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World Cheese Contest

The Monona Terrace is a regular who’s who of international and national cheese superstars this week, as the 2010 World Championship Cheese Contest kicks off today in Madison.


Walking around this judging floor is like strolling the red carpet at a Hollywood awards show (well, if cheesemakers were as celebrated as movie stars, that is – and you all know it’s my life mission to make that happen). Within the span of 100 yards, I chatted with a dozen judges from 15 countries and six continents, along with some of the most well-known cheesemakers and industry legends from across the nation.

(This seems like a good place to name drop – so here you go: we’ve got David Lockwood, of Neal’s Yard Dairy paired with Neville McNaughton, international cheesemaker extraordinaire, judging the smear cheese category (there are 74 cheeses in this class, and David & Neville have got to taste them all – yikes), while at the next table is Cathy Strange, global cheese buyer for Whole Foods assessing wheel after wheel of Brie, while Kate Arding of Culture Magazine is sniffing and spitting semi-soft sheep’s milk cheeses. Down the way, Max McCalman, Dean of Curriculum at Artisanal Premium Cheese Center, is intently squishing flavored soft cheeses, while Shigenobu Murayama, School Master at the Cheese & Wine Academy in Tokyo, is judging … wait, I can’t tell what he’s judging — too many people in the way.)

All the judges are here to sniff, taste and sadly, spit out (it’s a judging technique) more than 2,300 cheeses and butters from 20 countries, coming from as far away as Cypress, Argentina, Greece and Japan. This year’s contest is the largest cheese contest ever held in the world – entries were up almost 20 percent from last year — and are all competing for eternal glory as the world’s big cheese.

Each of the judges will taste about 150 entries over the course of two days, with all judges then tasting the 77 gold medalists in Thursday’s final round to pick one World Champion. Yes, out 50,000 pounds of cheese, one cheese will be named the ultimate winner. Bring it on!
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Buttermaker License

With Wisconsin facing a shortage of licensed buttermakers (yes, you really do need a license to make/sell butter in this state), several industry groups are finally working to update the rules related to obtaining a buttermaker’s license in America’s Dairyland.

The most exciting news is that, as part of this process, the Center for Dairy Research is offering a new Buttermakers Short Course on Sept 14-16 in Madison. This year, the course is limited to 25 Wisconsin residents and will cover the production of quality butter with an emphasis on flavor, composition and shelf life. Cost is $350. To register, call 608-263-1672, and make it snappy, because this class will sell out soon.

The new Buttermakers Short Course reflects an alternate rule, currently being drafted by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, with input from Wisconsin’s dairy industry, including artisan and farmstead buttermakers.

In January, the state Agriculture Board unanimously approved a scope statement to begin the process of altering the rules to earn a license. Under current law, anyone applying for a buttermaker’s license must pass an exam and match at least one other qualification, including: 1) working under a licensed buttermaker for at least 24 months, 2) working under a licensed buttermaker for 18 months and have completed a training course approved by the agriculture department, or 3) possess a four-year degree in food science, and have worked under a licensed buttermaker at least 12 months.

With only 43 licensed buttermakers left in the state, I would argue that if the rule is not updated, Wisconsin’s butter industry is at risk of not being able to take advantage of new market opportunities, including meeting a growing demand for farmstead and artisan butters.

In good news, it is expected that the new rule will offer another option in obtaining a buttermaker’s license that will include attending the Center for Dairy Research’s Buttermakers Short Course, apprenticing for a certain number of (much more limited) hours under a licensed buttermaker, and then passing a state exam.

The new licensing rules are expected to be finalized by September. Stay tuned for additional updates.
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Driving Tractor

Every once in awhile I rediscover a piece of writing I did in an earlier life. This one appeared in The Country Today back in July, 2003, when I was working there as a regional editor. It’s an oldy, but a goody. Hope you enjoy.


Everything I need to know, I learned driving tractor

You know the book, “All I Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten?” It argues the basics you learn in kindergarten lead you through life. I’ve often thought that book must have been written by someone who grew up in town, particularly illustrated by the line that says: “Take a nap every afternoon.”

