cheeseunderground butter, Wisconsin

Organic Valley Pasture Butter

There aren’t too many foods in life that butter doesn’t make better. And last Friday, I got the chance to see butter made from beginning to end. Not just any butter mind you, but Organic Valley’s Pasture Butter, which I occasionally sneak into the grocery cart when my cost-conscious husband isn’t looking.

Part of the fun of running your own organization is planning tours that you personally want to take. So I booked a mini charter bus, invited members of my Wisconsin Cheese Originals organization to join me, and off we went for a Farm to Fork Tour of Pasture Grazed Butter.

First stop: the Chaseburg Butter Plant, which produces all of Organic Valley’s Cultured Butter and a large portion of their pasture-grazed butter.
Dave Larson, head buttermaker and plant manager, gave us a personal tour of the butter factory, which is generally not open to the public. We got a behind the scenes look at the company’s giant butter churn, ghee production facility, and packing equipment.

The Chaseburg dairy plant has been around forever. It began its life as a butter plant, but then in the 1950s was converted to a commodity cheddar cheese plant. It changed owners several times and in 1999, was shuttered by Swiss Valley. Two years later, Organic Valley purchased the facility and today operates it 24/7, with three licensed buttermakers and a staff of several local
employees. In the town of 302 people, the butter plant is the heart of the community.
The facility’s make room is square, relatively small, and features what is probably the original terracotta block floor and giant glass block windows. Standing in the center of room, soaking up all the attention it duly deserves, is a ginormous stainless steel butter churn, which cranks out about 22,000 pounds of butter a day.

Next to the giant, rotating butter churn o’ goodness is a long, horizontal spatula-type contraption on wheels which scoops the butter out of the churn, and dumps it in a trough. As we walked in, the churn has just dumped its latest haul – 3,500 pounds of butter per churn – into the trough. What I wouldn’t have given for a piece of toast at that point, but alas, we were just there to watch!
Once dumped into the trough, another machine squeezes the beautiful golden yellow butter through a stainless steel tube to the packing machine, where it’s pressed into waxed-paper-covered sticks and then packed by employees into one-pound paperboard boxes.
Each churn-load uses 7,000 pounds of cream and yields about 3,500 pounds of butter. Dave told us that batch churns similar to the one used at the Chaseburg Butter Plant are a rarity these days, as most plants use continuous-production equipment, which has to be WAY less exciting than watching cream turn to butter through the window of a giant batch churn.
It takes about an hour and a half to make a batch of butter at the Chaseburg plant. Dave explained that first, the cream thickens into whipped cream. Then, after about 40 minutes, the butter begins to “break” – which (I looked up later) means to separate from the residual liquid.
Dave then drains the buttermilk off and continues churning the butter until it reaches the right texture and firmness. We went back in after our first trip through the make room just in time to see this process in action, and Dave even opened up the door for us to take a peek.

As if seeing 3,500 pounds of freshly churned butter isn’t enough to impress anybody, the smell of fresh butter is acutely amazing. I kept secretly hoping Dave would look away so I could reach my finger in and take a swipe of butter, but alas, the darn quality control managers were always watching.
“It’s a lot like cooking,” Larson told us, as I was trying to concentrate on his words and not on reaching my hand into the butter churn. “Anybody can follow a recipe, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to come out right.”
At Chaseburg, it almost always comes out right, and that’s due to the high quality work of the plant’s buttermakers. It also probably has a lot to do with the recipe, which was originally created by Willi Lehner, Bleu Mont Dairy. Willi provided the recipe for Cultured Butter to Organic Valley several years ago and the plant still uses it.
I did get my wish to try the butter later in the day, as the folks at Organic Valley Headquarters in LaFarge very kindly hosted us for lunch in their Milky Way Cafe.

Tripp Hughes, director of product management, then led us through a butter-tasting experience. We tried five Organic Valley butters: European-style Cultured Butter, Pasture Butter, Organic Valley Salted Butter, a new whipped butter product and one more that I apparently never wrote down because I was too busy eating the Pasture Butter. Ahhh …. butter … how I love thee velvety-golden goodness.

Later that afternoon, long after our butter comas had warn off, we stopped at the Miller Organic Dairy Farm near Columbus. Co-owner Jim Miller gave us a tour of his fifth-generation farm, which ships its organic milk to the Chaseburg Butter Plant, where it’s made into the butter we got to try at lunch.
The final treat of the day: watching the first cow of the evening milking step onto the farm’s new age carousel parlor, which rotates by floating on water. Chewing her cud and swishing her tail, as the Miller family employees began putting milkers on each cow one by one, I couldn’t help but think: these are happy cows.

