cheeseunderground cupola, paula homan, red barn family farms, Wisconsin cheese

Beauty and Brains: Red Barn Cupola Wins Design Award

It’s not often a cheese gets national recognition for its package design. But that’s exactly what happened recently with Red Barn Cupola, a Wisconsin artisan cheese. Boasting both beauty and brains, Cupola is a 2016 American Package Design award winner along with brands like 3M, Target and Whole Foods. Pretty cool, huh?

This year’s American Package Design Competition received 2,000 entries worldwide, placing Red Barn’s winning entry among the best-designed and most innovative packaging in the food and beverage industry.

In case you’re not familiar with Red Barn Family Farms, let me fill you in. The company was founded by Dr. Terry and wife Paula Homan in 2008. It consists of five farms in the Black Creek area, each selected for their ability to meet the “Red Barn Rules.” These rules revolve around rigorous quality, animal health, and operational requirements, linking excellence in what we used to call animal husbandry (but what today folks refer to as humane treatment of cows), to excellence in food quality.

Red Barn farmers are compensated with a pay rate for milk above and beyond the commodity market. This rate helps sustains their lifestyle of small, traditional dairy farming. Each farm must be family-owned and family members must perform the majority of the farm labor. Average herd size is 55 cows. Just like when I was a kid, cows are known and cared for by name and live longer lives than today’s industry standard. Each farm is annually inspected and certified by the American Humane Association.

Milk from Red Barn farms is bottled and sold as fluid milk, or crafted into award-winning cheese at one of three Wisconsin creameries – Springside Cheese in Oconto Falls; Willow Creek Creamery in Berlin, and LaClare Farms in Pipe. Cupola is crafted at LaClare by U.S. Champion cheesemaker Katie Fuhrmann. The cheese is fruity and nutty with hints of caramel and toasted pineapple. In other words, it’s amazing.

Cupola was named after the small structure at the top – or pinnacle – of traditional Wisconsin barns. A pinnacle cheese for Red Barn, Cupola is an American original that combines top-quality milk, a world-class cheesemaker, and a recipe perfected with the help of the Center for Dairy Research at UW-Madison over a three-year time period.

“Red Barn’s mission is to honor and sustain excellent small family farms in Wisconsin,” says company president Paula Homan. “We worked closely with Scott Mueller of Design Incites to create packaging that would communicate the tradition of excellence that our farms represent and the quality of the products they produce.”

Congrats, Red Barn Family Farms, for dedicating your lives to rewarding dairy farmers for producing quality milk that’s made into stellar cheese.

cheeseunderground Cesar's cheese, cupola, hook's cheese, jeffs select, Landmark Creamery, maple leaf cheese, marieke gouda, pleasant ridge reserve, Roelli Cheese, roth cheese, sartori, Wisconsin cheese

The 10 Best Wisconsin Cheeses of 2015

It was a good year to live in Wisconsin. Our cheesemakers debuted new cheeses, won boatloads of awards, and did happy dances on stage. And because it’s almost time to say goodbye to 2015, I think we should pay tribute to the great cheeses that continue to put Wisconsin on the map. Here are my 10 favorites.

1. Cupola, Red Barn Family Farms

Exceptional cheese starts with exceptional milk. No one knows this better than the five dairy farmers who make up Red Barn Family Farms, founded by veterinarian Dr. Terry Homan and his spunky wife, Paula, back in the mid 2000s. Every dairy farmer adheres to the Red Barn Rules, resulting in exceptionally happy cows that give give exceptionally good milk. Cupola is the company’s signature cheese (their Heritage Weis 3-Year Cheddar is also one of my all-time favorites). Cupola is a white, hard, alpine style cheese crafted by U.S. Champion Cheesemaker Katie Hedrich Furhmann for Red Barn Family Farms. This is a limited-availability cheese so if you see it at your favorite specialty cheese counter, buy it immediately.

