Hooks Donate $40,000 from 20-Year Cheddar

During the next few days, you’re going to hear a lot about Hook’s 20-year Cheddar.

You’re going to hear about how it debuted at a fancy dinner at L’Etoile in downtown Madison, where three James Beard award-winning chefs prepared a seven-course dinner for 70 people.

You’re going to hear about how expensive it is – $209 a pound – and how there’s very little to be had, because most of it is pre-sold or already reserved.

You’re going to hear about how surprisingly creamy it is for a 20-year piece of Cheddar, and how the calcium lactate crystals crunch in your mouth like pop rocks. And guess what? All of these things are true.

What you’re likely to hear less about, is that tonight, Tony and Julie Hook donated $40,000 – half of all proceeds from their 20-year cheddar — to the new Babcock Hall/Center for Dairy Research Building Fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I said when we started this, that if I got a cheddar to make it to 20 years, I’d donate half the money to the Center for Dairy Research,” Tony said. “Well, I meant it. We’re proud of the work they’re doing and looking forward to a new facility.”

Ground is expected to be broken this summer on the new Babcock Hall, which will be a state-of-the-art facility at UW-Madison with 20,000 square feet dedicated to a new Center for Dairy Research and dairy processing space with specialty ripening rooms to manufacture and experiment with mold and surface ripened cheeses. The building is expected to be finished in 2018.

Many, many thanks to the Hook’s team for making such an amazing cheese and for their generosity to the the industry. And a big thank you to chefs Tory Miller, Justin Aprahamian and Justin Carlisle for a fabulous dinner with seven courses featuring Hook’s Cheddar from young to old.

First off, all three chefs each created a cheese curd dish: top right with Kimchi by Miller, bottom with pesto and pickled rhubarb by Aprahamian, and left with truffles, Buddha’s hand and koshu from Carlisle.

Next, Miller created a 2-year Hook’s Cheddar “nacho” with chorizo, picled jalapeno and cilantro.

The first official course (the previous were bonus starter courses) was charred asparagus, rhubarb-hickory nut salumera and shaved 5-year Hook’s Cheddar from Miller.

Second course was one of my top 10 favorite dishes ever: Hook’s 10-Year Cheddar soup, with pepper, beer vinegar, popcorn wafers and chives by Carlisle.

Third course: 15-year Hook’s Cheddar with roasted veal breast, apricot and turnip by Aprahamian. One of our table mates had to stop mid-chew because he was “having a moment” and never wanted this dish to end.

Cheese course: Hook’s 20-year Cheddar. The dining room applauded after the first taste (and Wisconsin Foodie recorded our reactions).

Dessert: curd cheesecake with rhubarb, meringue, basil and delicious mystery pink ice by Carlisle.

Many, many thanks to all three chefs, L’Etoile, the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board and the Hook’s Cheese team for making tonight’s dinner happen. Wisconsin salutes you!

Got Cheese History? 100 Cheese Factories Now Documented

Newcomer cheesemaker Anna Landmark shares cheese with veteran
cheesemaker Willi Lehner, whose father emigrated from Switzerland
and managed Rysers Cheese Factory in Mt. Horeb for 21 years.

More than 100 cheese factories in southwestern Dane County are now mapped and remembered with extensive information and photos online, thanks to the Mount Horeb Area Historical Society.

The Society unveiled the new cheese factory website on Sunday in downtown Mt. Horeb on the site of the former Henze cheese warehouse, now Zalucha Studios. Next door is the former Rysers Cheese Factory, today home to the Grumpy Troll Brew Pub, where Bleu Mont cheesemaker Willi Lehner’s father – also Willi Lehner – was the managing cheesemaker for 21 years. It seems downtown Mt. Horeb, similar to much of rural Wisconsin, was once a cheese mecca.

The website is extensive, noting the years each factory operated, the types of cheese crafted, each cheesemaker’s name and the years they made cheese at the facility, as well as extensive notes on what was happening throughout the years at each location. It’s a literal treasure trove of cheese history.

So what makes someone want to create a website detailing all the cheese factories that were once in their area? Well, sometimes to understand the present, it’s helpful to understand the past. So this past winter, Society volunteers created database inventories of the area’s schools, cheese factories, churches and cemeteries.

“We found a map where it was just black with dots,” archivist Shan Thomas said of an early 20th century map that located factories in the areas surrounding Mount Horeb. “They were everywhere.”

The web resource actually began with the Society mapping schools in the area. Volunteers identified 52 – yes, 52 – schools in the area that now makes up just the Mount Horeb Area School District. Amazingly enough, 40 of them still stand, and were photographed for the project.

The Society’s schoolhouse project was the subject of an article in the Wisconsin State Journal last year, and the article piqued the interest of Doug Norgord,  a Mount Horeb resident who owns a mapping solutions company. Norgord contacted the Society and offered his services for free.  Through the technology of his company, Geographic Techniques LLC, the project took on further life.