And happy cows make great butter.
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Sterling Reserve

It’s official: I have a new favorite cheese. It’s called Sterling Reserve and as my friend Barrie Lynn, the Cheese Impresario, would say: “This cheese totally rocks.”

Sterling Reserve is a raw milk, cave aged goat cheddar brand new to the market. Available just this week at Fromagination in Madison (and hopefully elsewhere soon), this naturally-rinded, complex flavored beauty is crafted by Mt. Sterling Cheese Cooperative in tiny Mt. Sterling, Wis.

The cheese has been a long time coming. Marketing Director Pat Lund (who is also a dairy goat producer and member of the Mt. Sterling Cooperative) first presented the idea of making an artisan cave aged goat cheese to her board of directors back in 2003. She calls it a “producer inspired” cheese, and it is, in fact, just the first of what will be an entire line of artisan goat cheeses dreamed up by the cooperative members.
“We wanted to reflect the original intent of forming a co-op, so we produced a goat cheese simple in nature, powerful in presence and complex in flavor,” Pat says.
That’s a pretty good description of Sterling Reserve. Crafted by cheesemakers Al O’Brien and Bjorn Unseth in 2-pound daisy wheels, the raw milk goat cheddars are aged at the plant for about 30 days, and are then shipped to a farmstead cheesemaker in northern Wisconsin, where they are washed and aged in a true cave environment for another 60 days.
The result is a cheese that can hold its own on any cheese board in any restaurant or cheese contest anywhere, any time. It recently earned a gold medal at the 2009 Los Angeles International Dairy Competition in the ripened goat’s milk cheese competition, beating out three cheeses crafted by the venerable Redwood Hill Farm in California. In fact, when Pat recently presented the cheese to some accounts on the West Coast, she says they were all blown away.
“When they asked me where Mt. Sterling was from and I told them Wisconsin, they simply nodded as if to say, ‘Of course, where else?”
If you’re interested in tasting the magnificent Sterling Reserve, Pat will be at the Wine & Dine in Milwaukee on Oct 10-11, and at the Meet the Cheesemaker Gala at the Wisconsin Original Cheese Festival in Madison on Nov. 6. Until then, call your local cheesemonger and tell them to order it – one taste and they’ll be hooked. And no, I’m not sharing what’s left of the wheel in my fridge. You’ll have to find your own.
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Making Jack at Mt. Sterling Cheese

For the folks out there who continue to doubt whether an artisan cheese can really come out of a medium-size plant, I have four words for you: Mt. Sterling Cheese Cooperative.

Located in the heart of 1,000 acres of apple orchards in western Wisconsin on the edge of the thriving metropolis of Mt. Sterling (population 215), this tiny cheese factory has been crafting quality cheeses since 1913. In 1976, a handful of goat farmers banded together to form a co-op, and in 1983, they purchased the creamery. Today, about 20 dairy goat farmers ship their milk to Plant Manager Al O’Brien and Cheesemaker Bjorn Unseth, who together craft a variety of amazingly-good, award-winning goat cheeses, all by hand.
With the lure of asking me to try a new artisan, cave aged cheese (more about that later in the week – it deserves a blog posting all its own), Al invited me today to help him make a couple vats of cheese – one Jack Style Goat cheese, and the other Goat Cheddar.
I got there just in time to witness the Jack Style curds being stirred in preparation of scooping them into 40-pound cheese molds. (Monterey Jack is made a bit differently in that the curds are washed with cold water to cool them down and reduce the acid content). Monterey Jack is a fairly young cheese – usually only aged about a month or so and is very buttery.
At Mt. Sterling, they handle all the curd by hand – there’s nary a curd pump in site. Helper Brett was very good at scooping cheese, weighing each bucket to make sure the forms would be filled to uniform weights, and then dumping the curds into each 40-pound block form. Here’s a video of that process:

