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Cheesemaker for a Day at Roelli Cheese

Ever wonder how heavy a slab of cheddar curd is? Thanks to Cheesemaker Chris Roelli, 15 more people now understand the art, science and muscles required to make a vat of Cheddar.

On Saturday, Chris and his crew at Roelli Cheese in Shullsburg were kind enough to host 15 members of Wisconsin Cheese Originals for a rare Cheesemaker for a Day event. We spent the morning helping Chris make a vat of Cheddar, and then, after lunch in the upstairs former cheesemaker living quarters, had an amazing tasting of six of Chris’ current and brand new cheeses, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First, here’s what our day looked like:

1. Members arrived just in time to see Chris pour in the annatto to make sure our curds were bright Wisconsin orange.

2. A little more heating, rennet added, more heating, time to set, and it was time to check and cut the curd. We learned Chris likes a “clean cut” — meaning when he places the knife in the curd mass, it should break quickly and cleanly – no globs allowed.

3. While the curd healed, and then stirred, Chris gave members the backstory of how he became a fourth generation Wisconsin cheesemaker. It all started with his great grandfather, who had made cheese in both France and Switzerland in the early 1900s. He was looking to make a better living for his family making cheese, and had decided to either emigrate to Russia or the United States. When his cousin, who had already arrived in Russia, sent him a letter saying if he was coming to join him, he should bring a gun, Chris’ great grandfather chose to sail to the United States instead. And the rest, as they say, is history.

4. Finally, it was time to drain the whey from the curd! As we found out, cheesemaking is a lot of hurrying up and waiting. And while you’re waiting, you clean. And then clean some more. But since Chris was nice, he didn’t make us do the dishes – his helper Mark did all the work. We just got to do the fun stuff.

5. After raking the curd to one end of the vat to allow the whey to drain off, the “cheddaring” process started in earnest. Chris cut the mass in to half, dividing it into two loaves, separated them further, and then started stacking slabs to push the whey out. The slabs were then cut again, and stacked another four or five times. On the fourth time, we all got a turn at “cheddaring”. This is the Old World style of making Cheddar cheese and Chris makes it this way every day.

6. Then it was time to mill the curd. Chris uses a milling machine dating back to the 1950s. We stood back and let Chris and Mark handle the milling, as its knives are sharp enough to take a finger with it.

7. Last steps: wash the curd, stir and then salt!

8. It was then time to eat warm, squeaky and fresh curds right out of the vat.

After our curd snack, we helped Chris put curd into bandaged cheddar forms and put them in the press.

Then it was time to clean up, head upstairs for lunch, as the best part was about to be revealed. Chris cut up six cheeses for us, three of which are on the market, one that will hit the market in another month, and another two still under development that will likely be ready in time for the holidays. Is this, or is this not, an amazing table of fine-looking cheeses????

Roelli Cheese fans will recognize the front left square red cheese — that’s Red Rock, a creamy cheddar blue that’s taking specialty cheese shops by storm. And in the back, third from right is his Gravity Hill with Sea Salt and next to it, the flagship Dunbarton Blue, both currently on the market. The cheese at far right is a brand new creation hitting the market next month that is a goat/cow mix and partnership with LaClare Farms. The cheese to the far left was our absolute favorite and will be hitting the stores in a few months. It’s called Marigold, and this is a cheese to watch my friends. Front right is Chris’ new Bandaged Cheddar, which will also be on sale around the holidays. Yum.

Many, many thanks to Chris Roelli and his crew for putting up with an extra 15 people in his make room on a Saturday. We adore you!

All photos copyright Uriah Carpenter, 2012.

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Growing Cheesemakers

My family has the darnedest time figuring out what exactly it is I do for a living.

I grew up in a small town, moved away after college, and don’t get home very often. So on the rare occasions I go back for weddings or funerals, I often stand to the side and amusingly watch my father, a retired farmer, get asked by former neighbors and old friends what his two daughters grew up to be.

