Why are more chefs making their own cheeses? Because they can.

The Lexans have been playing an important role for Balika. For weeks, until the Four Seasons opened a special affinage room for Balika this past weekend, the pastry chef had to age his cheeses in the restaurant’s wine cellar, where the temperature was ideal but the humidity was not. That was where the Lexans came in. They trap the cheeses’ natural moisture, Balika says, to provide the optimal conditions for growing molds and aging wheels.

If Balika’s “humidifier” has been decidedly low-tech, his machines for heating milk are not. The chef’s modern tools give him an advantage that the cheesemakers of previous generations can only envy. Water circulators and induction burners regulate heat to the exact degree, which eliminates the stress of watching over the milk to make sure it reaches the proper temperature for adding the coagulating and flavor-generating cultures. Plus, induction burners don’t scorch milk.

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The tools, of course, go only so far. They won’t transform Balika — or LaCivita, who also employs a water circulator for his milks — into skilled Normandy cheesemakers overnight. Which suits Balika fine. He’s not aiming to make a wheel worthy of the Camembert Museum. He wants to employ classic techniques to make cheese that smacks of the Mid-Atlantic. You could claim that Balika is just another chef trying to push a locavore agenda, but his message is more subtle than that. Cheese, like wine, has always been about terroir; it’s just a taste of a particular region as filtered through the milk of a ruminant animal.

“What I really want to do,” says Balika, “is produce something that speaks of us, that speaks of the area that we’re from.”

At this stage in his cheesemaking career, Justin Owens has not yet adopted the language of the locavore, which makes sense. He’s still just learning the craft. Like LaCivita and Balika, Owens taught himself how to make cheese, but unlike the other two men, both trained chefs, Owens had a weaker foundation to build on. He’s a former firefighter who left behind the unpredictability of the combustible world for the more controlled flames of the kitchen.

Actually, Owens started out in the dining room. Three years ago, Cathal Armstrong hired him as a server at Restaurant Eve, but the new employee had a wandering eye and noticed that the kitchen occasionally made its own cheese. “I was interested in how it was created,” Owens says. “I started experimenting at home, and I sort of got bit by the bug.”

With a firefighter’s fearlessness, Owens fast-forwarded right past the simple fresh cheeses and promptly started his education with a Monterey jack made with Trickling Springs milk, which he bought at a local bodega. He aged his first cheese in a wine refrigerator, a suitable substitute for a cave. “Even if it wasn’t Monterey jack, which I hoped it was, it was still good,” Owens says. “I was happy that it didn’t make anybody sick.”

Owens has since experimented with a wider variety of cheeses. He even made his own Camembert at home, then asked Armstrong to sample it one day at Eve. “It ended up on the menu,” Owens recalls. “I was just floored.”

It’s fair to say that Owens is the Great White-Milk Hope for Cathal and wife Meshelle Armstrong as they pull together Society Fair, their European-style market that will feature a butcher shop, bakery, wine shop, prepared food section and, yes, a cheese counter. Set to open in October, Society Fair will be the Armstrongs’ own Eataly, minus the Italian accent and scaled more toward an Alexandria market. Owens is primed to make a number of the cheeses for both the market and Restaurant Eve. As part of Owens’s preparation, Armstrong secured an internship for the upstart at Murray’s in Manhattan, where the 28-year-old has been learning the art of affinage in the famous cheese shop’s caves.

“It’s a rare and very lucky person who finds their niche, and when you do, going to work is not like going to work anymore,” Armstrong says about his cheese protege. “He’s like a little kid on Christmas Day.”

Still, Armstrong understands that Owens must come to grips with the fickle nature of cheese. The key for Owens will be to develop a program that turns out consistently high-quality cheeses. That, of course, will mean lots of practice.

“We’re not experimenting on our guests,” Armstrong says. “We’re experimenting on ourselves.”