Today, the cheesemakers at Mt. Sterling made 26 blocks of jack style cheese, 15 plain and 9 blocks of flavor, including a couple blocks each of garlic, jalapeno, tomato basil, basamic vinegar & olive, and dill. The flavors are stirred directly into the curd and then scooped into forms. I got to taste them all, and I liked the dill and the balsamic vinegar & olive the best.
Monterey Jack is a fast cheese to make, as the 40-pound blocks only have to press for about an hour. Then it’s time to take them out of the presses, one by one, and on to the cryovac machine, where they are sealed, boxed and then wheeled into the cooler until sold. Here’s a video of that process:
Mt. Sterling makes about 300,000 pounds of cheese annually and is ramping up production: “Our sales are strong and our inventory is short, so we’ve got to keep making more cheese,” Al says. In addition to their plain and flavored jacks, they also make one of the best raw milk sharp goat cheddars in the country (it received a third place ribbon at this year’s U.S. Championship Cheese Contest in the Hard Goat’s Milk Cheese Category).
One of the more interesting aspects to me about Mt. Sterling is that both Al and Bjorn are fairly new to the Wisconsin cheesemaking scene. Al, age 52, got his cheesemaker’s license in 2005, after retiring as a dairy farmer (he milked about 40 cows just eight miles from the plant), and Bjorn earned his cheesemaker’s license just last May. Neither are from cheesemaker families – they both walked into the field pretty much by accident.
Bjorn, age 28, (he was named by his Norwegian aunt) was working construction just a couple of years ago, when his brother recommended him for a job at the Mt. Sterling plant. After just an hour, Al hired him on the spot, recognizing a good worker when he saw one. Bjorn has since earned his cheesemaker’s license and is busy recommending other young adults in the area to consider pursuing cheesemaking as a career.
“The more I get into cheesemaking, the more I like it. It’s interesting to learn new things, and we’ve been winning awards these past couple of years. It makes you proud. I’d like to see more high school kids considering entering agriculture and cheesemaking as a career – there’s a lot of opportunity here,” Bjorn says.
For what Al & Bjorn lack in years of experience, their talent seems to make up for it. The pair are continually earning more and more awards — in fact, a new cave-aged artisan cheddar they’re now making earned a gold medal at the 2009 Los Angeles International Dairy Competition in the ripened goat’s milk cheese competition, beating out three cheeses crafted by the venerable Redwood Hill Farm in California. I tasted this cheese today, and let’s just say it’s pretty freakin’ amazing. But you’ll have to wait for the full review until later this week … stay tuned.
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Tuscan Dream

I have fond memories of reading Dave Barry when he still had a weekly column in the Miami Herald. My favorite part was when he would refer to an “alert reader” who had written him with “important” news. Turns out I apparently have some “alert readers” as well, and thanks to one lady named Katheryn, a new Wisconsin cheese is now available on the retail market.

Back in June, as part of my “dark and early” summer cheesemaking tour, I made Big Wheel Emmentaler with Master Cheesemaker Bruce Workman at Edelweiss Creamery in Monticello, Wis. When I arrived at 3:30 a.m. that day, Bruce had already filled one of his other cheesemaking vats and was on his way to making Bel Paese cheese for a private label client. With all the excitement of making 180-pound wheels of Swiss, I have to say I never gave that other vat of cheese another thought until alert reader Katheryn emailed me on July 28 with this important question:
“When I was in Italy for several months in college, one of my favorite cheeses was Bel Paese, which was buttery and mild. I ate it for lunch almost every day, along with bread from the San Lorenzo market in Florence. Do you know if there is anything similar available in Wisconsin?”
I emailed Katheryn back, with the news that I knew of a Wisconsin cheesemaker making Bel Paese, but it was being sold under another label. When I asked Bill at Fromagination about it, his thought was immediately – “I bet we can get some straight from Bruce.”
Well, alert readers, another Wisconsin cheese is now born. Bruce has launched his Bel Paese under the name of Tuscan Dream and it is now available at Fromagination. The first wheels were delivered to the shop yesterday, and it’s just as Katheryn described – mild and buttery. A cow’s milk cheese, it matures for six to eight weeks, and has a creamy and light milky aroma. The color is a pale, creamy yellow. Bruce is making it in 4-5 pound wheels. I’d say it’s somewhat similar to a French Saint-Paulin or German Butterkäse, but not as stinky and much milder.
The best part about this story? This morning, I got to email Katheryn, with the joyous news that a Wisconsin Bel Paese was now on the market. Being the alert reader that she is, she emailed me back almost immediately, saying: “Thanks so much for hunting this info for me. I’ll be enjoying a good piece of Bel Paese soon, along with fond memories of Tuscany. :)”
Ahh, another happy cheese consumer. Life is good.
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Low Milk Prices Hurting Farmers

Those of us who like to eat, talk and write about funky cheese have a pretty good gig in Wisconsin. With 88 of the state’s 127 cheese plants today making at least one type of specialty cheese, (600 in all), there’s never a shortage of material.