My sister has it easy. “Well the oldest one’s a lawyer,” Dad will say with a big grin. And then he’ll go on to talk about how she owns her own law firm in Milwaukee and how she helps people who’ve been discriminated against at their jobs. He might even describe her latest case, or talk about a big company she just sued. My sister is a very good attorney.

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” the little grayed hair ladies will say, bobbing their heads and clucking approvingly. And then, inevitably, the question will come: “And what about your youngest – what does she do?”

And that’s when the eyebrows furrow, the eyes squint, and the look of confusion starts.

A slow inhale. A slower exhale.

“Well …. she used to be a newspaper reporter. She was a real good reporter,” he’ll say. “She won lots of awards.” Pause. Longer Pause. “But now she works with cheese. I think she writes about cheese. I know she does some real nice events in Madison.” And then he’ll frantically search around the room to find me smiling at him, wave me over, and have me explain what exactly it is that I do.

But therein lies the problem. Hell, even I have a hard time explaining what it is I do for a living.

I’m a writer. I’m a storyteller. I’m also an event organizer. I like to write about cheese. I like to talk about cheese. I like to organize events around cheese. And, of course, I eat a lot of cheese.

Mostly, though, I like to make stuff happen and then stand in a corner and watch it unfold.

That’s what happened today when I wrote a little press release about a young woman who’s just starting out in the cheese world. I don’t think she even has any idea of what’s in store for her. But I can see it. Her name is Anna Landmark. Today, she’s a policy research director for a Wisconsin non-profit organization, who with her husband, owns and runs a small-scale sustainable farm in Albany, Wis.

Five years from now, she’ll be an award-winning cheesemaker crafting original sheep’s milk cheeses and clearing a broader path for Wisconsin artisan cheese. She’s the kind of gal who’s going to put her own mark on the dairy industry, and she’s going to do it in style.

You see, Anna was selected from a wide field of applicants for a $2,500 scholarship from Wisconsin Cheese Originals, an organization I started in 2009 to help consumers connect with Wisconsin cheesemakers. She is mid-way through the courses required for the cheesemakers license and is working to secure an apprenticeship this fall.

As you know, Wisconsin is the only state in the nation that requires its cheesemakers to be licensed, an 18-month process that involves attendance at five university courses, 240 hours of apprenticeship under a licensed cheesemaker, and a written exam at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture.

While big and even medium-sized cheese companies can afford to put beginning cheesemakers through the licensing process, smaller, artisan companies, and especially those just starting out, can find the process daunting and sometimes, insurmountable. That’s why I started the scholarship in 2010 – to create a platform for beginning cheesemakers whom I am confident will go on to do great things if they can just get past the hurdle of getting their license. Past scholarship recipients include Katie Hedrich, a goat cheesemaker in Chilton, Wis., who went on to be the first and youngest woman goat’s milk cheesemaker to be named a U.S. Champion; and Rose Boero, a goat and cow’s milk cheesemaker in Custer, Wis., who will complete her cheesemaker’s license this spring.

While all of this year’s scholarship applicants were more than well-qualified, Anna’s application stood out because it told a story. And perhaps because I myself am a storyteller, her story spoke to me.

Anna’s story begins at her grandparents’ dairy farm in Mount Horeb, Wis., where a big block of Swiss cheese was brought out every morning for breakfast and then left on the table under a glass dome until after supper. Her story continues through the terrible milk prices of the 1980s, when she watched her grandfather become discouraged, eventually retire, and then discourage his grandchildren from ever getting into farming. Her story blossoms with the discovery that she loves to cook, and how that love led to making cheese in her kitchen (her first batch of mozzarella was so terrible she didn’t attempt to make cheese again for two years). And it ends with the story of buying a small property outside Albany in 2009 with her husband, where a new story is now starting: one of buying a gentle, stubborn, noisy Milking Shorthorn named Freckles who produced so much milk that Anna started making cheese just to use it all up. Then came along two Alpine dairy goats, and she made goat’s milk cheeses. Then heritage breed sheep, and finally sheep’s milk cheeses, where she found her true passion: to become a sheep’s milk cheesemaker.