I agree that kindergarten is important. But I would like to argue – that as a former farm kid – all I really needed to know, I learned driving a tractor.

For example:

1. Follow your nose. This was my all-time favorite direction given to me from my father, stated matter-of-factly whenever he set me up on a tractor to “teach” me a new task, whether it was raking hay for the first time, driving baler my first day or discing ahead of the corn planter on a windy spring morning.

After giving me the obligatory two-minute overview of the levers I needed to use and the general direction I should be headed, he would follow with, “Follow your nose, kid.” That was it. No other words of wisdom, no useful bits of advice about how to disc end rows correctly, no direction as to how to rake the hayfield corners perfectly.

As a kid, I really hated that expression, especially when halfway through the task, Dad would jump off his tractor, come racing across the field, frantically waving his hands back and forth, stop me, and chew me out because I had done it wrong.

However, looking back, I understand he was giving me room to figure it out myself, giving me confidence and trust, letting me hone the ability to think on my feet. Those aren’t life lessons I learned in kindergarten – I learned them on a tractor.

2. Plan ahead. After I mastered the “following my nose” technique, I got this sage advice from Dad: “Look far enough ahead so that by the time you get to that corner or to the end of the field, you know exactly what you’re going to do before you get there.”

I learned the hard way that there’s nothing worse – especially when the clouds are rolling in, the sprinkles are starting, and your father is giving you the sign to throw the throttle up a notch – that there really is no bigger tractor-driving sin than to stop mid-field and contemplate, “How exactly do I bale the corner without wiping out the fence?”

Anticipation: probably the most useful skill every farm kid learns to master. By always looking ahead to the next corner, the next task, or the next challenge, time can be saved and mistakes avoided.

Life lesson number two: learn to look ahead and anticipate what’s coming – whether it’s an obstacle or an opportunity – so that by the time you get there, you’ve thought out your options and end up making the right choice.

3. Don’t look back too often. One of my rookie mistakes when driving tractor was to constantly look behind me, making sure the baler was taking all the hay, or the disc was on its mark.

Not only did my neck start to hurt, but I would also start to veer off course. Worse yet, I violated rule No. 2: I was so busy worrying about what I was doing at that very minute, that I hadn’t anticipated how to handle the next tricky spot.

One thing you learn quickly when driving a tractor is that there’s a fine line between looking back often enough to make sure you’re doing a good job, and looking back too much that you lose track of where you’re going.

Life lesson number three: look to the future more than the past, but look back often enough that you don’t repeat your mistakes. Not only will you be more successful in life, your neck won’t hurt as much.

Growing up, I often thought the kids who grew up in town were the lucky ones – they could go swimming on the days I was helping my family bring in the hay crop, or they could go shopping when I was racing to beat the clouds that would end corn-planting too early.

Today I realize how lucky I was to be a farm kid, because now I’m looking for ways to teach those same tractor-driving life lessons to my daughter, who lives in town and spends her free time riding her scooter around our block or going swimming with her friends.

I guess I’ll have to find new ways to teach her the lessons I learned while I was driving a tractor.

On second thought, maybe I can talk her grandpa into teaching one more generation to “follow her nose.” Let’s head to the farm.
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Fat Bottom Girl

There’s a new cheesemaker in town, and she’s driving a Mini Cooper and packing MAC lipgloss. That’s right, California cheese chick Seana Doughty and her Fat Bottom Girl have arrived on the cheese scene in the north Bay Area of California.


I met Seana this past week at the Sonoma Valley Cheese Conference, where she was showing off her new hard sheep’s milk cheese called Fat Bottom Girl. The cheese gets its name from its unique shape, which Seana says actually began as an accident. She had taken some cheeses out of their forms to be flipped, but then had to hurry out for afternoon milking. When she returned to the creamery (where she’s been renting time/space), the cheeses had flattened a bit under their own weight and were starting to form a wide bottom.

She says she found myself frequently referring to these yet-to-be-named cheeses as her “fat bottomed girls,” referring to the song by Queen that had come up on her iPod while working in the creamery. Apparently it was meant to be, and the name stuck. She has since continued to develop the process, coming up with the correct timing to achieve the perfect Fat Bottom Girl shape.