Meanwhile, down on the farm, times aren’t so good. In fact, our dairy farms are folding up shop, dispersing cows, and moving to town to try and find jobs, one by one. A colleague at the Department of Agriculture told me last week – his head in his hands – that Wisconsin may lose 1,000 dairy farms by spring.
Ouch.
Since mid to late 2008, the price to produce the milk we all drink, eat in cheese and enjoy in ice cream, yogurt and various dairy products, has far outweighed what farmers are getting paid for it. This is not new news. Historically, milk prices paid to dairy farmers have always fluctuated – sometimes hitting peaks of more than $20 per hundredweight like they did in 2007, and then sometimes hitting $10 a hundredweight, where prices are hovering around now.
But never has the price paid to the farmer stayed this low for this long, and never has the price of input materials – food, fertilizer and fuel – stayed so high. Farmers I talk with say they’re losing $100 per cow every month. That means Farmer Wayne and his family down the road who are milking 80 cows are losing $8,000 a month. I can’t imagine working 18 hours a day only to dig myself deeper into debt.
Farmers are a hardy bunch. For the most part, they’re not complainers. They take the lumps as they come. But low pay prices, partnered with high cost prices, combined with never-changing relatively high retail prices are really beginning to stick in the craw of the average dairy farmer.
Why? Because retail prices for dairy products haven’t dropped in accordance with the prices paid to farmers, so consumers on average aren’t even aware of what farmers are being paid. No matter the price, only about 23 percent of the price of a gallon of milk ever makes it to the farmer. That means for a $3 gallon of milk, the farmer gets only 69 cents.
Pat Skogen, a small organic dairy farmer near Loganville, Wis., emailed me this week. (You know dairy farmers are getting desperate to get out information when they even track down the cheese bloggers for help). Pat says they sell their milk to a small local cheese plant and she’s thinking of starting a butter/cheese arm to the farm “because dairy prices really STINK right now.”
Pat says that milk prices paid to farmers today are at 1975 levels. A lot of things have changed in the last 30 years. In 1975, Pat started teaching school at $8,000 a year. A new Ford F250 for the farm cost between $7,000 – $10,000. Today, she’s a retired schoolteacher and a new farm truck can cost up to $40,000. Yet, the price being paid to a farmer for 100 pounds of milk is the same, at around $10.
“The cost of production of milk is around $18 per hundredweight. For a family living wage, we should be receiving $25 – $35 per hundredweight of milk. We are losing thousands of dollars each month. It is not the weather, floods or poor business sense. It is not supply and demand. If we received HALF of the $3.69 you might spend for a gallon of milk, we would be at over $21/hundredweight. So where is the other half going?”
Good question, Pat. I am not an economist, so I don’t know or pretend to know the answer. But a quick Google search shows the following:
1. Dean Foods Inc posted a 31 percent increase in quarterly profits this month, “helped by lower costs for raw milk.” — according to Reuters, Aug. 5, 2009.
2. Kraft Foods Inc reported a higher-than-expected 11 percent rise in quarterly profits this month as “the largest North American food maker benefits from price increases and cost cuts” — according to MSN Money, Aug. 4, 2009.
3. ConAgra’s consumer foods business is growing. In June, ConAgra said “earnings from continuing operations rose to 41 cents, compared to 18 cents last year, as the food maker benefited from lower manufacturing and supplier costs.” — according to the Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2009.
As the suits in corporate America and Wall Street reap the profits of low milk prices paid to Wisconsin dairy farmers, the farmers themselves are not the only ones suffering. The rural businesses who depend on dairy farms are already feeling the loss of farmer cash flow and payments.
Ralph Reeson, Pat’s husband, recently told the Reedsburg Times Press: “What happens out here impacts what happens in town. When we don’t have money, we don’t buy new trucks, we don’t buy more feed, and some stop even paying their insurance.” Even though Reeson, like most every dairy farmer is losing money right now, still plans on farming and milking as long as he can. His neighbor, Darrell Myers, agrees: “Most of us care enough where we don’t want to give up. We’d like to hang on. That’s the question a lot of us are asking. At what point do I give up?”
Let’s not make our dairy farmers give up, people. Talk to your farm neighbors and friends. Imagine what Wisconsin would look like without our farm green spaces and grazing bovines. Talk to your legislators and ask them to support Wisconsin dairy. Let’s do whatever it takes to keep families on their farms, milking cows, and producing the product most of us take for granted every day.
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Cheesemonger For A Day

Slinging cheese for a living is hard work. At least, I’m pretty sure it would be if I did it full-time.