After she uses the scholarship money to earn her cheesemaker’s license, Anna plans to craft fresh sheep’s milk cheeses, and differentiate them from her cheesemaking idol Brenda Jensen’s cheeses, by draining the curd for a longer period of time and perhaps rolling the cheese in herbs and distributing it in various shapes. She’s also going to make aged sheep’s milk cheeses, including thistle-rennet cheeses, which will require her to develop her own rennet from thistle flowers. This type of cheese is currently only available via import from Portugal and Spain.

“Wisconsin has such a robust cheese industry and I live in the heart of it,” Landmark said in her scholarship application. “However, the majority of sheep milk cheeses consumed in the United States is still imported. I would like to grow this emerging industry and help provide a stable market for sheep dairies in my region.”

I have no doubt she’ll accomplish all that and much more. Anna will be a cheesemaker, and she’ll be a good one. She says her grandfather is now enjoying watching her entry/return into the dairy and cheese world, but is still skeptical anyone on a small scale can really make a living doing it.

Good cheesemakers can make a living doing it. And Anna will be good cheesemaker. I’m looking forward to watching her grow and discover all the things of which she’s capable, all of the things I see in her when she talks about making cheese.

So perhaps that’s one way I can explain to folks what it is that I do: I help grow cheesemakers. But then again, that’s not going to be an easy career for my father to explain to the neighbors either. So I guess I’ll stick with being a writer who has a sister who is a good attorney. That’s good enough for me.

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Last Look: Food in France

If every day was a 31-hour day like yesterday, I’d sure get a lot more done. You’ve got to love leaving Paris at 12:15 p.m. and arriving in Chicago after a nine-hour flight, only to have it still be 2:15 p.m. the same day. That’s because our group of 20 Wisconsin Cheese Originals members flew home from spending 10 days in France where we toured dairy farms, cheese factories, aging caves and cheese shops in Paris, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Roqeufort, Dijon and Beaune.

But France isn’t all about cheese. It’s about food, too. So here’s one last look back at some of the foods we enjoyed while across the pond.

Butter: for sale in every specialty cheese shop just like this one. My favorite was the Beurre de Baratte, an AOC cow’s milk butter.

Eggs: delivered daily to specialty shops, eggs sit out in the open, unrefrigerated, where daily shoppers pick up what they need to cook for the next day or two.

Coffee: usually offered with warm milk and served with a cube of sugar. Hello, cafe au lait.

Pastries: looking back at all the photos my hubby took on this trip, it’s hard to find an intact pastry. That’s because I had usually eaten most of it before he could get a shot. One of my favorites: the Napolean. The French refer to it as  mille-feuilles, or thousand leaves. The perfect combination of snowy whipped cream, eggy custard and crisp puff pastry.

Ice Cream: the French eat a lot of La Glace: an Italian-style gelato, that history says was introduced in France by Catherine de Medici in the late 16th century, when she married into the French royal family.

Snails: offered as a first course in nearly every nice French restaurant, I found they were best when drowned in garlic and butter. If you can get past the fact that you’re chewing a snail, they’re actually pretty tasty little buggers.

Crepes: offered savory or sweet, crepes are served everywhere, but nobody does them like restaurants in Paris. This one boasted the traditional combo of nutella, bananas and whipped cream. Who needs dessert when you can order this as your entree?

Seafood: the open air seafood markets in Paris are amazing. Most sell every kind of seafood imaginable, on ice.

Pork: the French like their meats roasted. This little piggy never made it home.

Chicken: roasted and offered at open air farmers markets in every city in France.

My first Boeuf Bourguigon was the third course in an amazing regional dinner at Au Clos Napoleon in the tiny village of Fixin, France. Eaten after scooping the beef, juice and onions and pouring over freshly made pasta. Heaven.

Quite possibly the best plate of food I’ve ever had: Toasted bread with poppy seeds and poached eggs in sauce made with Epoisses. The first course at Au Clos Napoleon in Fixin, France.

Mustard: the guys on the trip loved the mustard shops in Dijon, where mustard magically flows from spigots.

The wine: thousands of wines to choose from, they all start with a grape. Harvest was nearly completed by the time we arrived, but we gladly enjoyed the fruits of their harvest.

