Tag Archives: wisconsin trip 2011

Wisconsin Day 3: Fromagination reading

Posted on July 18, 2011 | 1 comment

I’m pretty much at the end of promoting my book via readings – one can only milk this kind of thing for so long – but I really had to do some Wisconsin events before calling it a day.* I mean c’mon, Wisconsin… those people love their cheese. It means a lot to me when Wisconsin like me book.

Because really, I’m a Californian. Being a California cheese person among Wisconsin cheese people is like being a Californian in Oregon. At any gathering, someone in the Wisconsin dairy crowd will mock the “happy” California cows, a Californian will bring up the fact that California leads the nation in milk production, and it can get all West Side Story. Can’t we all just get along?

One person who I always get along with is Jeanne Carpenter of Cheese Underground and a million other cheese projects. She’s one of my favorite cheese people. How could she not be when she referred to me as the “Barbara Mandrell of the cheese counter”?** When I arrived at Fromagination for my reading she gave me an autographed copy of the Wisconsin Cheesemaker calendar. At the Cheddar Maker roundtable I had complained that we had been trying to get everyone’s picture signed at Rainbow but because we actively use the calendar, it had already gotten trashed. That’s the kind of person she is!

Fromagination is right on the Capitol Square in Madison, the site of all the huge protests against the coming corporate fascism. I spent the day in Madison walking around and having an old friend show me around the battlegrounds. “That’s where we snuck into the Capitol Building through the window…”***

My reading was full of friends and friends of friends… worker-owners of Union Cab? Hello! … WMMB acquaintance? Good to see you! … Quince and Apple? Welcome! … Writer friend of my ex’s sister? Great to meet you! My old cheese friend Steven was there too, working the counter. That was really special since I got to find out he worked for a company whose cheese book I mocked during my reading. It’s a small cheese world.

Oh Wisconsin, I love you.
reading at Fromagination

(If this entry seems a little out of date since I’ve been back form Wisconsin for a few weeks now, let’s just say that between losing multiple unposted blog entries and installing a new operating system on my computer, I’ve got a backlog of stuff. Timely writing is overrated in my opinion anyway. 😉 )

Written while listening to Flamingo 50

*Just for the record, I’m not seeking out more book events – 40+ is a lot – but I’m still happy to hear offers. I’m deeply sad that I can’t do this year’s Southern Festival of Cheese, for example, so Nashville, I owe you one. And NYC, I wouldn’t turn you down either.
**If I have a tombstone someday, this is what I’d like to have on it, please.
***It goes far beyond this – in every state in the union – but the Recall elections are coming. Do the right thing, Wisconsin.

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Wisconsin Day Three: Bleu Mont Cheddar

Posted on July 5, 2011 | 4 comments

After hanging out at Uplands Cheese I got back in the car and in less than an hour was at one of the most impressive human-made cheese caves I’ve ever been to. What an embarrassment of riches Wisconsin has! I said this at both my readings and it’s true: The Dunbarton Blue, Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Blue Mont Cheddar are not just good Wisconsin Cheeses, not just good American-made Cheeses, but stand up with any cheese in the world. And you can visit them all before lunch if you leave early enough in the day!

Willi Lehner makes a great traditional Cheddar even though he doesn’t even have a cheesemaking facility on premises. Heck, there’s plenty of places to make Cheddar in Wisconsin, but there’s only one cheese cave built into the hill of Blue Mounds, Wisconsin.

I just wish I had moved the shelf out of the way before I took the picture.
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And check out the inside! It’s beautiful!
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Longtime readers have seen me mock the use of “cave” (or “caaaaaaaav”) many times. It’s hard to resist when “cave-aged” often means “aged in a modern, strip-mall, temperature-controlled warehouse where the cheese may be cryovac’d anyways.” But caves — even ones built, not found, by cheese-agers — do have a lot of value. They prevent excess airflow, thus maintaining the environment of beneficial microbes that help the cheese develop flavor, and they control the temperature and humidity efficiently.

Willi just makes and ages amazing cheese. His Cheddar is grassy, bright, earthy, sharp, shardy, and milky sweet… one of my absolute favorites. There’s not a lot available – it’s hard to find even in Wisconsin – but if you see it, grab it.

Plus it’s the only cheese aging facility I’ve ever been to where Crocs are mandatory footwear.
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Wisconsin Day Three: Uplands Cheese

Posted on June 30, 2011 | 5 comments

The amazing thing about Wisconsin Cheesemakers is that there are so many great ones close together. The morning after the Gathering of the Cheddar Makers, I headed a half hour down the road to visit Uplands Cheese. Uplands is famous for being the only company to win the American Cheese Society Competition Best of Show more than once for the same cheese. Pleasant Ridge reserve has won three times, most recently last year.

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Long time cheesemaker/owner Mike Gingrich is in the process of turning over the operation to Andy Hatch but the cheese is as good as ever. Last year Uplands introduced their second cheese: the seasonal Rush Creek, a Vacherin Mont D’or-like, bark-wrapped, oozy bit of amazing.

Here’s Andy with some aging Pleasant Ridge Reserve:
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Unrelated to cheesemaking, Andy used to live directly below the infinity room* at House on the Rock. No one seemed happy when I brought up the proximity of Uplands and HOTR. C’mon dudes, embrace your culture!** Even if they are unwilling to acknowledge the camp-terroir of their region, the Uplands folks make great cheese. The Pleasant Ridge is Alpine style, nutty and grassy, more like a well-aged Comte than a Gruyere. Like Comte, it’s dry-salted instead of brined and it’s one of this country’s best full-flavored big cheeses. Being a grass-based operation, Uplands does not make cheese year-round and they sell all the cheese they make so, while not rare, you won’t find it everywhere.