As it is, the folks at Fromagination humor me one Saturday every month by letting me come in and pretend I’m a cheesemonger for about 4 hours. It’s great. I stroll in around 10 a.m., don an apron, stretch on some plastic gloves, start talking cheese with customers from behind the counter and attempt to cut the correct amount of cheese ordered.
Besides being on your feet all day, the hardest part I find about being a cheesemonger is actually wrapping the cheese. Fromagination, like most cut-to-order cheese shops, uses a special paper with layers of plastic film that allow the cheese to breathe. While the paper is good for the cheese, in the hands of an inexperienced cheesemonger (i.e. me), it can become a giant wad of paper and tape that is not attractive. (I once wrapped a piece of cheese, only to have the customer hand it back to me and say, “Um, could you ask somebody else to do it?”)
In good news, I have found a new mentor in the art of cheese wrapping. Matt, resident cheesemonger at Fromagination, showed me today his super cool way of wrapping cheese, called the French Pleat. I first saw this method a couple of weeks ago at the American Cheese Society competition in Austin, Texas, where cheesemongers from four different stores competed in a cheese wrapping duel. They did it so fast, however, I couldn’t study their method.
Fear not, however, amateur cheesewrappers of the world. We may now unite, as Matt gives us an example of how to wrap a wedge of cheese using the French Pleat:
Okay, so now we know how to wrap a wedge of cheese. What about a square shape? Here’s Matt again:
And, just because I asked him to, Matt shows off a bit by wrapping a piece of cheese using the French Pleat method in 10 seconds flat.
Personally, I think the best part about these videos are my incredibly inane sounds at the end — from the “Yayyyyyy” to the “Whoaaaaaa” to “Wow”. If I were more technically adept, I’d edit these to make myself sound better, but, hey, you’re stuck with me. It is what it is.
So, many thanks to Ken, Bill, Matt, Paris, Tyler, Sandy, Kristi, Ryan, Gisele, and all the folks at Fromagination for humoring me by letting me pretend to be a cheesemonger for a day. See you all behind the counter next month!
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Inaugural Cheese Festival

In exciting news, tickets to my first annual Wisconsin Original Cheese Festival went on sale last night at midnight. Some events have sold out, but there are still plenty of seminars and tours to choose from, and tickets are still available for a Meet the Cheesemaker Gala Reception on Friday night.

Here’s the official scoop:

Held at the Monona Terrace in downtown Madison on Nov. 6-7, the festival will offer attendees the chance to meet dozens of Wisconsin cheesemakers and taste more than 100 of the state’s finest artisan, farmstead and specialty cheeses.
The two-day festival will feature a variety of events, including a Friday night Meet the Cheesemaker Gala Reception, Saturday morning guided tours and educational seminars, and a Saturday evening Artisan Cheesemaker Dine Around. Advance tickets are required. Visit www.wicheesefest.com to purchase tickets.
Hosted by Wisconsin Cheese Originals, a new member-based organization that I launched in March, the festival will be a premier destination for cheese enthusiasts and food buyers from across the nation. As Wisconsin becomes nationally recognized as a mecca for original artisan, farmstead and specialty cheeses, I wanted to create a festival that would be the perfect venue to learn more about, celebrate, and taste hundreds of the original cheeses our cheesemakers are crafting.
So, with all that said, here are the festival events:
Friday Night Meet the Cheesemaker Gala Reception: Shake hands and talk shop with the current generation of rock star cheesemakers. Sample 100 different Wisconsin original cheeses, network with foodies and enjoy your favorite wine or microbrew. Tickets: $25 per person.
Saturday Morning Tours: Choose between a private coach bus tour of Green County cheese factories, including Chalet Cheese (the only Limburger cheesemaker in America) and an elegant fondue lunch at Roth Kase USA; or partake in a personal guided tour of the largest producer Farmer’s Market in the nation, with lunch at Fromagination on the Capital Square. Tickets range from $35 – $55 per person.
Saturday Afternoon Seminars: Choose from a stunning line-up of six seminars. Enjoy wine, beer & cheese pairings, learn the art of crafting cave-aged and pasture-grazed cheeses, or the science behind “stinky” cheeses. You’ll be a cheese geek by the end of the day. Tickets range from $20 – $35 per seminar.
Saturday Evening Dine Around: Experience a culinary sensation at one of six participating Madison Originals restaurants. Each chef will partner with a local cheesemaker and host a one-of-a-kind three-course dinner. You’ll join the featured cheesemaker at a private table for 12. Tickets: $75 per person.
Additional sponsors of the First Annual Wisconsin Original Cheese Festival include: BelGioioso Cheese, Fromagination, Dairy Business Innovation Center, Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, and World Import Distributors. Thanks to everyone for their support and I hope to see all of my Cheese Underground readers at the festival!
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Making Cheese with Brenda Jensen