And finally, the cheese: you’ve read many a post on the cheeses of France, but here’s a last look at one of my favorites: Epoisses.

Dining outside: the weather was amazing while we were in France: 10 days of sunshine with temperatures in the 70s and 80s. This is our group enjoying our favorite appertif: Kir, in the vineyards of the Burgundy region.

Parting shot: my family joined me on this tour. Thank you to Uriah for all the amazing photos and to Avery for all of her help. On to Italy in 2013!

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On Location: Sainte Maure de Touraine

Today, on day 4 of the 10-day Wisconsin Cheese Originals’ Grand Cheese Tour of France, we toured the largest castle in the Loire Valley, learned how to make Sainte Maure de Touraine, nearly got crushed by a hay loader, and sang along to French show tunes in a tiny restaurant in downtown Tours.
You know, just the usual day in the countryside of France.
After an amazing morning tour of the Chateau de Chambord, its double-helix five-story central staircase, 282 fireplaces and 426 rooms, our Wisconsin cheese bus wound its way to the La Ferme du Bois-Rond farmstead goat dairy in Pussigny, France, where the husband-wife team of Dominique and Marie-Therese Guillet provided 20 members of Wisconsin Cheese Originals with a remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime personal experience of the making of Sainte Maure de Touraine.
Sainte Maure de Touraine is an AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controlee) designated cheese, made only in the Loire Valley, about 30 miles south of Tours, in the central region of France. It gained AOC status in 1990, and today about 240 goat dairies in the region are authorized to make this raw-milk, whole goat’s milk, soft-ripened beauty.
Dominique showed us the farm, while Marie-Therese provided an amazing tour and cheesemaking demonstration in the farmstead creamery. But like any farmstead cheese, the story starts with the milk. And this is a story best told in pictures. So here we go.
A herd of 340 dairy goats, made up of eight different breeds – Poitevine, British, Toggenburg, Alpine, Nubian, Boer, Saanen and La Mancha, are milked twice a day at the farm. Quick science lesson: in order to give milk, goats must have babies. In order to have babies, goats must be bred. With a five-month gestation period, and a due-date of February 15, guess what time we arrived at the farm? That’s right, breeding season. 
For three weeks every year, Dominique puts a group of bucks (male goats) in with the does (female goats). When we visited, the bucks were only on day 4 of their 21-day breeding season and already looked tired. Dominique said some of the bucks had already lost 20 pounds due to “being so busy,” which our translator had trouble saying with a straight face.
To give a good amount of milk, goats need to eat well. Dominique feeds his goats a mixture of grains and hay everyday, and the goats get two hours on fresh pasture each morning. He couldn’t wait to show us his barn’s super-nifty hay-loading/unloading roller-coaster machine, made by French manufacturer Griffe a Foin. After a demonstration of its cab that runs on rails attached to the barn ceiling, with attached giant hay-scooping hook that he arced out above us, threatening to scoop us all up (with a smile of course), we decided we all wanted one, whether we needed it or not. It’s amazing technology that I have not seen in the U.S.
When he’s not playing with his super cool hay unloader, Dominique milks the goats twice a day. The evening milk is combined with fresh, warm morning milk, and placed into 58-gallon mini vat tubs in the farm cheesrie where it is warmed to 68 degrees F. Rennet is added and the milk is then left to coagulate for 24 hours.
The next step is hand-ladling the curd into specially curved forms, where it drains naturally. 
After it is set, the new cheese is removed from the form, and a rye straw that is marked with the AOC seal and a number indicating the producer is inserted into the middle of the cheese log. This helps the log keep its shape for the next step of the process.
Once the straw is in, the log now has enough stability to be rolled in a mixture of salt and charcoal ash, which gives it its unique grayish/blue color and contributes to its taste.
The cheese is then allowed to dry overnight before being placed in an aging room, where it is hand-turned daily for a minium of 10 days, as outlined by AOC regulations. Marie-Therese actually ages her St. Maure de Touraine for 12 days. Once a week, she ships wooden boxes, each holding 12 precious logs, out to a host of retail shops, who then have the option of aging it longer or selling it immediately. Marie-Therese told us she believes the peak time for her cheese to be eaten is at 45 days.
Keep in mind that this is a raw-milk cheese, and you’ll understand why we don’t see this cheese very often in the U.S., as American laws dictate a raw-milk cheese must be aged at least 60 days before being sold to consumers. 
After the farm and creamery tour, Marie-Therese and Dominique set up a wonderful tasting session for us, where we got to taste both fresh and aged Sainte Maure de Touraine. What a treat! Thank you so much to the Guillets for opening their farmstead dairy to a cheese geek group from Wisconsin. We appreciate you!

