Great American Cheese Collection

The Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Artisanal cheeses grow in popularity

By John Silcox
The Journal Gazette

Ahh, the power of cheese. Indeed. We love it piled high on a pizza, melted on a hamburger, sliced up on a cracker.

Yet, for most of us, including yours truly, what we think of as cheese rarely ventures beyond the Day-Glo cheddar we sprinkle on our tacos or the processed Velveeta we stir into our macaroni.

Sure, we may happen upon the occasional slice of provolone on a deli sandwich, or some crumbled blue cheese in a salad.

But we wouldn't know a good gouda or a brilliant brie if it bit us on the backside. And if we did, we'd probably assume it came from some faraway place.

Giles Schnierle, a fine cheese distributor in Chicago and a connoisseur of domestic cheeses, aims to change all that.

He'll be at Joseph Decuis in Roanoke on Aug. 21 for a special cheese and wine tasting event. Sid Cook, owner of Carr Valley Cheese in Wisconsin, will be with him.

These men are at the forefront of what Schnierle describes as "America's artisanal cheese renaissance."

By artisanal, he means hand-crafted, small-batch, Old World-style cheese, made, in some cases, on the very farms where the milk is produced.

Cheese has been made this way in Europe for hundreds of years, Schnierle says. But in the United States, cheesemakers were mostly hobbyists, he says.

While there was always a place for the mass-produced cheddars and monterey jacks of the world, it wasn't until the early 1990s that American artisanal cheese began to really make its mark.

In many ways, Schnierle sees parallels between the current rise of American domestic artisanal cheeses and the California wine boom of the late 1970s.

As more Americans traveled to Europe and enjoyed cheese courses, they began to seek them out in the United States.

Some high-end supermarkets and gourmet specialty stores started carrying complex and delicious domestic cheeses.

And several award-winning books chronicling the rise of American cheese, including "The New American Cheese" by Laura Werlin, and "The Cheese Plate" by New York maitre fromager Max McCalmand and David Gibbons, helped fuel the trend.

Soon, chefs across the country were adding cheese courses or match flights of wine with cheese. (Joseph Decuis has a cheese dessert course now on the menu, and its popularity is growing).

Once chefs started recognizing the potential, it was only a matter of time before it started to trickle down to the consumers.

Today, there are literally hundreds of American artisanal cheeses to select from, with cheesemakers adding to their rosters all the time.

Schnierle's company, the Great American Cheese Collection in Chicago, carries cheeses from 65 different producers, making it the single largest source of artisanal American cheeses.

He sells primarily to other distributors, white tablecloth restaurants and specialty-food shops around the country. The cheeses range in price from $4.20 to $34 a pound.

"There's a huge interest in cheese," says Cook of Carr Valley, "especially the ones with very intense flavor profiles. People want to eat less and taste more."

"When you taste the cheese, you remember the flavor profiles; it reminds you of a cheese you ate five years ago, 10 years ago . . .'I tasted a cheese like that in France.' It's wonderful."

Cook is a fourth-generation Wisconsin cheesemaker.

His great-grandfather was churning out cheddar 100 years ago, and Cook has been around the business from the time he was little.

When he was a boy, he would stand on a 5-gallon pail and stir a corner of the vat with a rake so the curd wouldn't stick.

By the time he was 10, he was making his own vats. At 16, he had his cheesemaker's license.

After college, Cook briefly considered a career in law before deciding to follow his father into the family business.

"I'm very glad I did," says the 51-year-old. "It's been a great life. I absolutely love it."

Cook oversees two cheese plants, 18 miles apart, in south central Wisconsin - producing old-fashioned banded cheddar wheels at one, and hand-crafted artisanal cheeses at the other.

He'll make 5 million pounds of cheese this year.

"We can make any kind of cheese," he says. "We have a lot of flexibility."

In all, Carr Valley produces 43 different kinds of specialty and artisanal cheeses, including 15 or 20 that are Cook's own recipe.

These are rustic-looking cheeses, irregular in shape, cave-aged, and made from all types of milk: cow, goat and sheep's milk, or in some cases, all three.

Cook sells his cheeses at three retail shops, one at each plant and one off-premises, by mail-order and though his Web site, www.carrvalleycheese.com .

At his La Valle plant, Cook turns out his prize-winning artisan cheddars, hand-wrapped in cheese-cloth and waxed in red, green and black coatings, the color varying with the age - which can be up to eight years.

The apple smoked cheddar is a white wheel, smoked over apple wood in Carr Valley's smokehouse and rubbed with paprika before further curing. It has a burnt orange finish with a soft, sweetly smoked flavor.

The Virgin Pine Cheddar Blue is a cave-aged cheddar pierced with needles to let the mold grow.

In his plant in Mauston, Cook focuses on creating more innovative cheeses, many of which are are small-batch, mixed-milk cheese, meaning they consist of cow's milk and also sheep and or goat milk.

Mobay, for example, is made with a stripe of ash sandwiched between a slice of goat milk cheese on one side and sheep milk cheese on the other. "You have three different flavor profiles - very interesting cheese."

Gran Canaria, which is aged three years in olive oil, is robust and pungent with a crumbly body like Parmesan.

Benedictine, a wash-rind cheese made with sheep, goat and cow's milk, has an earthy, intense flavor. "It just explodes in your mouth."

Marisa, another mixed milk cheese, this one named for Cook's daughter, is made from 100 percent sheep's milk.

It's creamy white in color, with a sweet flavor and stringent aftertaste - picante and spicy. Not unlike it's namesake.

"That would be her," Cook says. "She's a handful. Fifteen, you know. You know how that goes."

Like fine wine, a fine cheese is a product of its environment, Cook says.

The grasses the animals eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe - all contribute to the quality of the milk they produce and hence the complexity of their product.

"You can make great cheese with great milk, but you can't make great cheese with poor milk," he says.

Joseph Decuis' cheese and wine event is from 6 to 8 p.m. Cheese from Carr Valley, as well as Bitter Sweet Plantation Dairy in Gonzales, La., and Old Europe Cheese in Benton Harbor, Mich., will be featured.

Cost is $50. For reservations, call 260-672-1715.