Norgord was part of a perfect storm of people, all Mount Horeb area residents, qualified to pull off this project: Thomas, a former archivist at Luther College; former Mount Horeb school administrator and principal John Pare; computer programmer Merel Black; and Brynn Bruijn, an international photographer whose work has appeared in books and in magazines such as National Geographic and Town and Country. The volunteers also worked with the Mount Horeb Landmarks Foundation and the historical societies of Blue Mounds and Perry township.

Pare and Bruijn scouted the countryside for former schools and sought permission from homeowners who now live on those properties to photograph and document the properties. Once the volunteers got going, they saw a pattern – clustered with the schools were cheese factories, churches and cemeteries. Ask anyone who has grown up in a small town in Wisconsin, and they’ll tell you the most prominent features are the school, the bar, the cemetary, and the old cheese factory on the edge of town now turned into a house. In fact, most former cheese and butter making facilities have today become private residences and are easy to spot because of their elongated style of architecture.

“What we notice is that these little areas were communities,” Black said. “They rode on horseback, they’d drop the milk off and drop the kids off at school.”

Cheese makers at the Mount Horeb Creamery and Cheese Company, taken
on Sept. 15, 1939. The creamery building now houses the Grumpy Troll Brew
Pub. Photo courtesy of the Mt. Horeb Historical Society.

On hand Sunday to celebrate the revival of cheese factory history were several area cheesemakers, including Willi Lehner, who said he often helped his dad clean at the Rysers Cheese Factory in downtown Mt. Horeb. “My dad would often remind me that for the first two years of his apprenticeship in Switzerland, all he did was clean. He didn’t get to actually make cheese until year three.”

Also in the crowd was southwestern Wisconsin native Diana Kalscheur Murphy of Dreamfarm, who now makes amazing goat’s milk cheeses on her farm near Cross Plains, Anna Landmark of Landmark Creamery in Albany, who is making sheep, cow and mixed milk cheeses at both Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain and Clock Shadow Creamery in Milwaukee, and Tony Hook of Hook’s Cheese in Mineral Point, home to world champion cheeses including an array of aged cheddars and blues. In fact, Hook’s brother, Jerry, and sister, Julie, both cheesemakers at Hook’s, are actually alumni of Mount Horeb High School and Jerry still lives in Mount Horeb. Yes, it is a small world.

Each of the cheesemakers spoke for a few minutes, talking about their operations and remembering their family histories. A crowd of about 75 people noshed on local cheese and drank local beer, reminiscing of all cheesy things past and present.

One cheese not represented at the gathering was the stinky granddaddy of them all. The crowd got a chuckle when one attendee asked Tony Hook his favorite cheese. “The answer might surprise you,” Hook said. “It’s Limburger, made today at only one plant in the nation – Chalet Cheese Cooperative in Monroe.” Just goes to show you that no matter how many things change, one of the oldest cheeses in Wisconsin is still front and center.

The Evolution of Wisconsin Cheddar

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If the state of Wisconsin were to have one signature identifying symbol, it would likely be a chunk of cheddar. Crafted in blocks, barrels and wheels, and then cut, wrapped and stamped, millions of pounds of construction-orange Wisconsin cheddar are sold every year to American consumers.

Most Wisconsin cheddar gets shipped to the coasts for city folk to enjoy, but thousands of pounds are still bought by Midwest locals at roadside cheese shops and cheese factories, with many a Wisconsin farm family still putting the requisite piece of sliced cheddar on apple pie at Sunday dinner.

In a quest to learn more about how the cheddar industry evolved in Wisconsin, I’ve been doing a little research. Did you know that cheddar was just about the only cheese produced in the entire United States prior to 1850? By 1880, in a foreshadowing of our future dairy dominance, Wisconsin had taken the lead in producing more cheddar than any other state in the nation. And by 1929, back when there were 2,499 cheese factories and creameries, each supplied by a dozen or so farmers, with each farmer milking about a dozen cows, nearly all of those cheese factories made cheddar.*

That’s right, baby. Cheddar was king.
While it continued its dominance in driving the state dairy economic engine, by the late 1950s, however, the state of cheddar had changed. Almost every cheese factory now sold their cheddar to big distribution companies such as Kraft, Borden or Armour, marking the beginning of an era when distributors, not cheesemakers, set the price for their product. To quote Wisconsin cheesemaker Sam Cook in 1957, (you may recognize Sam Cook’s name, as he’s the father of Sid Cook who today owns Carr Valley Cheese): “You took what they gave you. We was lucky to sell what we had.”**
The relationship between big distributors and cheesemakers changed the face of cheddar.  Back in the 1930s and 40s, cheesemakers had taken pride in their cheddar being different or “better” than the cheese factory 4 miles down the road. Those were the days when each factory had its own self-propagating cheese culture and resident molds in its walls and aging planks. Those were the days when cheddar had what you might call “character”.
Now, with the coming of the big distribution companies, cheddar instead became a commodity. The new buzzwords became: “consistency” and “long shelf life” and “mild flavor.” These were the traits that put Wisconsin cheddar on the map and made it such a huge success in national markets. As author Ed Janus puts it: “This was the great achievement of the Age of Cheddar.”***
Success is all well and good, but it comes at a price. With Kraft, Borden and Armour demanding consistency, many small factories went out of business, being either unable or unwilling to modernize. Many of the old cheesemakers, born of the craftsmen era, didn’t know scientific cheesemaking. The way they determined when the curd was ready to mill wasn’t to check the ph of the whey; it was to put a hot iron to the curd mass, and when it strung out a certain distance, the cheesemaker knew it was ready for the next step.
By the 1980s, Wisconsin had lost many of its smaller cheese factories in the name of progress. Equipment was sold and doors were shut. Some were turned into machine sheds or homes. Most were left to just fall down. And with the loss of the smaller plants, Wisconsin began to lose the character of its cheddar. The cheddar from one factory now tasted much like the cheddar from the factory down the road. In essence, Wisconsin’s cheddar industry traded “character” in exchange for “consistency.”
Remaining cheddar plants got bigger and more efficient. The mass market clamored for lower prices. Now cheesemakers had to make more and more cheese just to continue to make a living. Everything became based on volume. Many a cheesemaker who got out of the business in the 1990s will tell you that by the end, they were making only a profit of one penny per pound of cheese sold. That’s not enough to live on, much less to send your kids to college or re-invest in your business.

