine, better whites, and being in a DO, from Rueda, which in principle go very well with cheeses. Cheeses should not be harmonized with red wines, but with whites, rosés, clarets, cavas. Fruity ones go very well with soft pastas. Solera wine is the one that works best.
How is cheese best preserved?
Rubén: I have always said that you don’t have to keep them, you have to eat them. But at home, better inside a tapper, without wrapping them, all together, and with the tapper closed. When they are wrapped, anaerobic conditions are created that are not good for the rind, the cheese must breathe. We must avoid buying whole cheeses, we must buy for a week, in small portions, since we do not have the conditions to preserve them.
Is there an order to taste them?
Ruben: It depends on the aromatic intensity, the blue ones last, the smoky ones last, the truffled ones last, and the rest as you want, taking into account that there are fresh ones that have a lot of acidity and should not be the first.
