How Susan’s natural curiosity led to a a new culinary career – and River Whey Creamery
Cheese has become such an essential part of American food culture that most of us seldom give a second thought about where it comes from or who makes it. Simply put, we take our cheesemakers and their work for granted.
That’s not the case for fans of Susan Rigg’s River Whey Creamery, however, the most ardent of which speak of her products with reverence typical of oenophiles.
And while she may have stumbled upon a career as an artisanal cheesemaker at midlife–in the middle of what one might call a professional plot twist, Susan’s passion for her work borders on palpable.
A natural drive to learn
“My career didn’t turn out anything like I thought it would as a kid,” Susan observed one recent sunny morning, sitting in her Schertz creamery. “When I was young, I knew I wanted to go to medical school. For my tenth birthday, I asked for a copy of ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ Can you imagine?”
Placed into a special program for gifted children in Silicon Valley, young Susan poured herself into understanding every system in the human body, even learning the name of each bone. In the world of education, such intellectual intensity in bright young people has a specific phrase: “rage to master.” That focus and drive stayed with Susan through high school and college, even in the wake of a near-fatal car accident between the two education levels. When her parents, both British immigrants, relocated to Texas, she followed. Susan also continued to chart a course to medical school through to her senior year in college, when she began to feel uneasy.
“I was in the pre-med program at UTSA. I was miserable. My dad said to me, ‘No one said you have to do this.’ I went to a career counselor who said I could change my mind, do something else. This was a revelation to me. It never occured to me that I could change my goal.”
The bookish years
On the advice of her father, young Susan took a job after college “just to work for awhile” in a bookstore. The atmosphere proved ideal. “I really loved being in that environment. With all of those books–and the ability to borrow them as an employee, it was like having access to the Internet before the Internet existed. I love learning. I’ve always had a project going. It was the perfect place for me.”
That deep-dive approach to the world, that rage to master, led Susan to rise within her new profession. She eventually became a manager within a national bookstore chain. “The job helped me develop all kinds of skills–leadership, team building, inventory. The challenges, too, helped me grow, helped me learn to invest in human capital . . . and come to see that each person has something good to bring to the table. Every bit of what I learned back then helps me with my work today.”
By 2007, however, a series of corporate changes within the company led Susan to shift gears. “I hired a life coach, and it was fantastic. I worked through the ‘what am I going to do with the rest of my life’ question. I figured I had at least two more decades of working. Why not make the most of it?”
A passion for food
Over and over again during her work with the life coach, Susan said, the topic of food kept coming up. Although she knew she didn’t want to open a restaurant (“I’d had enough of that kind of life with the bookstore years.”), she started pursuing a culinary education in earnest, first in New York at a bootcamp and later here in San Antonio. “I was one of the first students to graduate from the CIA [Culinary Institute of America] at The Pearl. I was the oldest student, too. I did my first year here and my second in New York. It was grueling, physically demanding, and intense. I loved it.”
An externship with chef Jason Dady and a required business plan project spurred her further from her studies onward to what would become her current undertaking. Inspired by a comment from her mother–and having opted to take a trip to a cheese festival for a graduation present, Susan began to look closer at cheesemaking as a profession.
She navigated the rocky road of entrepreneurship with an adventurous spirit.
“I never get to ‘No’ on an idea. I keep taking baby steps, inching forward. Anything that needed to be done in the beginning, I figured out how to do it, how to make it work.” She kept her focus tight, too. “To become a licensed creamery, you have to deal with city, county, state, and federal rules. I used to sit in bed at night, reading dairy regulations.”
Inside River Whey Creamery
The patience and persistence paid off, as did Susan’s insatiable desire to understand everything about the science of creating a sensational, mouth-watering cheese.
Spend a little time with her at her creamery, and you’ll receive a rapid-fire master class in cheesemaking. Don’t let the speed of her dialogue fool you, however. Susan possesses an incredible ability to give breadth and depth at once. No detail was left untouched or undescribed during my visit, from the interesting provenance of a recently acquired piece of stainless steel equipment to which microbes create which colors on cheeses tucked into her chilly cheese cave. (To the casual observer, the space-with its orderly wooden shelves and carefully plotted inventory system to support the aging of cheeses evokes ready comparisons to bookshelves.)
Remarkably, within just a couple of years of opening River Whey Creamery, Susan’s fresh Saint Clements cheese–made with organic oranges, lemons, and local Holdman Honey–was honored with a first place award at the 2016 American Cheese Society’s annual meeting.
It was a stunning achievement for a new cheesemaker.
“I was absolutely blown away. A great fresh cheese is all about the ‘chefiness,’ the flavor profile, and so that was a huge moment for me,” she said.
Onward to the future
Following a trip earlier this year to the United Kingdom with her partner, Kathleen Leathem, to visit some of the world’s finest creameries and the legendary Welsh salt maker Halen Môn, Susan returned home to co-host a multi-course dinner at Michael Sohocki’s Restaurant Gwendolyn. During the decadent supper on the Riverwalk, she shared trip highlights and observations alongside Sohocki’s fresh, elegant dishes and River Whey’s The Welshman, Caldera España, and Keystone cheeses, among others.
Now with summer winding down and feeling inspired from her trip abroad, Susan’s turning her attention to the process of moving her creamery to a larger facility. She also volunteered recently to collaborate with other forward-thinking American creameries in a pilot initiative to develop a truly original American cheese using native microbes and ingredients.
It’s no small task, but a potentially landmark one.
“The cheeses that you find at the grocery store, made by big companies here in America? No human hands may ever touch them during the entire process. That’s not cheesemaking for me. There’s a place for it, sure, because it feeds the masses, but that’s not about the tradition of cheesemaking that has fed people for millennia,” Susan said. “The most fascinating things in American cheese right now are happening in small independent creameries.”
Frankly, with her passion for the process and love of the end product, it isn’t hard to imagine that Susan Rigg could prove integral to a twenty-first century American cheesemaking revival.
And wouldn’t that make a great final chapter for the cheesemaker herself?
Pamela Price is the founder of TheTexasWildflower.com.
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