Cheesemaker Brenda Jensen is the kind of person you like more the longer you know her. Passionate, innovative and dedicated to growing Wisconsin’s sheep dairy industry, Brenda is a world-changer.

She’s my kind of gal.

I had the utmost honor to spend two days with her and her husband, Dean, this past week, learning more about their sheep dairy farm and creamery in the heart of Amish country in western Wisconsin near Westby. (The Jensens just added a guest bed & breakfast suite to their farmhouse, which they plan to make available to people who want to stay overnight, see the farm, and milk sheep or help make cheese).
In addition to being sustainable land stewards in their farming practices, as well as heightening the reputation of Wisconsin quality cheeses (Hidden Springs just won 8 awards at the 2009 American Cheese Society for fresh and aged sheep’s milk cheeses), the Jensens act as THE local liaison between the area’s growing Amish population and the rest of the county’s residents.

Over dinner Wednesday night, I learned they’ve taken countless Amish women to the hospital to have babies, transported many an Amish broken bone to the local doctor, and even spent hours making pancakes for out-of-town Amish families that magically appear at their neighbor’s farm for weddings and funerals, expecting to be fed. Most people would look on these duties as burdens, but the Jensens don’t – they know they have the honor of being asked by the Amish to do these things for them. It’s hard to garner the trust of an Amish farmer, but the Jensens have done it.
Being part of the Amish community has also helped the Jensens. Each morning and night, Amish neighbor John Henry and his 5-year-old daughter, Lydia Ann, walk to the Jensens to do the morning and night milking. Little Lydia Ann runs barefoot out to the pasture to fetch the sheep while John Henry sets up for milking inside the parlor. No bigger than the sheep she is rounding up, Lydia Ann does an amazing job — I caught a picture of her as she walked back to the parlor Wednesday night, trying to respect the Amish custom of not taking pictures of their faces.

In the morning, I got the chance to see John Henry’s farm, as I rode with Dean to pick up milk for morning cheesemaking (Brenda buys sheep milk from John Henry to supplement her own herd’s production). Dean piled a half dozen stainless steel cans in the back of the pickup and we drove about 1/4 mile to John Henry’s farm, where his wife and six children were finishing the morning milking. We (and by we, I mean Dean and John’s oldest son) loaded100-pound cans of milk onto the pickup and we were off. Then it was back to Dean & Brenda’s creamery to transport their milk from the parlor in stainless steel cans to the creamery, about 40 feet away.
This trip was special, as my daughter, Avery, decided to come along. Turns out she’s a pretty amazing apprentice cheesemaker. While we were waiting for the milk to heat up in Brenda’s micro 200-gallon vat, Avery helped do all of the milk testing and then helped measure the cultures and mix the rennet. We were making a batch of Ocooch Mountain, an aged sheep milk cheese that just won a second place in its class at ACS.