While Fat Bottom Girl is the only cheese Seana makes (she’s currently sold out – bummer), she soon could be making several more, as she just roadtripped to Wisconsin in December and bought 10 of her very own sheep from sheep dairy farmer Paul Haskins. That trip is a story within itself — she sums it up as “Operation Sheeporama” –featuring 1 truck, 2 girls, 5 days, 10 sheep, 4,200 miles and a lot of winter icy driving with 10 bleating sheep in the back of a “big ass 4×4 truck.”

Sounds like a good time to me.

Seana has since named her 10 ewes, which are specialized 50/50 crosses between the East Friesian and Lacaune dairy breeds. East Friesian sheep originated in Germany and are considered to be the highest producing dairy breed by milk volume, while French Lacaune sheep produce milk with slightly higher milk solids. The famous Roquefort blue cheese from France is made exclusively from the milk of red Lacaune ewes.

Each of Seana’s ewes has been bred to a Lacaune ram from the University of Wisconsin’s Spooner Agricultural Reseach Station, the only university in the United States with a program dedicated to sheep dairying. If all goes well, her ewes will give birth to lambs in April 2010 and she can begin milking them in May. She plans to increase the size of her flock by keeping all of the ewe lambs and purchasing additional ewes.

Eventually, she’d like to be milking between 100-200 ewes and plans to use every last drop of the milk for her cheesemaking. While she’s currently committed to California, I lobbied her pretty hard this week to move to Wisconsin, mostly because I’d love to serve a cheese at my table called Fat Bottom Girl, and her production is too small for any of her two-pound beauties to make it all the way to America’s Dairyland. Either way, I have complete confidence that Seana Doughty will be a force to be reckoned with. Expect to hear more about this glam cheesemaker and her Fat Bottom Girl in the years to come.
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On Location: Sonoma, CA

Today was my first day at the Sonoma Valley Cheese Conference here in California. This is a great little shindig hosted by Sheana Davis & The Epicurean Connection. With about 100 attendees — all cheese trade folks — it’s a fabulous opportunity to talk with industry leaders and opinion leaders in a very intimate setting. Plus, it’s 60 degrees and we’re at a quaint hotel in wine country. I mean, really, why would I NOT be here?


One of the most interesting talks today was led by Mateo Kehler, co-founder/owner of the Cellars at Jasper Hill and maker of some of my favorite cheeses, including Constant Bliss and Bayley Hazen Blue. Mateo is working with the Vermont Department of Agriculture and the University of Vermont to study whether his state should consider developing a platform for “place-based foods.”

Such a program would celebrate the terroir of Vermont and might be similar to a French AOC (Appellation d’origine contrôlée) designation, where products (such as certain cheeses like Roquefort and Comte) must be produced and aged in a consistent and traditional manner with ingredients from specifically classified producers in designated geographical areas.

While Mateo, being a Vermont cheesemaker, is of course interested in designating Vermont cheese as a “place-based food,” he freely admits the work could benefit other industries — including products such as Idaho potatoes, Kentucky bourbon, Virginia ham, California wine and Wisconsin Cheddar.

Such an idea is not as far-fetched on this side of the Atlantic as one might think. For example, just last year, our neighbor to the north established a Quebec-government-regulated label of IGP (indication géographique protégée), for Quebec’s Charlevoix lamb, making it the first food product in North America to be legally protected based on its region of origin.

With 43 farmstead cheesemakers making 150 different types of cheeses in a state with only 600,000 people, Vermont certainly has a unique angle on the cheesemaking industry. The question is, however, do Vermont cheeses taste different than other cheeses made in other parts of the country? I would argue yes. Just as I believe Wisconsin cheeses – especially those produced in the southwest part of the state where our sweet soils and limestone-filtered water grow grass unlike anywhere else on earth, and in time, grass becomes milk which becomes cheese — Vermont has its own climate, own culture and own cheesemaking heritage. Compare a Vermont Cheddar to a Wisconsin Cheddar any day and you’ll notice a distinct flavor profile difference.