2.  Marieke Bacon Gouda, Holland’s Family Cheese

U.S. Champion Cheesemaker Marieke Penterman is known for making a variety of flavored goudas – mustard melange, cumin, foenegreek, insert another 10 flavors here, but she outdid herself this year with her new Bacon Gouda. Made on the Penterman family farm in Thorp, Wisconsin, this farmstead bacon gouda is chock full – and I mean freakin’ chock full – of bacon. As most of you know, I come from a long family line of folks who don’t eat a lot of cheese, and when I presented this cheese to my father on Christmas Eve (keep in mind he was recovering from the stomach flu), he took one bite and then kept eating. The whole thing. Because yeah, it’s that good.

3. Petit Nuage, Landmark Creamery

Newcomer Cheesemaker Anna Landmark and her business partner Anna Thomas Bates put Wisconsin on the map with this French-style button sheep’s milk cheese last year, and followed up this year with a shiny gold medal at the 2015 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest for their Petit Nuage. Available seasonally from February through October, each cheese is just one ounce in weight and less than two inches in diameter – a perfect single portion. I’ve seen the cheese paired with honey, ginger, a variety of preserves, and even black pepper, but seriously, it’s amazing alone and makes a lovely addition to a cheese board.

4.  Queso Oaxaca, Cesar’s Cheese

America’s best string cheese. Period. I could just stop here, but I have to gush a bit more because I find it amazing that cheesemaking duo Cesar and Heydi Luis still hand-stretch every single batch of this delightfully stringy, salty, addictive cheese. I compare this bright white cow’s milk cheese to a bag of potato chips. You can’t eat just one, and before you realize what’s happened, the entire package is gone. Popular with kids and adults alike, this is the one cheese that teenagers always, always expect me to have in my fridge, and when I don’t, inform me I have failed their cheese needs.

5. Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Uplands Cheese

Just when you think there’s nothing more that can be said about America’s most awarded artisan cheese, Cheesemaker Andy Hatch hits it out of the park with another stellar season of alpine-style greatness. Pleasant Ridge Reserve has been so good for so long, many of us take it for granted. But the current wheels for sale – aged about 15 months – are some of the best cheese I’ve ever tasted. If you haven’t had Pleasant Ridge in a while because you think it’s old news, it deserves another look. Simply put, this cheese never goes out of style.

6. Three-Year Cheddar, Hook’s Cheese

In a year when Tony and Julie Hook made national headlines with their 20-Year Cheddar (and then donated half of the proceeds – $40,000 to the Center for Dairy Research in Madison), their 3-Year Cheddar is still my favorite. When folks ask what cheese best describes Wisconsin, this is the cheese I put in their cart. Solid, sharp cheddar with a construction-orange hue that put Wisconsin cheddar on the map years ago. A true Wisconsin classic.

7. Dunbarton Blue, Roelli Cheese

Dunbarton is one of the few Wisconsin cheeses that can serve dual purposes on a cheese board: both Cheddar and Blue. That’s because this cellar-aged, natural-rinded cheddar sports a few deep veins of blue. It literally tastes like a cloth-bound cheddar until you hit a blue vein, and then the heavenly combination of rustic cheddar and blue mold meet for a new flavor all its own. Remember the commercials from the ’80s for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – where chocolate and peanut butter accidentally meet to make the perfect candy bar? The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board should reenact that commercial for this cheese, because newly minted Master Cheesemaker Chris Roelli continues to strike gold with cheddar + blue = Dunbarton Blue.

8. Extra Aged Goat, Sartori

Master Cheesemaker Pam Hodgson releases this limited-edition cheese twice a year, usually in summer and then in time for the year-end holidays. Hand-crafted in small batches, the 22-pound wheels are aged a minimum of 10-months. If you like Sartori’s BellaVitano Gold, you’ll like this cheese, as it reminds me of the Gold, but without the Gold’s sweet fruity finish, and instead a deeper, tangier bite. Bright white, crumbly yet still sliceable, Sartori’s Extra Aged Goat is a perennial award winner on the world stage and is the perfect goat’s milk cheese to serve your friends who are under the impression they don’t like goat’s milk.