This looks like a lot, but it’s not enough to meet demand from all the cheese buyers who want it. I could move in here, for sure:
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Every batch of Pleasant Ridge has a test wheel so the Uplands folks can see how the cheese is aging. You can see the core holes on this one:
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Lastly, Uplands Cheese is farmstead, meaning that all the milk comes from their own grass-based cows. Aren’t they cute?
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*The Infinity Room really is awesome.

As is the carousel:
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**Though this lack of interest in the local art forms perhaps explains the crappy “monument” to Cheddar that I wrote about in the “Ruminations” section the current issue of Culture Magazine

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Cheddar Mill

Posted on June 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is so awesome it deserves a post of its own… Master Cheesemaker Bruce Workman and Roelli Cheese’s Chris Roelli feed cheddared slabs into the mill to make Cheddar curds. Whether a cheese is cheddared (pictures in the last post) and milled determines — to many people — whether a given cheese is a “real” Cheddar. Many makers these days use a “stirred-curd” method which is less labor intensive.

These folks are traditionalists here:

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Wisconsin Day Two: Gathering of the Cheddar Makers

Posted on June 28, 2011 | 4 comments

I went to Wisconsin mostly to attend the gathering of cheddar makers hosted by Chris Roelli of Dunbarton Blue fame. I went partly because Chris invited me, partly because I’m doing research for my next book and partly because I am too much of a cheese geek to turn down the opportunity to hang out with an estimated 350 years of cheesemaking experience when I get the chance.

This event was actually a follow up to the visit of a bunch of Neal’s Yard folks last year. Someone floated the idea of setting up another gathering where a couple of different vats of cheese — one clothbound, traditional-style Cheddar and one 40-lb block-style Cheddar — would be made so everyone could taste the differences. Slightly different cultures and recipes were used, but the milk was the same. Hopefully, a year from now, I’ll get invited to the tasting event as well!

Here’s Chris Roelli working while a bunch of master cheesemakers give him a hard time:
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Watching people make cheese is awesome. Making the cheese is hard work. Cheddar is especially hard work if one does it the way it is traditionally done in the US, cutting up the coagulated curds into slabs and piling them on top of each other to press out more whey in order to give the cheese the texture we expect. The cheese room is humid and there is a lot of lifting, cutting, and pushing that needs to be done from non-optimal ergonomic positions.

I was lounging off to the side with my camera. I had a week off from non-ergonomic lifting:
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Slabs of curd, Cheddaring in their vat
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The thing that struck me, being in a room with so much experience and mastery of craft, is how California (my home state) lacks this kind of generation-to-generation passed down, hands-on knowledge. With the passing of Ig Vella recently, this issue is even more acute. Ig was the resource to cheesemaking history in California for many, many people. In Wisconsin, being a third generation cheesemaker isn’t common, but it’s not like finding a raw milk Brie either. Widmer Cellars, Roelli Cheese, Carr Valley, and Hennings Cheese come to mind right away and a google search reveals many more who I’m less familiar with, their cheese not getting out West regularly.

Spending a day with cheese people, eating steak sandwiches, drinking New Glarus beer and talking cheese? A pretty great way to spend the day.

*Here’s the group shot that I stole from Jeanne Carpenter, a much better journalist than I. She wrote about the event as well so check it out. What I love about this picture is that it’s color coded. With the exception of Willi Lehner, everyone who makes cheese is wearing white and only the culture sales people, the distributors and the retails are wearing colors.RoelliCheddarDaygroupshot.small

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Wisconsin Day One: From urban to rural

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 6 comments

My first day in Wisconsin was all about transportation. I got a direct flight from SFO-Milwaukee — on what I later saw was a kinda scary airline — and my trip was fast and pleasant. I got my rental car in my after-flight daze and just said no to all the scare tactic extras (“If you don’t spend $24/day more for supplemental coverage we will leave you and your car in whatever ditch you drive into. In fact, if this situation arises we will hire a local farmer with a backhoe to bury you alive in the rental vehicle and then sue your estate for a new car. Would you like to add the supplemental insurance so we don’t have to do this?”) and was on my way.

In fact, very soon after landing I was driving out of Milwaukee, listening to their local punk station, and heading west to Schullsburg which is in the South West corner of the state, closer to Illinois and Iowa than Madison or Milwaukee.

I wasn’t just going there so I could experience Gravity Hill, that was an added benefit:

No, I was going to visit Chris Roelli who makes the Dunbarton Blue and attend a gathering of Cheddar makers for a day of cheesemaking, fellowship, and education. Driving through small town Wisconsin was a great way to acclimate to a few days of cheese talk.

Unfortunately, as I got to Darlington, where I was staying I realized my big city ways had not prepared me for small town life. It was 9:15, I hadn’t eaten and nothing was open. Well, nothing except for the gas station McDonalds, and it was about to close too. I had to think fast… cobble together a meal of Pringles, powder donuts, and cookies from the gas station mini mart, or get my first McDonalds meal in about 20 years.

I’m an American. I did what I had to do. This may be one of the only food blogs in the US where the author will admit in print that they ate fast food but there you go. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, the Big Mac tasted exactly the same as the hundreds of Big Macs I had growing up. Everything just seemed a little smaller than I remembered.

The mini mart did carry New Glarus beer so I bought a 6-pack of Spotted Cow to pair with my Big Mac just to prove I really was a snobby urbanite. It was terroirific.

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