Establishing a “place-based foods” designation just might be the one way to preserve what’s left of Vermont’s dairy industry. The state, like many others, has watched its smaller dairy farms disappear and its remaining farms get bigger to survive. Vermont, however, will never support large, confined dairy operations like those in Western states, because of “political, economic and environmental reasons,” Mateo says.

“We have an iconic, pastoral, idealized landscape. When you think of Vermont, you think of patchwork land and fields,” he says.

But getting Vermont farmers (and I would argue –farmers in any part of the country — they’re an independent bunch by nature) to collaborate and work together toward an AOC-type of designation for Vermont cheese will be hard, Mateo admits. “This type of initiative is going to have to be producer-driven, and frankly, I’m not sure if we Yankees have it in us to collaborate on anything.”

Let’s hope they at least give it the ol’ college try, as this is one initiative that could be a good model for other industries around the country.
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Geriatric Cheddar

The 2010 Winter Olympics weren’t the only competition to kick off last Friday. With the release of a second batch of Hook’s 15-Year Cheddar in Wisconsin, the hunt for geriatric cheese is officially on.


In December, cheesemakers Tony & Julie Hook in Mineral Point put 1,200 pounds of their super smooth, crumbly and not-a-bitter-note-to-be-seen-15-year Cheddar on the market. It promptly sold out within two weeks with customers literally fighting over the last wedge at area cheese shops. This time, the Hooks will sell 1,600 pounds, with the majority of it already at area specialty cheese shops and restaurants.

In Madison, the cheese is available at Fromagination, Metcalfe Sentry, Hy-Vee and Whole Foods. If you don’t live Wisconsin, do not, I repeat, do not despair. You can order it from Fromagination, which when I breezed in today, was abuzz with phone and mail orders, shipping out blocks of $60-pound Cheddar like it was candy at a parade. Fromagination is also sell a “cheese flight” of 2-, 5-, 10-, 12- and 15-year cheddars, which includes a sheet of tasting notes. Poof! Instant cheese party.

So what’s the difference between a 2-Year Cheddar and a 15-Year Cheddar? It’s all about intensity of flavor. Good Cheddar will become richer, nuttier and increasingly “sharp” with age. Its firm texture will become more granular and crumbly. By the time it’s 12 years old, a good Cheddar will be almost beefy with a caramel tone. At 15-years, it’s in a class all its own. Tony compares it to a single-malt scotch, because yes, it’s that good.

If you miss this round of 15-year Cheddar, in good news, Tony has another batch aging and expects to release it in December. After that, who knows? Tony says he’ll have to continue to taste the current aging cheddars to determine their fate. Let’s hope there’s some late bloomers in there.
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Gingerbread Jersey Grows Up

Five years ago, a dairy farm couple and their children in Augusta, Wis., took a leap of faith and began making cheese from the milk of their own 50-cow Jersey herd. They started by crafting cheese curds, a few flavored jacks and cheddar. Today, they’re producing more than 80 kinds of cheese and are winning awards in national competitions.


In short, Gingerbread Jersey is all grown up.

I first blogged about this farmhouse dairy back in 2006, and I regret to say that I haven’t done an update in four years. I ran into owners Virgil and Carolyn Schunk last weekend at the Isthmus Beer & Cheese Fest, and bless their hearts, they still remembered me from when I attended their grand opening on behalf of the Dairy Business Innovation Center in June, 2005. This is why I love cheese people.

At that time, the Schunks were the first dairy plant in the state to make cheese with Darlington Dairy Supply’s Cheese on Wheels, a mobile, state-of-the-art cheesemaking plant housed in a 53-foot semi-trailer. Five years later, they’re still making cheese in the mobile unit, only it’s not quite so mobile anymore. They’ve built a viewing area adjacent to the trailer, so visitors can watch Virgil make cheese, which he does several days a week, including making fresh curds every Friday. Click here for a short slide show on the Schunk’s farm & cheese plant operation.

One of their newest cheeses is Taste of Sicily, a Monterey Jack with sun-dried tomatoes, basil, and garlic, which won a gold medal at the 2009 North American Jersey Cheese Awards. In fact, the Schunks won three awards at that conference, out of 77 entries from 29 different producers representing 15 states and Quebec. Not bad for a mom & pop operation making cheese out of a semi-trailer, eh?