By 2000, however, a handful of cheesemakers were getting off the commodity cheddar wagon and changing to specialty and artisan production. Cheesemakers such as Sid Cook in LaValle and Tony and Julie Hook in Mineral Point started making small batch cheddar and setting it aside to age. This was cheddar that didn’t get sold to Kraft for a penny on the pound. This was cheddar that the cheesemaker could put his own label on, and set his or her own price.

Now the old time cheesemakers will tell you that aging cheddar isn’t anything new. They all did it, even back in the day. It was just called Cheesemaker’s Cheddar. It was the cheese hidden in the cellar that each cheesemaker’s family ate at night with dinner. They’d sell a block or two on occasion to people who today I suppose we’d call “foodies” who would stop by a cheddar factory and say, “What’s the oldest cheddar you’ve got? Will you sell me some?”**** So even back then, aging cheddar was not a new concept. What was a new concept was selling it to the public at a price the cheesemaker set.
The real key, however, to the renaissance of Wisconsin cheddar, was chefs. Cheesemaker Sid Cook says that by the mid 1990s, chefs started seeking him out. They would buy cheese and take it back to their restaurants, cook with it, and diners loved it. So the chefs would order more. Diners would ask where the cheese came from, and then visit the factory to watch cheese being made, usually – if Sid had anything to do with it – buying some on the way out.

“There’s a certain element with cheese that almost is addictive,” Sid says. “You can tell when people are sampling. They’ll take one. And it will be a little while. Then their hand just goes out. It’s just automatic. They can’t help it. They don’t think about it … That’s how you know it’s really good. What we really like to do is get their hand past their hip so they get their wallet out.”*****

Today, Wisconsin cheesemakers still make plenty of commodity cheddar, and cheddar is still sold on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the current price is $1.62/pound). But most often, those blocks and barrels are serving as cash flow and are the backbone of a cheesemaking operation. Those same cheesemakers today are selling more specialty cheddar under their own brand, and using the proceeds to develop new artisan cheeses such as American Originals. This turnaround in the process – the cheesemaker setting the price – is what is largely responsible for the current artisan cheese renaissance we’re currently experiencing in Wisconsin.

Interested in trying a good aged Wisconsin cheddar? Here are some of my favorites:

  • Four-Year Cheddar by Carr Valley Cheese, LaValle, Wis.
  • Six-Year Cheddar by Widmer’s Cheese Cellars, Theresa, Wis.
  • Ten-Year Cheddar by Hook’s Cheese, Mineral Point, Wis.

Interested in a good specialty cheddar? Then try:

  • Peppercorn Cheddar, Henning’s Cheese, Kiel
  • English Hollow Cheddar, Maple Leaf Cheese, Monroe
  • Heritage Weis Old-World Style White Cheddar, Red Barn Family Farms, Appleton

And if you’re looking for some amazing bandaged cheddar made by Wisconsin artisan cheesemakers, I’d recommend:

  • Bandaged Cheddar, Bleu Mont Dairy, Blue Mounds
  • Kinsley, Roelli Cheese, Shullsburg
  • Eagle Cave Reserve, Meister Cheese, Muscoda

*Facts and figures courtesy of Harva Hachten and Terese Allen’s book: The Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State, 2009.
**Sam Cook quote courtesy of interview in the book Creating Dairyland: How caring for cows saved our soil, created our landscape, brought prosperity to our state, and still shapes our way of life in Wisconsin by Ed Janus, 2011.
***Creating Dairyland: How caring for cows saved our soil, created our landscape, brought prosperity to our state, and still shapes our way of life in Wisconsin by Ed Janus, 2011.  Page 100.
****Creating Dairyland: How caring for cows saved our soil, created our landscape, brought prosperity to our state, and still shapes our way of life in Wisconsin by Ed Janus, 2011.  Page 103.
*****Creating Dairyland: How caring for cows saved our soil, created our landscape, brought prosperity to our state, and still shapes our way of life in Wisconsin by Ed Janus, 2011.  Page 104.