October 25, 2014

Big cheese Jason Sobocinski ’01 values and preserves tradition

Jason Sobocinski ’01 holds Der Scharfe Maxx, a wheel of strong Swish cheese made with cow’s milk, in the cheese shop of his Caseus Fromagerie & Bistro restaurant.
Jason Sobocinski ’01 holds Der Scharfe Maxx, a wheel of strong Swish cheese made with cow’s milk, in the cheese shop of his Caseus Fromagerie & Bistro restaurant.

With fermentation and preservation, humans built empires. Jason Sobocinski ’01 continues that tradition today.

By Liz F. Kay

Every cheese has a story, and Jason Sobocinski ’01 is telling it, in many different ways.

The New Haven, Conn., entrepreneur is the man behind Caseus Fromagerie & Bistro and Ordinary, a restored tavern, both with menus that focus on cheese, along with the Caseus Cheese Truck.

He was the host of The Big Cheese on the Cooking Channel, and more recently, he has teamed up with a cheesemaker who works in a shipping container 15 feet away from the milking parlor on a Lebanon, Conn., farm. Their product is now used and sold at New York restaurants and shops such as the Gramercy Tavern and Eataly.

Sobocinski grew up in a Polish-Italian family in Connecticut, with parents who eat mostly vegetarian food for health reasons. His father will eat one hot dog on the Fourth of July and turkey at Thanksgiving, he said, and his mother eats bacon. Sobocinski himself avoided meat until he was 12.

His parents and grandparents instilled a love of cooking in him. His Italian grandmother would come over on Friday nights to make vegetarian suppers and enjoyed cooking Chinese dishes, enlisting the family in assembling dumplings for dim sum nights. They still plan big meals, such as holidays and weddings, as a family, discussing menus and assigning tasks.

“I enjoyed cooking and participating in all aspects of food, not just cooking but serving, too,” Sobocinski said. “It was a lot of fun.”

Cheese-fun-shots
“You don’t need to be fancy to appreciate cheese and all the wonders of it.” — Jason Sobocinski ’01

The marketing major wasn’t sure where he was headed after he graduated from Providence College, but he knew he loved food. He had cooked at a Providence restaurant while he was a student and worked in New Haven restaurants before following his degree to a sports marketing job in Miami, Fla.

That’s when Sobocinski learned about Boston University’s master’s degree in gastronomy — an anthropological study of cuisine, food, and culture, and why people eat what they eat.

He moved to Boston to enter the program while he worked at the Formaggio Kitchen, a noted cheese shop in Cambridge. Robert Aguilera was general manager of Formaggio Kitchen when Sobocinski was hired, initially to work in the bakery. He moved to the cheese counter swiftly, however.

“You couldn’t hold him back. You couldn’t tie him down,” Aguilera said. “He wouldn’t do just one thing — he would do many, and anything he would do, he would succeed.”

Sobocinski and another employee turned a weekly pop-up barbecue night at Formaggio that had only operated during the summer into a year-round event. During the fall season, Sobocinski also started selling raclette, a traditional French-Swiss dish in which gooey, melted cheese is scraped off the wheel onto ingredients such as potatoes, onions, or meats. His additions to the offerings at Formaggio Kitchen made visiting the shop an appointment for customers, who also could not get enough of his enthusiasm and entertaining style of service.

“The ideas were always coming, but the execution was always spot on. It would never miss,” Aguilera said.

Aguilera, who is now the U.S. sales representative for Fromagex, a major supplier of cheese equipment and ingredients for small producers, had been teaching cheese-tasting classes at Formaggio, and Sobocinski joined him. The courses soon expanded to include the origins of prepared foods from specific cultures and esoteric pairings such as cheese and poetry.

Sobocinski’s master’s thesis at BU was his business plan for a cheese shop and restaurant. That was where he developed the idea of telling the stories behind the cheese. Cheese is so basic and straightforward, made by “salt-of-the-earth” people, he said. His idea is to be laid-back and not fancy at all.

“That’s kind of what I’ve tried to propagate all the way through — the idea that you don’t need to be fancy to appreciate cheese and all the wonders of it,” Sobocinski said.

There’s a lot to admire.

“These products have been made for thousands of years and have been the building blocks of what we know as civilization,” Sobocinski said.

Modern refrigeration has only existed for about 150 years, he said. Before the discovery of fermenting milk and making cheese, there wasn’t a way to store milk — and the ability to keep surplus food freed up time for people to pursue other interests, such as art, music, and philosophy.

“It’s pretty cool to think about the fact that preservation is what really sent us into what we know as civilization,” Sobocinski said. “Fermentation brought about preservation, which brought about civilization. That gets me so excited.”

This enthusiasm has fueled enterprises both at Formaggio and in New Haven.

“It just felt like you had an arm that could do anything, a magic wand,” Aguilera said about Sobocinski. “The question wasn’t, ‘Was this going to succeed?’ The question was, ‘Just how big was this going to get?’”

For Sobocinski, entrepreneurship is an opportunity to be a trailblazer.

“I want to be someone who can lead people,” Sobocinski said. “As a leader, I want to try to be as innovative as I possibly can, so the people I’m leading are inspired.”

In addition to Caseus and Ordinary, Sobocinski operates the Caseus Cheese truck and Smokebox, which supplies the barbecued and smoked meats on Ordinary’s menu. He worked with his brother, Tom, and master brewer Tyler Jones to start Black Hog Brewing Company.