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On Location: Paris, France

It started with a bucket list, made long ago: visit Paris and taste a raw milk Camembert before age 40.

Check.

This week, five months before my 40th birthday, I’m in Paris with 20 members of Wisconsin Cheese Originals, visiting cheese shops, tasting endless rows of bloomy rind cheeses and touring the City of Lights. Tomorrow morning we leave for Loir-et Cher to tour Chateau de Chambord and to taste goat cheese in Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine. More about that later in the week – first I have to tell you about the cheese we discovered in Paris.

Our trip started Thursday night with a visit to Sacre-Coeur Church (I can also check singing nuns off the list), a tour of the artist community in Montmarte, the Bohemian heart of Paris, and a four-course welcome dinner at  La Bonne Franquette.

Several bottles of wine, an appetizer of snails in garlic and butter sauce, onion soup, duck in orange sauce and a healthy serving of chocolate mousse later, we were a very happy bunch. There’s nothing like a stomach full of French food to help you catch up on sleep after a way-too-long overnight flight from the U.S. to France.

Friday was cheese shop day. We started with a visit to the fabulous indoor/outdoor Marche d’Aligre, a farmer’s market on steroids. There, we caught up with Gigi Cazaux, who is now living in Paris, and who, in May, published a 135-page report titled: “Application of the Concept of Terroir in the American Context: Taste of Place and Wisconsin Unpasteurized Milk Cheeses.” Gigi joined our group for the next couple of days, helping us with rudimentary functions such as ordering cafe au lait in corner bistros and navigating the interesting French world of same-sex restrooms. Thank, you Gigi!

Then it was off for two private tours of cheese shops. First, we visited Androuet, a shop with 250 cheeses, 85 percent of them being raw milk (hello to my first raw-milk Camembert!). Shop manager Jean Yves was amazingly gracious, offering us a tasting of five different French cheeses, ranging from sheep to cow to goat to raw to pasteurized.

The second stop was at Fromagerie Dubois & Fils, where the fabulous owner herself, Martine Dubois, welcomed us with a private tour and tasting of three different French cheeses. Madame Dubois has run her cheese shop for more than 40 years and carries 300 different cheeses between the retail space and her affinage caves. She specializes in carrying different cheeses cheeses from EVERY region in France. I discovered cheeses here that I never even knew existed.

As if that weren’t enough, Madame Martine then called her affineur, Hubert Quinque, who gave us each a tour of the shop’s underground caves: a catacomb of three different spaces that have aged cheeses for the last 200 years. Hubert showed us his meticulous record-keeping system, which consisted of six notebooks full of labels and hand-written notes with information on when/where and from whom each and every round of cheese had been purchased. Cheesemaker Brenda Jensen of Hidden Springs Creamery, was jealous of Hubert’s cave, admiring the stone walls, straw mats and wooden shelves. I could see her mind already thinking of new cheeses to make once she gets back to Wisconsin!

When we weren’t eating cheese, we were touring and shopping our way through Paris, with stops at the Eiffel Tower, a boat ride on the Bateaux Mouches on the Seine, and an amazing guided tour of Notre Dame Cathedral. Hearing the bells ring in Notre Dame wasn’t even on my bucket list, but I checked it off anyway. Paris is a magical place and deserves all the credit it gets. Looking forward to six more days of France and eating cheese in Tours, Bordeaux, Montpellier and Dijon. I will keep you posted!