These past few days I went to Wisconsin on a Cheese Tour arranged through the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. We visited the following cheese makers: Widmer Cheese, Crave Brothers Farmstead, Carr Valley Cheese, Meister Cheese, Uplands Cheese, Hook's Cheese, Bleu Mont Dairy, and Sassy Cow.
Windmer's Cheese Cellars was the first stop on our trip. Joe Widmer is a master cheese maker who learned the craft from his father who opened the cellars in 1922. They practice in the traditional swiss style of making cheese. They specialize in Wisconsin Brick Cheese and Colby Cheese. We were fortunate enough to taste several varieties including Colby, brick, Colby cheddar spread, 2 year old cheddar, 6 year old cheddar, jalapeños cheddar, caraway cheddar, and a vegetable cheddar.
The Crave Brothers Farmstead are doing quite amazing things in the field of cheese making. They built an anaerobic digestion system to produce energy from the organic waste into methane gas. This produces enough electricity to power the plant, the cheese plant, and neighboring houses in the town ship. We saw how the cheese was turned from raw milk, to pasteurized milk, to pulled and shaped mozzarella. We were able to taste their Les Frères cheese, which is a classic European style cheese that is cured to form a rich rind washed cheese. We sampled the cheese on a cheese block, and also baked with several varieties of mushrooms. Both very exquisite and brought out the creaminess of this cheese in different ways. We tried different preparations for mozzarella cheese including a stringed rope-part-skim cheese, and different sizes of fresh mozzarella cheeses.
Carr Valley Cheese is a larger cheese making facility. The multi certified master cheese maker Sid Cook created around 80 varieties of very different and distinct cheeses using sheep milk, goats milk, cows milk, and blending the varietals of milk. Some of the more interesting cheeses that I tried were the:
- Ba Ba Blue, a good sheeps milk cheese that is strong and smooth and easy to cook with.
- Marisa, a seasonal sheep milk cheese that had a sharp bite to it, but also a short finish.
- Virgin-Pine Native Blue Sheep, very musky earthy taste with a strong long after taste.
- Cardona, is a sweet caramel flavoured goat cheese with a slight nuttiness.
- Cave Aged Cardona, a goat cheese that gives a slightly more complex flavour profile due to being cave aged.
- Sweet Vanilla Cardona, very sweet vanilla flavour that out powers the cheese flavours with a thick rich finish to this goat milk cheese.
- Black Goat Truffle, strong earthy truffle flavour that out powers the cheese flavors.
- Cocoa Cardona, this goat cheese is rubbed with cocoa which gives the mellow cheese a gritty feel on your tongue.
- Snow White Goat Cheddar, this cave aged goat cheese is smooth with a nice bite to it.
- 4 Year Cheddar, simple smooth cows milk cheddar with a slight tang from the aging.
- Bread Cheese, this baked cows milk cheese is smooth when served cold and tastes like a grilled cheese sandwich when baked. This is inspired by the Finnish cheese called Juustoleipa.
- Cranberry Chipotle Cheddar, a cows milk cheese with a slight mild sweat crunch to it.
- Apple Smoked Garlic Cheddar, a balanced smokey flavoured cows cheese.
- Creama Kasa, this cows cheese is very rich and at room temperature is very spreadable. It is a good cheese for baking.
- Gouda, this aged cows milk cheese has a light flavour with a smooth fresh finish to it.
- Benedictine, this sheep/goat/cow mixture is similar to a limburger cheese with a dry moldy earthy taste.
- Bessie's Blend,this combination of goat and cows milk is cured for four months and produces a nutty and simple yet full tasting cheese.
- Mobay, this is similar to the French Morbier with a creamy layer of sheep milk cheese and a white layer of goat milk cheese separated by a layer of grape vine ash down the center. Gives a very flavourful and complete palate.
Uplands Cheese was probably one of my favourite cheese makers to visit. Andy Hatch makes cheese seasonally in the spring through fall and spends his winters occasionally still apprenticing with cheese makers in Europe. They raise their own cows and grass feed their cattle which provides a very pure unpasteurized raw milk that they make the cheese from. They have two types of cheese the Pleasant Ridge Reserve which is produced from the flavours present in the spring and summer grass and the Rush Creek Reserve that is made only in the autumn which draws from the distinct flavour profile that is present with the grass from the mixture of the pastures and the winters dry hay. The Pleasant Ridge Reserve is probably my favourite cheese that I tasted on this trip.
Hook's Cheese is a small operation that has been making cheese for over 35 years. They make small batches of cheddar and of blue cheese, for the farmers market season they also will make parmesan and swiss. They are known most for their award winning blue cheeses, the Paradise Blue and the Tilston Point were the ones I preferred but I am also not a huge blue lover. The complexity in the aging process of the cheddars is very astounding from the 2 year to the 12 year, I settled on purchasing the 10 year as the 12 year was a little too sharp or had too much of a bite for me.
Bleu Mont Dairy was easily my favourite cheese maker. Willi produced my second favourite cheese, but the complex flavours he achieves with his cave aged bound cheddar is really quite amazing. The other favourite of mine is the Renegade Alpine cheese which is aged in a room that is just overpowered by the ammonia that is released in the first few weeks as the cheese ages in the unique caves that Willi built. His caves are built underground covered by 10 feet of ground on top of the three chamber caves. There is a small entry way work area and two curing rooms, one that is filled with the strong ammonia produced by the raw milk Renegade Cheese. The second room has the mellow musky smell of the lard covered cloth bound cheddar that fill this room at different stages of aging. Here is a good article on the cheese maker from Cheese by Hand.
Sassy Cow is a creamery that produces mainly milk and ice cream. They produce a string cheese and a oaxaca cheese that Ceaser makes in the traditional Mexican style of cheese making that his grandmother taught him. His hand pulled string cheese has a unique taste and texture of a vertically pulled cheese that really aligns the proteins much more successfully then a machine would, a success that is transfered to the taste of the cheese. The milk and ice cream use all natural ingredients that is pasteurized and is the freshest creamiest I've tasted. They have two different herds, one organic and one regular which they offer in their milk products. The creamery has a very community and education based approach to milk and cheese making which shows greatly from their layout of the facility.
