A Yakima cheesemaker linked to a listeria outbreak that killed one person reacted with prayer and a promise to reopen.

“This is going to pass,” said Venedita Montes, the 71-year-old owner of Queseria Bendita. “We are going to clean, we are going to fight.”

At the recommendation of state and federal health officials, Montes and her family on Friday voluntarily recalled their products and temporarily ceased making cheese until they hire an environmental specialist to help them wipe out a particular strain of listeria that also caused problems for them four years ago.

Interviewed Saturday, they were unsure how long they would be closed, but Montes promised her customers she would resume and continue “as long as my feet are still on the ground.”

Her daughter, Sandra Aguilar, who has helped manage the company since it opened in 2000, translated for her mother, who first learned the craft as a 10-year-old girl in Mexico.

Queseria Bendita is Spanish for “Blessed Cheese.”

The state Department of Health responds to between 11 and 29 cases of listeriosis per year, but the three cases linked to Queseria Bendita shared the exact genetic structure as each other and the five cases in 2010 traced to the company, said Dr. Scott Lindquist, state communicable disease epidemiologist and deputy health officer, in a phone interview Saturday afternoon.