The first few hours of cheesemaking consists of a lot of waiting around for milk to heat, cultures to work, and rennet to set. To keep us busy (and to keep Avery awake), Brenda had us wash and flip cheeses in her cave until it was time to cut the curd. Then we all took turns using the knives to swoop through the pudding-like curd mass, breaking it up into chunks of curds and whey. (I attempted to relate this process to Avery via the “Little Miss Muffet” nursery rhyme, — “Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey” — but alas, was greeted only with an eye roll from my soon-to-be-teenager. Oh well, I tried.)
After a 10-minute “healing” period for the curd, we all got elbow deep in the vat, scooping and breaking up curd by hand as the paddles slowly made their way from one end to the other. Here’s a short video of Avery getting her hands into the curds and whey for the first time in her life (she at first thought it was slimy, but after a couple of seconds, really got into it):

After another 30-minute wait, then it was time to release the weights, flip the cheeses inside the forms once more, and then put the rounds back into the press, where they were pressed overnight. (As a write this, Brenda is probably taking the final product from the forms and salting the rounds — bummer that we’re not there!).
Making cheese with people like Brenda reminds me of how amazing it really is that a big tub of milk can be transformed into cheese in less than 8 hours. Very cool. Thanks, Brenda & Dean for a great couple of days. I’ll send Avery your way in a few years for her apprentice cheesemaker hours. 🙂
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ACS Best in Show

The world of American artisan cheese has a new reigning king. Winning Best of Show out of 1,327 cheeses at the 2009 American Cheese Society annual competition tonight in Austin, Texas, is … insert virtual drum roll … Rogue River Blue, crafted by by David Gremmels and Cary Bryant at Rogue Creamery in Central Point, Oregon.

Made seasonally from autumn into early winter from the milk of grass-fed cows, Rogue River Blue is as beautiful as it is delicious. This raw-milk cheese is aged for up to a year in the creamery’s special aging rooms, which were constructed to simulate the ancient caves in Roquefort, France. The beauty of Rogue River Blue, however, is that it reflects its own region’s terroir, with flavors hinting of sweet woodsy pine, wild ripened berries, hazelnuts, morels and pears.
To preserve the cheese, the folks at Rogue River hand wrap each wheel in grape leaves harvested from nearby Carpenter Hill Vineyards. The leaves are soaked in Clear Creek’s Pear Brandy and tied with raffia. Bryant and Gremmels say the grape leaves add additional complexity to the terroir-driven flavors of the cheese and preserve its moist, creamy texture. They’re absolutely right. Rogue River Blue is an exceptional cheese and I’m so happy for Bryant and Gremmels.
Rounding out the Best in Show awards were Cowgirl Creamery, California, which took Second Place Best in Show with its Red Hawk, a perennial favorite and a previous overall Best in Show winner at the 2003 ACS Show. Tying for third-place Best in Show were Carr Valley Cheese, Wisconsin, with its mixed milk Cave Aged Mellage, and Consider Bardwell Farm in Vermont, with its Rupert, a raw Jersey cow’s milk cheese.
Overall, Wisconsin fared quite well in the competition. Of 1,327 total entries, Wisconsin cheesemakers scored 92 awards, more than any other state, including 24 firsts, 34 seconds and 34 third places. Cheesemakers from 197 companies in 32 U.S. states, Canada and Mexico were represented.
In addition to taking Third Place Best of Show, Carr Valley’s Master Cheesemaker Sid Cook landed 19 ribbons. Cheesemaker Brenda Jensen of Hidden Springs Creamery, Westby, captured the second most ribbons for Wisconsin, with a total of 8 awards for her fresh and aged sheep’s milk cheeses. Holland’s Family Cheese took home the next most awards with six ribbons for its range of Dutch-style Goudas.
In summary, first place ribbons for Wisconsin cheesemakers went to:
• BelGioioso Cheese Inc., Denmark: Burrata
• Carr Valley Cheese, LaValle: Four-Year Cheddar, Cave Aged Mellage, Cocoa Cardona
• Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese: Les Frères Reserve
• Edelweiss Creamery: St. Mary’s Grass-Fed Gouda
• Hidden Springs Creamery, Westby: Driftless Honey Lavender, Farmstead Feta
• Holland’s Family Cheese, Thorp: Marieke Gouda Clove
• Klondike Cheese, Monroe: Dill Havarti, Lowfat Feta
• Meister Cheese, Muscoda: Roasted Red Pepper Mozzarella
• Montchevre-Betin, Belmont: Mini Log Flavored with Honey
• Organic Valley, La Farge: European Style Cultured Butter, Pepper Jack Cheese
• Pasture Pride Cheese, Cashton: Redstone, Guusto
• Roth Käse USA, Monroe: St. Otho, Gran Queso, Valfino
• Sartori Foods, Plymouth: Merlot BellaVitano, Black Pepper BellaVitano, SarVecchio Asiago, Pastoral Blend
Congrats to all the winners!! Can’t wait to sample all of these cheeses at Saturday night’s Festival of Cheese. I’ve got a pocket full of Lactaid and I’m not afraid to use it.
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Live from ACS: Mexican Cheeses

While the American Cheese Society is routinely touted as showcasing cheeses from all of North America, rarely does a Mexican cheese make an appearance. While the ACS does have a category for Hispanic Style Cheeses, the furthest south a winner’s ever been declared is from Texas, and even that happens rarely — for example, Roth Kase in Wisconsin won the category last year with its Gran Queso.

