It stands to reason that if you are the maker of award-winning cheeses and it is your 10th anniversary, you might celebrate with a toast. Not a champagne toast, but real toast. Made from your own artisanal bread. And why not a special anniversary cheese too?
Molly and Eric Glasgow will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Grey Barn and Farm in Chilmark this year with both. A special cheese — called Bon Anniversaire, naturally — and the debut of their new on-farm bread baking operation are both planned for this spring and summer. The Glasgows will also be growing more vegetables.
At the moment, Bon Anniversaire is aging in one of the farm’s two cheese caves. Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, the bakery’s new Italian deck ovens are making their way to America on a container ship. And last week, two new high tunnels for year-round vegetable growing arrived at the farm.
The cheese will be released at a party July 7 on the farm, but you can sign up for your piece now (two party invites included) with a special web and e-letter promotion Molly created to build anticipation. The bakery should be up and operating in mid to late April and producing loaves for Grey Barn’s farm stand by mid to late May.
All this will happen in addition to the regular stuff — keeping the farm stand open seven days a week, 365 days a year; a cheese operation that yields between 30,000 and 35,000 pounds of cheese annually; and raising and marketing a range of other certified organic products, from eggs and milk to pork, veal, and beef. Not to mention caring for the cows, the sheep (added in 2017), laying hens (now in the hundreds), pigs (80 hogs raised last year), and Ruby, the three-year-old English lab who follows Molly everywhere. The farm totals 100 acres; the Glasgows also grow hay on 50 additional acres up-Island.
In an interview at the farm last week, Molly and Eric said it has all been made possible thanks to talented employees. “Our farm wouldn’t be what it is today without all the people who work with us,” Molly said. It’s not our farm — mine and Eric’s, but our farm — all of us who work here. If Asa didn’t do such a great job with the cows, if Joe didn’t do such a great job with the cheese, if Ethan didn’t do such a great job with the vegetables . . . then the farm would be nothing.”
“It sounds kind of cheesy,” she added with a laugh, “but it’s like a family. When someone is away, I’m like, wait, where are they? And it feels like home when everyone is around.”
Today Asa Baer, Joe Alstat, and Ethan Buchanan-Valenti are three of 12 staffers working year-round on the farm. But hiring the right people hasn’t been easy.
“The greatest challenge we’ve faced over the past 10 years has been finding and keeping employees who want to live on the Island,” Eric admitted, reflecting a common problem for many Island employers.
For example, he said the reason the bakery will become a reality is due to their recent opportunity to hire Christian Walter. Christian helped his sister Lily Walter found Slip Away Farm on Chappaquiddick in 2012 and discovered he was drawn to baking after building a wood-fired pizza oven on the farm. Four years ago, he ventured to America to cook and bake at the award-winning Rhubarb in Asheville, N.C. When Christian decided to return home, he contacted his friend Ethan, who asked Eric and Molly if they’d ever considered doing bread.
The bakery was always a dream. During high school and college, Eric — who was a commodities trader before he and Molly decided to change their lifestyle — cooked in restaurant kitchens and spent a summer working in a commercial bakery in Marblehead. When Ethan mentioned Christian, the dream reignited. Molly began working on plans to build out the bakery in the farm’s original main barn building.
This winter, Molly, Eric and Christian took a whirlwind tour of artisan bakeries in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, tasting 33 different breads in just a few days. At Grey Barn, they plan to start with three or four regular loaves, including a baguette, a levain (boule), and a batard with fruit and nuts. They’ll add others as specials. Most of the breads Christian plans to bake will be based on sourdough starters derived from wild yeast, with the dough cold fermented over a period of 18 to 24 hours.
“And we’re excited to be baking challah on Fridays. We’ll be using the recipe our son Noah developed during his community service project for his bar mitzvah,” Molly said.
The timing of the bakery with the anniversary is really just happy circumstance. The same goes for the vegetable expansion, which includes an acre of vegetables in addition to the high tunnels.
Molly is a passionate gardener and undertook the first market garden at the farm. But it was too much on top of her other duties, which officially include marketing and promotion, and unofficially include creating the beautiful aesthetic that permeates everything on the farm, from the blackboard signs to the farm stand displays. A photographer and former art director, her reverence for good design is evident.
Giving up the garden was an effort at finding balance, always a struggle on the farm, they said. “The farm tends to be all-consuming, especially if you let it,” Eric said. “And when you work where you live, there are no boundaries.”
Hiring Ethan, a seasoned veteran of Morning Glory Farm, opened up possibilities. This winter he grew enough greens in the hoop house to supply the farm stand every week. And nothing went to waste, as Molly and Eric discovered a hungry market for year-round vegetables.
“I think when you add the vegetables to the cheese, the meat, the eggs, and soon the bread, you get to a critical mass. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The more you have, the more people will want to come,” Eric said.
“And I think people really like coming here,” Molly added. “It’s always been important to us to be open-year round, and after 10 years people are aware that we’re open. 7 a.m. every day!”
With 10 years comes experience and also hard-won knowledge. When Eric and Molly, with their sons Noah (now 16 and a student at Falmouth Academy) and Jake (now 14 and an eighth grader at the West Tisbury School), bought Rainbow Farm from David Douglas in 2009, they knew they had a working vision for the farm. But they admit they didn’t know all that it would take to get there.
“We had some ideas, some of which were wrong,” Eric said, adding with a chuckle: “Many of which were wrong.”
And they couldn’t have known how hard some of it would be.
In 2013, an electrical fire in the newly built creamery destroyed all the milking and bottling equipment. Molly was ready to give up, but Eric insisted they persevere. It was such a difficult time that, reflecting back now, Molly called their single biggest accomplishment “still being married!”
The 10th anniversary of the farm happens to coincide with 20 years of marriage.
In a way, the fire helped. It forced them to rethink the direction of the farm and to become “laser-focused” on making cheese rather than being a full-service dairy. Joe has been at Grey Barn for five years and became head cheesemaker two years ago. During that time, Prufrock, the farm’s creamy, pungent washed-rind cheese, has won two awards from the American Cheese Society.
“It was actually Joe’s idea to make the anniversary cheese. He really wanted to make a Prufrock Grande,” Molly said.
Promoting the anniversary cheese is just another way Molly is engaging people with the farm.
In the summer, Grey Barn hosts farm tours and cheese tastings and this year will add some flower workshops with Morrice Florist. Molly plans to stage workshops in a small commercial kitchen they’re installing next to the bakery.
“When we started out, we didn’t realize how important the work we’re doing would be to this community of ours,” she said. “On a daily basis I have customers and friends thank us for our farm. For me this is the best part — bringing beauty and happiness to the people around us.
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