Small Cheese, Big Taste
Out of the factory and into the handmade world of artisanal cheese
By Jay D. Rumisek
Mike Gingrich, owner of Uplands Cheese in Dodgeville, Wis., believes in an ancient way of doing things. But it wasn’t always this way. “I sold milk from my dairy farm to a cheese plant down the road for about 30 years,” he says. After a while, he decided that the industrial nature of food had simply gotten out of hand, and figured that he could do his part to bring it back under small-scale control. “We made our first cheese—Pleasant Ridge Reserve—in 2000. It won Best in Show at the American Cheese Society conference that very year, and it has won many awards since.” It’s the only kind of cheese the people at Uplands Cheese make, but they make it well.
Since the origin of cheese predates the written word, there’s no way to be sure just exactly when or where milk was first allowed to curdle, harden, and possibly mold with the express purpose of being eaten. But cheesemaking was certainly big business once the Roman Empire standardized and spread the practice.
During the Dark Ages, Rome’s influence waned, allowing (or perhaps forcing) individual towns and farmers to modify existing techniques and flavors using what livestock, terrain and equipment they had at hand. The result? Europe was littered with hundreds (possibly even thousands) of cheeses not previously known to mankind. These cheeses formed local identities, and, over time, became integral to defining the regional cultures that produced them.
Of course, it was the United States that took cheese industrial. In 1851, an upstate New York farmer chose to capitalize on the assembly-line craze, and a culinary corner was turned. By World War II, American factory cheesemaking overtook small, farm-based ventures almost entirely. Today, some Americans are unaware that there’s an option to processed cheese. Yet we’re the world’s largest cheese producer.
Over the past few decades, American cheesemakers have been inspired by the artisanal cheeses of Europe. “I worked in Europe for six years,” says Bob Stonebrook of Aniata Cheese in San Diego, “and caught the cheese bug there.” As far as he’s concerned, it’s a bug that should be as communicable as possible. “Aniata’s mission is to expose our customers to great artisanal cheeses,” he says. Part of the key to grabbing the attention of Americans is providing the best examples available.
Clearly, Pleasant Ridge Reserve is one cheese that’s helping the new market for artisanal varieties come to fruition. But don’t let the fancy name fool you—Pleasant Ridge Reserve is no new type of cheese. “It’s made like Beaufort cheese, a variety out of the southeastern French Alps,” says Gingrich, “and all the ingredients are local.”
At Uplands Cheese, the focus has always been staying close to home. “We make the cheese right here on the farm. It never gets exposed to outside mold or bacteria.” At every stage a human being is involved. “Making cheese by hand is definitely the best way to do it,” says Gingrich. “You can touch it, feel it, smell it every step of the way. And you can make adjustments as necessary, to ensure it will turn out the best it possibly can.”
Where artisanal cheese is concerned, that’s really the key. “It’s important that our customers at Aniata get a cheese in great condition, so they know what the real thing is all about,” says Stonebrook. “A large part of that is taking care of the product in order not to screw up what the animals and cheesemakers have created.”
The passion of people like Gingrich and Stonebrook reflects a larger trend in America: factory-born fanaticism for sameness is being shoved aside in favor of variety—variety of flavors, variety of textures, variety of the locales reflected in cheeses. “Artisanal cheese seems to be on the same trajectory as wine and microbrews,” says Stonebrook. “The American Cheese Society has seen exponential growth in the number of small American cheesemakers, and the good ones seem to have a strong market.”
Read Part 2 of the story here