That’s why I jumped at the chance to attend today’s Mexican Artisan Cheese session, featuring three Mexican cheesemakers (a total of seven were scheduled to attend, but four were denied visas). Each cheesemaker told their story in Spanish and an interpreter translated for the room of about 150 attendees. Turns out the Mexicans are making some pretty interesting artisan cheeses, and we got to taste five of them — all shipped to Austin, Texas, special for this session.
Maria De Jesus Lopez of Lacteos Acatic brought her Adobera, which we Americans typically label as Queso Fresco. It is fresh cheese with a mild, slightly salty flavor. Maria says this is the most commonly used Hispanic-style cheese in Mexico. It has a soft, crumbly texture that softens, but does not melt when heated. This cheese is based on the Spanish cheese Burgos. Soft and breakable rather than crumbly, it has a grainy feel and very mild, fresh acidity. The cheese is typically used for topping or filling in cooked dishes.
Maria and her family started making Mexican artisan cheeses in the state of Jalisco, Mexico in 1998. Jalisco is in the western part of the country and is the nation’s largest dairy farming region. She makes “Old World recipes” honoring the cheeses her mother and grandmother enjoyed, including quesadilla cheese, Panela and Adobera. Mexico has two markets for cheese – a) commodity cheese for the masses and b) artisan cheese for the locals, says Dr. Guadalupe Rodriguez-Gomez, who worked with moderator Laurie Greenberg to host the panel.
But Maria’s family-owned company and others like it are facing competition, and that competition is — yep, you guessed it — us. Global corporations including Kraft and Nestle are pumping out millions of pounds of imitation Mexican cheese made with milk protein concentrate instead of raw fluid milk, and undercutting the national artisan cheesemakers. Last year alone, the Mexican government imported 24 million tons of American-made cheese into their country — most of it commodity Hispanic cheese manufactured by corporate giants.
One local cooperative in Jalisco is trying to compete. The Centro Lechero Cooperative de Los Altos consists of 62 local dairy farms and was incorporated in 1990. They produce between 80,000 and 100,000 liters of milk a day, with 50,000 liters going into daily cheese production (the rest is sold as fluid milk).
We had the honor of trying this cooperative’s Cotija cheese, a hard, crumbly Mexican cheese used as an all-purpose grating or crumbling cheese. Jesus Duron, cheesemaker, said his dairy farmers banded together to create cheeses in an effort to obtain more value from their milk. Their Cotija cheese is excellent – just the right amount of salt and it crumbles beautifully.
The third and final Mexican cheesemaker we heard from was Rodolfo Navarro, third generation cheesemaker at Quesos Navarro, his family’s dairy plant in Jalisco. Founded in 1958, this is a large operation, even by American standards. We tried two of Rodolfo’s cheeses — a six month Cheddar and an Adobera. I had never heard of Mexican cheddar before and didn’t realize it was being made south of the border.
Turns out Rodolfo’s grandfather originally had a contract with Kraft Foods way back when Kraft actually was interested in making Mexican cheese in Mexico. Eventually the relationship ended, but the Navarros kept producing Cheddar. Today, they are the largest Cheddar producer in Mexico. Rodolfo describes his cheddar as being made in the British-style and it is quite good.
Overall, similar to America, cheese consumption is up in Mexico. Dr. Gomez reports a 12 percent increase since 2000 in the amount of cheese Mexicans are eating. “We prefer cheeses that taste like the old times,” Dr. Gomez said. “We’re seeing a revival of traditional cheeses here in Mexico. It’s very heartening.”
Many thanks to the Mexican delegation for travelling to ACS this year and showcasing their cheeses! Maybe they’ll even take home a few awards for their work … we’ll find out tomorrow night at the 2009 ACS Awards Ceremony. Stay tuned for the results!