9. Roth’s Private Reserve, Roth Cheese

I swear to God this cheese keeps getting better every year. Made in traditional copper vats and aged in the Roth Cellars in Monroe, Private Reserve is released on flavor, not age. It’s always aged a minimum of six months, but the wheels this year have to be closer to one year. This is literally the best Gruyere cheese you will ever eat that does not have Gruyere in its name.

10. Jeffs’ Select, Maple Leaf Cheese & Caves of Faribault

There’s no easier way to class up a cheese board than with this aged cow’s milk gouda made by Master Cheesemaker Jeff Wideman at Maple Leaf Cheese in Monroe, and then aged by Cheesemaker Jeff Jirik at the Caves of Faribault in Minnesota. With its annatto-rubbed pumpkin-colored rind, this striking cheese sports a dark golden hue with deep caramel notes and tyrosene crystals the size of walnuts. Okay, well perhaps I’m exaggerating about that last part, but this cheese is so good that I can’t exaggerate its taste enough. Buy. It. Now.

cheeseunderground cheese, cupola, paula homan, red barn family farms, Wisconsin cheese

Just Released: Red Barn Family Farms Cūpola

Three years after working to perfect the recipe for a new farmhouse cheese, Red Barn Family Farms in Wisconsin unveiled its new masterpiece, Cūpola this week.

Cūpola is a semi-hard cheese crafted in 11-pound wheels. The flavor is fruity and nutty with hints of caramel and toasted pineapple, while the texture is firm, yet supple enough to cut and eat with a cracker. Aged seven months, the first batch was pre-sold to select retailers, so it’s a bit hard to find. But another batch will be ready in late June, so chances are you’ll find it in more stores later this summer.

I pre-ordered two wheels back in April for Metcalfe’s Market-Hilldale in Madison, and then promptly forgot about it. So you can imagine how excited I was when the cheese magically appeared on my counter this week. After demoing it exactly twice, one wheel is already gone, so you can bet the farm I’ll be pre-ordering more wheels when they become available in June.

You may know Red Barn Family Farms for their Heritage Weis Cheddars, which have won multiple gold medals in national and international competitions, and which are made by cheesemaker Wayne Hintz at Springside Cheese in Oconto Falls, Wis.

For Cūpola, they partnered with U.S. Champion Cheesemaker Katie Fuhrmann at LaClare Farms, and worked with the folks at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research to perfect the recipe. As always, the cheese is crafted using milk exclusively from a group of eight small family farms, all certified by the American Humane Association and held accountable to the Red Barn Rules, stringent standards of animal health care and milk quality.

Company owners Paula and Terry Homan say the cheese will always be made in small batches, but consistent availability will likely happen by the holiday season.

As for the name, Paula and Terry coined it themselves. If you’re not familiar with the term, a cūpola is the small structure on top of traditional Wisconsin barns (which are usually red). The Homans describe a cūpola as a pinnacle. 

“We think this cheese is a pinnacle product for Red Barn,” Paula says. “We’ve got a world-class cheesemaker, top-quality milk, an American original, and a recipe perfected over three years with the help of cheese experts at the Center for Dairy Research.”

With its stellar pedigree and a flavor that delivers, Cūpola reflects everything Red Barn Family Farms stands for. Founded in 2008 with a mission to help preserve excellent small family farms in Wisconsin, the Homans (Terry is a licensed veterinarian) believe there is an intrinsic link between the health and care of dairy animals and the quality and flavor of the milk they produce

Over the years, the Homans have hand-selected small family farms that meet their Red Barn Rules. Each farm has an average herd size of 55 cows. “Cows are known by name and live longer lives than the industry average,” Paula says.

Happy cows + great milk + champion cheesemakers = awesome cheese. Congrats, Red Barn Family Farms!