Cheese, Dry Jack

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

The American entry in an Italian family, and the only cheese on this page that nobody set out to invent.

⭐ In 1915 a San Francisco cheese wholesaler, D. F. DeBernardi, had an oversupply of fresh Jack and put it into storage. The First World War then cut off shipments of Parmesan and Romano from Italy. When he came back to the forgotten wheels they had gone hard, sweet and nutty — and his Italian-American customers, who could no longer buy the imports, took to it immediately. By the 1930s something like sixty California makers were producing it.

🔴 And it is the one make on this page with an exit. Everything else here is a one-to-two-year bet on a wheel you cannot taste. This one is a cheese that is perfectly good young — so if the aging goes wrong, you eat a Monterey Jack. For a first attempt at this family, that matters more than any flavour argument.

Ingredients

• 3 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/2 tsp mesophilic culture — see Cheese Culture, Mesophilic Mother
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 2 Tbsp cheese salt
• For the rind rub: 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 Tbsp fine black pepper

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. ⭐ Start from Cheese, Monterey Jack, but drive it drier. This is the point people miss: a Dry Jack is not simply a Jack left on a shelf. The make is adjusted for the life it is going to get — a longer cook and a longer stir, to take out water a young Jack would keep.
2. Warm to 88-90 F / 31-32 C, add mesophilic culture, ripen 45 minutes. ⚠ Mesophilic is correct here — this is the one recipe on the page that does not cook hot.
3. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3 — a firm set.
4. Cut to 1/4 inch — finer than a table Jack, coarser than the Parmesan.
5. Cook to 100-102 F / 38-39 C over 30 minutes, then keep stirring for a full hour. The extra stirring is the whole modification. You want grains that have visibly shrunk and squeak, not the soft pillowy curd of a young Jack.
6. Drain, then salt the curd at 2 Tbsp and mix it through thoroughly by hand.
7. Press in cloth. Traditionally these were pressed in cloth without a hoop, which is why old Dry Jacks are slightly irregular boulders rather than neat cylinders. ~10 PSI for 30 minutes, flip; ~20 PSI for 2 hours, flip; ~25 PSI for 12 hours.
8. Air-dry 3-4 days, until the surface is dry to the touch and slightly leathery.
9. ⭐ Rub the rind. Mix the oil, cocoa and pepper to a paste and rub it over the whole surface. Repeat every few weeks for the first couple of months. It slows moisture loss, discourages mould, and gives the cheese its black coat.
10. Age at 55 F / 13 C, 80-85% RH, seven months minimum. A year or more is better. Turn weekly.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED. ⚠ And the origin story, while consistently told, is not documented in anything I would call a primary source. The 1915 date, DeBernardi’s name, the forgotten stock and the wartime import cut-off are repeated by California dairy-history sources and by the cheesemaking trade in the same words. It has the shape of a true story and I have not seen the paperwork, so it is written here as an account rather than a record — the same footing this collection gives burrata’s 1956 attribution and the Oaxaca origin.

⭐ The black coat, and a second helping of soot DeBernardi is credited with being first to coat the cheese, and his coating was oil, pepper and lamp black — the pigment scraped from oil-lamp soot. Modern makers use cocoa powder in its place, which is why the rub above is not a flavouring: it is a replacement for soot that happens to be edible.

⭐ That is the second time soot has turned up in this section, after Morbier’s protective layer over the evening curd — and in both cases the modern cheese substitutes something inert for it, vegetable ash there and cocoa here. Together with Edam’s red wax and American Muenster’s painted rind, that is a fourth instance of the same pattern: the appearance outliving the function.

⭐ Why this is the sensible first cheese in the family The family page is honest that the hard part of extra-hard cheese is not the make, it is getting one piece of feedback every two years. Dry Jack shortens that loop twice over: it is drinkable-young insurance, and seven months is a third of the wait. Make three small ones and open them at 4, 7 and 12 months — you will learn more about your own cave in a year than a single Parmesan will teach you in three.

The makers The name most associated with it is Vella, in Sonoma — Tom Vella from the 1920s, and his son Ig, who held that a Dry Jack needed at least seven months and kept his premium stock a year or more.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/grating-and-extra-hard/ on the site.