In addition to Taste of Sicily, the Schunks are also expanding their cheesemaking repertoire and are making Asiago, Parmesan-style and Romano cheeses. Although Gingerbread Jersey is best-known for its cheddars and flavored jacks, its expanded line of cheeses are very high-quality and reasonably priced. Yum.

So, if you’re ever in the Eau Claire area — more specifically, right off Highway 12 eighteen miles east of Eau Claire (click here for a map), be sure and visit Gingerbread Jersey and say hi to the Schunks. They’re good people making good cheese.
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Wisconsin Vs. The World

Haven’t you always wondered how Wisconsin’s best artisan cheeses stack up against their world counterparts?

Yeah, me too. That’s why I’m partnering with the World Championship Cheese Contest and planning an event on March 17 in Madison, Wis., where we’ll get to taste at least 35 different cheeses, meet 30 international cheese judges from six continents, and shake hands and sample cheeses from 11 award-winning Wisconsin artisan cheesemakers.

I mean, really, what more could you ask for?

Tickets for what I’m calling “An Evening at the World Championship Cheese Contest,” are $20 and are now on sale at www.wisconsincheeseoriginals.com. The event runs from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. on March 17 at the Monona Terrace in Madison. All tickets will be sold in advance, and I expect this event to sell out, so if you’re interested, buy early and buy often.

So what international cheeses can you expect to taste? Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll be picking them out on Wednesday morning, after they’ve competed for gold medals in the 28th biennial World Championship Cheese Contest. I do know there will be cheeses arriving from Argentina, Australia, Cypress, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, so expect to see those countries represented for sure.

Wisconsin cheesemakers attending and sampling their finest cheeses will include: Willi Lehner of Bleu Mont Dairy; Sid Cook of Carr Valley Cheese; Bruce Workman of Edelweiss Creamery; Brenda Jensen of Hidden Springs Creamery; Al O’Brien of Mt. Sterling Cheese Cooperative; Al Bekkum of Nordic Creamery; Chris Roelli from Roelli Cheese; Jerry Heimerl from Saxon Homestead Creamery, Andy Hatch of Uplands Cheese, and Joe Widmer from Widmer’s Cheese Cellars. Cheeses from Holland’s Family Farm will also be sampled.

Plus, when you get sick of eating cheese, you can nosh on yummy appetizers. A cash bar will also be available, but alas, no green beer. Hope to see you on March 17 in Madison!
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Accountant Turned Dairy Farmer

It’s no secret that it’s hard to start a dairy farm from scratch these days. With significant cash outlay needed for equipment and animals, ever-rising farmland prices and a cyclical high/low market in which to sell milk, if you’re not a farm kid who inherits or has the chance to buy into your parents’ farm, odds are you’re going to choose a different profession in life.
Such as writing a cheese blog, or becoming an accountant.
Richland Center dairy farmer Jeff Jump is an accountant. He’s also a dairy farmer. And he’s the type of guy Wisconsin is going to have to start recruiting if we want our small-scale, traditional dairy farms to continue to exist in America’s Dairyland.
Jeff, 44, his wife Connie, and their two children, Cody, 14 and Molly, 13, moved from Chicago to Richland Center in 2003. Today, they run an 80-acre dairy farm, which when they purchased it, consisted of an old dairy barn that had seen better days, an amazing crop of weeds and thistles, and an old farm house in need of repair. Today, the house has been remodeled, the old dairy barn has been cleaned up and is being used as a calf care facility, and the Jumps have added on a Swing-8 New Zealand style milking parlor and a composting barn/loafing shed, where their 53 Jersey cows look like they’re pretty much having the time of their lives.

