The moon-lit cheeses of the Karoo Highlands

Tastes, textures, degrees and ages of Langbaken. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

By Tony Jackman

18 Nov 2022

The moon that shines on Langbaken, says Koos Kaas, is a wheel of cheese. And every cheese they make there shines as brightly.

To reach Langbaken from the R63 between Carnarvon and Williston, turn left onto the Bakensklip road. After 15 km, turn right at the grader, then left at the windsock. The windsock has been all but annihilated by the wind after which it is named, but I spot it in the nick of time. A few kilometres on I spy the white corbelled house Francy Schoeman had told me to look out for.

To get to Langbaken, turn right at the tractor, left at the windsock, and look for the white corbelled house. (Photos and composite image by Tony Jackman)

It’s not every day you meet someone at a corbelled house, an architectonic distinction of this part of the Karoo Highlands, or Hoogland, of the Northern Cape, a world of Hantam and extreme temperatures, hellish hot in summer and cold as hell in midwinter. In this otherworldly terrain, Francy Schoeman makes some of the country’s finest cheeses. The corbelled houses were built by trekboers from the slate you find everywhere on these ancient lands, and being inside one is a marvel once you look up. It looks as though it could collapse and bury you forever in a flash of architectural vengeance, yet the interlaced slates, much in the style of a dry stone wall, have remained intact for the many generations who have stood or slept beneath its roof.

Francy Schoeman inside the corbelled house, a mysterious world of interleaved slate that seems to defy the laws of nature and gravity, especially when you look up. (Photos and composite image by Tony Jackman)

Langbaken cheeses had found me at a food festival outside Cradock in the autumn before the early cold swooped in, and soon found their way into my Karoo kitchen. Now there is a new haul of them, but this time I trekked all the way to Langbaken to find them and to meet their maker. Their names captivated me – Karoo Crumble, Karoo Sunset, Karoo Blue – but their textures and flavours had me swooning.

Karoo Blue maturing at Langbaken. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The Karoo, just as it lends itself to the fine meat of sheep, has a way with cheese as well. It seems to belong. People who find themselves living on its vast plains turn their minds to the craft of food, and cheese making is one of the finest crafts. Not everyone has a way with it, but Francy Schoeman does. When the Zimbabwe-born Francy fell in love with Peter Schoeman and found herself leaving Greyton and moving to a farm in the stinking hot Karoo Highlands near Williston in 2010, an area so in touch with the greater universe that strange masts point to the sky not far away from Langbaken looking for signs of life other than our own, her mind turned to cheese.

Langbaken has been in Peter’s family since the late 1800s and it was his turn to steer it forward, but Francy needed to do something worthwhile with her now remote days. She did a two-day course in cheese making at the Elsenburg Dairy Lab in Stellenbosch and taught herself the rest. “Trial and error is always best,” she says simply.

Her cheeses are unpasteurised. “All the best cheeses in the world are made from raw milk,” Francy says. “That’s why they have so much more flavour and are so unique.” This doesn’t mean that the best cheeses win the major international awards for cheese, as in many instances being unpasteurised disqualifies them.

Francy Schoeman where you’ll find her every morning, and a batch of Karoo Crumble she’d churned out (literally) while the rest of us were still asleep. (Photos and composite image by Tony Jackman)

In her cheesemaking room with its strange raw dairy smell is a shelf full of 20 wheels of Karoo Crumble she made that morning after the daily cheese routine churned into action at 4am. I can’t believe that these wheels didn’t exist when I woke up this morning in Carnarvon to drive to Langbaken. She churns out (literally) that many wheels of cheese every second day, sometimes the Crumble, other Karoo Sunset, on other days a different recipe. That one day’s production amounted to about 50 kg. They’re wetly white, their colour to change with time and temperature. Karoo Crumble is her flagship and has won the most awards.

Serried rows of Francy Schoeman’s cheeses drying and maturing in her cold room include Karoo Blue, Stout Williston, Karoo Sunset and other beauties. (Photos and composite image by Tony Jackman)

She takes me into the drying room where they go after brining, serried on shelf after shelf on many walls. It’s a wonderland of cheese wheels. A cheese cave of controlled temperature, well below the maximum of 18℃ but generally below 15℃. There are thick wheels and slim ones, in varying hues depending on their age. The size has a lot to do with the ripening of a cheese, smaller wheels will ripen quicker. They’re coated with what she calls cheese paint, or cheese coating, a white paste that looks like wood glue that prevents the cheeses from drying out. Every wheel is dated with food colouring.

Serried cheeses in Francy Schoeman’s cheese cave at Langbaken. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

One batch of her Williston cheeses is coated with paprika, a rusty-red beauty. There’s Karoo Swiss, in the Emmentaler style, and Karoo Blue. She chooses not to call them Cheddar, Gouda etc, preferring simple Karoo names. She shows me the Stout Willis which is a variation of the paprika-coated Williston but washed instead with Peter’s home-brewed stout.

Producing the milk that makes the cheese is Francy’s single herd of Jersey cows. Langbaken cheese began its story with just two. Long before the crack of dawn, strong hands are carrying heavy buckets of milk around for the new cheeses to find life. Helping Francy is “Koos Kaas”, real name John Feris, an able and wise assistant who joins us at lunch time to take over from Francy. “Like Koos Kombuis,” the young man says with the confidence of an older and wiser man. He jokingly tells Francy that he’ll give her Saturday off as she needs a break and he’s not doing anything else. When I ask her if he has a job title she says simply, “Just Koos Kaas.”

Francy Schoeman and John Feris (Koos Kaas) in the cheese cave at Langbaken. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

It was the lockdown that spurred the business and saw it grow quickly. Not because business was brisk during those truncated times, it wasn’t at all, but because they were able to build up stock. They kept production going but, with the market suddenly impenetrable, everything they produced stayed put and aged. A ready market swallowed it all up when the lockdown ended, and now Langbaken is in great demand.

Tastes, textures, degrees and ages of Langbaken. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Their main distributor is Wild Peacock in Stellenbosch. They’re not in the supermarkets, and nor does Francy wish them to be. “We’re too small,” Francy says, quickly adding, “but chefs love us.” One example is on the degustation menu at Epice in Franschhoek; called Ages and Degrees of Langbaken, it’s a sensuously thrilling cheese course.

The cheeses of Langbaken seem blessed by the moon that shines over langbaken and its endeavours. Now, again, they bless my Karoo kitchen. DM/TGIFood

Langbaken Cheese is on Instagram @langbakencheese

Tony Jackman is regional Vodacom Journalist of the Year (Lifestyle) Eastern Cape for 2022 and Galliova Food Champion 2021.

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks. Share your versions of his recipes with him on Instagram and he’ll see them and respond.

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