‘Buffalo whisperer’ brings tasty bit of Italy to U.S.

And it’s a culinary calling fitting for a CU Buff

By Clay Evans

Until a couple years ago, if you wanted to try silky dairy products made from the butterfat-rich milk of water buffalo cows, your best bet was to wing it to southern Italy.

But after traveling a long road that led from Boulder through life on a houseboat, shacking up with poets, and an accidental career as a dairy farmer and creamery expert, Curtis Fjelstul (FineArts’74) and his business partner have brought such delicacies to American shores.

The people making all that delicious gelato have to add cream, but with water buffalo milk, that’s not necessary.”But where Italy is famous for water-buffalo mozzarella, the Double 8 Dairy in Petaluma, Calif., has made its first impressions with sweet, creamy gelato in such flavors as cardamom, cinnamon, hazelnut and caramel.

“With water buffalo, the milk fat is 10 percent, compared to 3.5 percent for Holsteins and 6 percent for Jerseys. The milk is kind of the consistency of half-and-half, a little sweet and thick,” says Fjelstul, 63, who lists partner, gelato master and “buffalo whisperer” among his titles. “The people making all that delicious gelato have to add cream, but with water buffalo milk, that’s not necessary.”

You may have seen feisty Ralphie, an American bison, leading the CU Buffaloes football team up Folsom Field on a crisp fall afternoon. Or maybe you remember Jim Perkins fleeing a charging Cape buffalo on the classic TV show, “Wild Kingdom” (five seconds on Google, kids). And you’re thinking, “Aren’t buffalo, y’know, dangerous?”

Actually no. Water buffalo are docile, gentle and used in their native Asia as draft, meat and dairy animals (cows and calves, at any rate; male bovines of any kind can be extremely dangerous). Melisa Schulze, Double 8’s other “buffalo whisperer,” is even training the farm’s small herd of 70 cows to line up for milking, just like those classic, black-and-white Holsteins.

Fjelstul would never have imagined a life hanging out with such exotic animals when he first came to CU in 1970, though he had a semi-exotic pedigree of his own. He lived the first six years of his life in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,where his father was in the petroleum-exploration business. In 1960, the family moved to Brisbane, Australia, where Fjelstul graduated from high school.

“When it came time to go to college, I chose Boulder. CU is pretty much like most Australian universities—sports-conscious, high matriculation standards,” he says.

Double 8, formerly called Di Bufala Dairy and Creamery, is now home to a private rehab — not too many residents volunteer to scoop stalls or feed these days — and America’s first water-buffalo gelato creamery.Though first interested in physics — “particles and all that,” he says — he soon gravitated to art and art history and loved painting and sculpture. While working at a San Francisco art-supply store, he began selling freelance graphic art to Mother Jones and other publications.

“It was a lot of fun. When the desktop computer came in it just changed everything. Everybody is a graphic artist now — or a critic,” he says.

After graduation, he lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., and with a bunch of poets in San Francisco’s North Beach area before getting married in 1978 and moving back to the ancestral family farm in Iowa, where he “froze to death.” They moved to warmer climes, owning a dairy farm in Hawai`i and milking a few cows in the wild, windswept lands around Point Reyes. Eventually he hired on to St. Anthony’s dairy farm outside Petaluma, which was owned and run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Francisco as an addiction-recovery center.

“There was a priest, Father Boedecker, who felt the destitute could kick drug and alcohol habits if they could just get away from the city. So I ran the dairy and milking operation, and the residents helped, feeding calves and milking,” Fjelstul says. “It didn’t pay very much, but it was satisfying to see people kick that habit.”

He worked at the dairy-rehab from 1996 until 2009 when the diocese shut it down. But when he met Andrew Zlot, a former hedge-fund manager who expressed interest in farming water buffalo, Fjelstul knew the perfect place: St. Anthony’s Farm.

Double 8, formerly called Di Bufala Dairy and Creamery, is now home to a private rehab — not too many residents volunteer to scoop stalls or feed these days — and America’s first water-buffalo gelato creamery.

“Such simple beauty,” one San Francisco food critic wrote of Dairy 8’s gelato. “(P)ure and stark, lilting on the tongue … a light milky flavor, rather than heavy with cream, despite its butterfat load.”

The farm is also perfecting its recipe for mozzarella and recently won third place from the American Cheese Society in its farmstead category.

Double 8 products are only available in northern California so far, but rave reviews from customers portend a bright future.

“We’re planning to expand the herd and we just installed a new milk plant so we can start milking in the barn,” Fjelstul says. “And we just got pint containers with our label. We hope to enter the retail market and small independent grocery stores with our own packaging.”

The creamery’s product made last year’s list of best new food in Esquire magazine. See: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/food-for-men/best-new-food-2014#slide-16. It was also recently featured in The Bohemian. See: http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/ice-cream-dreams/Content?oid=2691930#.VMFEHHfTlCA.mailto

Clay Evans is director of public relations for CU Presents.

Feb. 27, 2015