Through one of Sobocinski’s latest ventures, the Mystic Cheese Co., he is helping to produce cheese himself. He is working with Brian Civitello, a veteran cheesemaker who has worked in Italy and the United States and designed the self-contained cheese production space inside a shipping container located at Grey Wall Family Farm in Lebanon, Conn.

Their Melville cheese — a reference to that other Connecticut native, Herman Melville — is a soft, ripened variety that Sobocinski compared to a crescenza or a fresh mozzarella. The proximity to the animals has a lot to do with the cheese’s sweet, tangy taste.

“We take the milk at 90 degrees, right from the cow, and it never cools down,” Sobocinski said. “It keeps the structure of the milk really pristine.”

With his beers, Aguilera said that Sobocinski uses the same approach as he does with his food and cheese, so diners can enjoy all the subtle nuances.

“He wants people to be able to taste all the things that are going into it, and enjoy it enough that they can have another,” Aguilera said. “He’s very loyal to the flavors he’s putting into whatever he’s making, whether it’s a cheese plate or a beer.

“He’s very true to those ingredients, because many are coming right from the farm,” he said.

It’s pretty cool … preservation is what really sent us into what we know as civilization.” —Jason Sobocinski ’01

For example, Sobocinski serves a lamb neck braised 14 hours overnight, with grits from Ansom Mills in South Carolina that are ground fresh and must be kept refrigerated.

“It’s fun to be able to not just cram chow but to really think about it as you’re eating, especially in this day and age where we are now, where there’s so much industrial food,” he said.

Sobocinski said he appreciates being able to tell a customer details about how their food got to their tables — and that they don’t need to worry about preservatives or other concerns.

“Somewhere, we stopped caring about what we put in our bodies,” he said. “People will spend more money on cable television and shoes than what they put inside themselves.

“There is no perfect solution — we can’t feed the world without some large-scale stuff,” he said. But the new appreciation for food sourcing makes it an exciting time to be in food, Sobocinski said.

He also has told the story of cheese in more traditional formats. Sobocinski published the Caseus Fromagerie Bistro cookbook in 2011. Rather than just assembling a bunch of recipes in a stock layout, he worked with a designer, artist, and photographers to capture “a snippet of time in the life of Caseus,” he said.

The book includes stories and profiles of people who worked there at the time, from the chef de cuisine, the cheesemongers, and the waitstaff to Sobocinski’s grandparents, who gave him startup funds, and a farmer. Some of the recipes, such as a cassoulet, don’t have a strict set of measurements but rather a recommendation of ingredients.

Sobocinski’s big break with the Cooking Channel did not begin in a dramatic way. Another restaurant owner forwarded him an email from the Food Network, explaining that they were searching for the host of the show. Sobocinski responded, went to New York City for a screen test, and they booked him for a one-hour special. He later shot eight episodes as well as another hour-long special.

Overall, Sobocinski says he appreciates the opportunity to “be able to connect with people through the stories of cheese.”

“My purpose is to make it so it’s a good time for people,” Sobocinski said. “It’s expensive, and people who make it put a lot into it, so it should be fun.

“It can be intimidating. It can be overwhelming,” he said. “But if you break it down to a personality kind of thing, it makes it more fun.”

Cheese-mac-n-cheeseThe Mac ’n Cheese*

1 pound orecchiette pasta

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small loaf brioche or other enriched bread

1/3 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/4 pound chevre

1/3 pound extra-sharp Vermont cheddar

1/3 pound gouda (aged 1 year)

1/3 pound comte (aged 1 year)

1/3 pound raclette (French or Swiss)

1/4 pound provolone

Plus, any bits, nibs, ends, or leftover nubs of any cheese you have in your refrigerator

1 quart milk

1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions

Our Mac ‘n Cheese is NOT CONSISTENT at Caseus. Throughout the year as the seasons change we change our Mac ‘n Cheese, adding more chevre or more raclette as we see fit. Sometimes the nib ends and bits are different; this means the Mac ’n Cheese is as well. At any given time you may find the perfect Mac ‘n Cheese combination for you, and although you’ll search the rest of your life for it again and again, it’s like your first kiss in 5th grade on the playground swings — it just may never be as extraordinary. It’s the journey, not the destination, that the true epicure relishes.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees F.

Bring water to a boil in a large pot. Boil the orecchiette until slightly undercooked. Drain. Toss cooked pasta in a bowl with olive oil and set aside.

Slice the brioche thin and place on a cooking sheet. Place in low oven for 20 minutes or until dry. Remove, let cool, and crumble into small pieces. This will make more breadcrumbs than you need but making them from scratch makes all the difference. Cook’s Note: Do not use something from a can that’s been sitting around on some shelf for who knows how long.

Increase the oven temperature to 400 degrees F.

Melt butter in a small pan. Whisk in flour until completely incorporated (no lumps). This is called a roux.

Crumble the chevre into small pieces; grate all other cheese.

In a small saucepot, bring milk to a boil, stirring occasionally. Add in the roux, whisking constantly, until the mixture returns to a boil. The mixture will thicken. Turn off the heat. You now have a bechamel sauce.

Add 3/4 of the cheese, whisking until melted and incorporated. Add freshly grated nutmeg. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Add sauce to the cooked pasta and toss to coat. Place in an oven-proof dish, top with remaining cheese, and bake 25 minutes, or until bubbling hot.

Top with bread crumbs and continue to bake 3 minutes. Remove from oven when you see things looking very oozy and bubbly.

*Recipe provided by professional cooks and modified from Caseus website.