“We call it the beach,” is how Jeff describes his composting barn, which features a clay base and two feet of sawdust mixed with ground corn fodder. Unlike a freestall barn, the shed has a completely open floor plan, with feeding bunks facing the outside, where the Jumps’ cows enjoy fresh air while eating breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“When you get up in the morning, go out to the barn and 90 percent of your cows are laying down, sleeping or chewing their cud, then you’ve got some pretty happy cows,” Jeff says. And he’s right — these girls have got it pretty good. They live on a tidy farm with owners who treat them right. Pick any of the Jumps’ cows or calves, and you can literally walk right up to the animal, stretch out your hand and pet it. I’m living proof, as I nearly lost my scarf to a group of calves who decided I was a mid-afternoon snack. I had to yank half of my scarf out of the throat of a 6-month Jersey calf to reclaim it.

So how does a big-city accountant come to be a Wisconsin dairy farmer? A native of South Bend, Indiana, Jeff is a graduate of Indiana University and is a Gulf War veteran. He was working for a food company in Chicago as their chief accountant, when he had the opportunity to invest and do the finances for Hilltop Valley Dairy, a small yogurt company in Richland Center. He had always been interested in the dairy industry, and knew the opportunity would allow his family to get out of the city.

So, for the next several years, he and his family became the stereotypical “city slickers move to the country and get adopted by their neighbors.” During the day, Jeff worked for Hilltop Valley. In the evenings and weekends, he played farmer.

“I really wanted to understand the whole circle of the dairy industry, and our kids were at the right age to join 4-H. So we started reading books, talking to the neighboring farmers, and bought a couple of Jersey calves,” he said.

But, lo and behold, it turns out that calves grow up. So the Jumps studied the breeding process, got their heifers bred (in fact Jeff learned so much about the artificial insemination process, that he’s now an Area Board Rep for Accelerated Genetics — funny how life works), and then his pregnant heifers had calves.

“Then, we were like – oh my gosh, what do we do with the milk?” So Jeff purchased a portable milking machine – the kind you find at small county fairs – and milked five cows twice a day, dumping the milk, as he couldn’t get a milk hauler interested in picking up milk from five cows.

At some point, Jeff says he woke up one morning and realized: “I’ve got a herd.” So he “went off the deep end,” built a milking parlor, started milking 10 cows and by now was big enough for the local milk hauler to stop every other day and pick up the milk from his tiny bulk tank.

“The people in this community are amazing,” Jeff says. “We are surrounded by neighbors and friends who helped us get to the point where we are now.”

That point is a 53-cow Jersey milking herd, with the intent to grow to 100 cows. Jeff’s hired some help with the milking and farm chores, as last year, after Hilltop Valley was sold to Schreiber Foods, he began working for Meister Cheese in Muscoda as their finance director and field rep.

With his unique skill sets of being able to run numbers, as well as knowing first-hand how dairy farms work, Jump holds a unique position at Meister Cheese – so unique that President Scott Meister can’t figure out a title for him.

“We have to come up with a creative combination of Chief Financial Officer and Head Field Representative,” Meister says. “Jeff’s got it all – and he’s got an amazing repertoire with our dairy farm patrons. We’re very lucky to have found him.”

I’d say Wisconsin is pretty lucky to have Jeff Jump and his family. As good stewards of the land, conscientious dairy farmers and active community members, perhaps the answer to growing America’s Dairyland is to start luring the accountants out of Chicago, one prospective dairy farmer at a time.
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The Colby Conundrum

Jon Topp of Chesterfield, Missouri, is on a quest to find the Colby of his youth. Growing up in the 1960s in central Iowa near a small country store that carried the “absolute best Colby cheese,” Jon remembers eating Colby in longhorns, wrapped in cloth and wax.


He can remember the taste like it was yesterday: mild, deliciously nutty, firm and laced with small holes. Most importantly, like much of the Colby made today, it wasn’t cheddary. It was also rubbery, not gooey or wet and had the perfect salt to moisture ratio.

In short, it was perfect. And Jon Topp can no longer find it.

Jon emailed me a couple of weeks ago, attaching the most fabulous spreadsheet listing results of dozens of Colby cheeses he has ordered from Wisconsin cheesemakers during the past several years, all in a mission to find the original Colby of his childhood. Apparently, in an act of complete desperation, he decided to email the Cheese Underground Lady to see if I could help.

I put on my cheese superhero cape, fired up the bat signal and called the person I knew who could help: the amazing John Jaeggi from the Center for Dairy Research in Madison. And in the process, I learned a lot about Colby.

Brief background: Colby cheese was actually invented in Wisconsin by Joseph F. Steinwand in 1885. He named it for the township in which his father, Ambrose Steinwand, Sr., had built northern Clark County’s first cheese factory three years before.

The Code of Federal Regulations – as specified in Sec. 133.118, describes the requirements for making Colby cheese. The key difference between cheddar and traditional Colby is that the mass is cut, stirred, and heated with continued stirring, to separate the whey and curd. Then, part of the whey is drained off, and the curd is cooled by adding water, with continued stirring, which is different from cheddar (no added water/rinse with cheddar). The Colby curd is then completely drained, salted, stirred, further drained, and pressed into forms, instead of being allowed to knit together like Cheddar.

According to John Jaeggi, this traditional make method allowed Colby a curdy texture with mechanical openings in the middle. The flavor was slightly sweet with a slight salty note. Best of all, he says, the cheese had a dairy, milky note.

All this was grand until sometime after the mid 1970s, (I can’t find an exact date) the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture decided to amend the state standard of identity for Colby cheese, ATCP 81.50(2) by adding this little gem of a sentence:

“Wisconsin certified premium grade AA colby and monterey (jack) cheese shall be reasonably firm. The cheese may have evenly distributed small mechanical openings or a closed body.”

This annotation, especially the portion I’ve highlighted in red, has led to significant changes in the make process of Colby by Wisconsin manufacturers. Because mechanical openings are no longer required of Colby, many processors are making a cheese that resembles mild cheddar and labeling it as Colby. John Jaeggi says that technology improvements have also changed Colby.

“I think cultures are faster. Older cultures were slower single strains, resulting in slower make times. These slower cultures tended to make for a sweeter cheese,” Jaeggi says. Another change is the curd wash, he says. Many large manufacturers now do a curd rinse (no hold) after dropping the curd pH down to a 5.60. Old time Colby makers used to drain whey to the curd line while the curd was still sweet – at 6.00 pH or higher. Then after the whey was drained to the curd line, water was added to drop the curd temperature to a set target. After 15 minutes, the whey/water was drained off the curd and then the curd was salted. Most of the acid developed in the press. The reason this changed was larger plants understandably did not want to process all that water along with the whey.

Also, the hoop sizes and pressing of the cheeses is much different today than it was back in the day, Jaeggi says. Traditional Colby was made in the longhorn shape and pressed in 13 pound horns. They were then waxed for sale. Other plants made Colby in 40 pound blocks.

A Wisconsin cheese company still making Colby in those 40-pound blocks is Hook’s Cheese in Mineral Point. Back in 1982, cheesemaker Julie Hook actually captured the World Championship Cheese Contest with her Colby, and husband Tony and fellow cheesemaker says they haven’t changed the recipe since then.

“We can’t keep up with demand,” Tony told me this week. “Usually, we sell Colby at 4-6 weeks because that’s when I think it’s at its peak, but lately we’ve been selling it even younger because people seem to like it so much.”

Tony says he is one of very few cheesemakers still making traditional Colby – washing the curd and not pressing it in a huge vacuum machine, which closes the small mechanical holes that used to make Colby, well, Colby. “We’re still making it the old fashioned way. We’re not cutting corners and we’re not cutting up mild cheddar and calling it Colby. Our Colby is real.”

Two other cheese plants still making Colby in the traditional manner, according to Hook (and who, coincidentally both received the highest rankings by Jon Topp in his cheese quest – Jon hasn’t yet tried Hook’s Colby), are Widmer’s Cheese Cellars in Theresa, Wis., and Gile Cheese & Carr Cheese Factory in Cuba City.

Sadly, Topp may never find the Colby he grew up with, Jaeggi says. “Most traditional Colby was made by small cheesemakers in the 50s, 60s and into the early 70s. Each factory has their own unique flavor profile. What Jon is remembering from the Colby (he grew up on in Iowa) is possibly a flavor profile from some long gone small cheese factory.”

Keep the faith, Mr. Jon Topp. And keep us posted if you find the cheese of your childhood.