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GOURMET NEWS MAY 2016 www.gourmetnews.com NEWS & NOTES 9 two-year-old Grand Cru Surchoix. The fourth member of the Grand Cru family, Grand Cru Private Reserve is made from heat-treated raw milk for a cheese that re- tains even more of the complex flavors of the pasture. Grand Cru Private Reserve has enough awards and honors to its credit to have earned its way to eminence even in this rank of the nobility. Emmi Roth's newest cheese, intro- duced just this year, is Prairie Sunset, a relaxed and undemanding cheese in- spired by the French Mimolette. With sweet flavors, undertones of butter- scotch, and bright golden color, Prairie Sunset is not a cheese that requires you to think about whether or not you like it, and it will very definitely brighten up a cheese board. After a lunch that showed off a daz- zling range of Menck's culinary skills and the versatility of the Emmi Roth cheeses, we reboarded the bus for the trip to our next cheesemaker. Here and there, the occasional crow pecked along the stubble rows and dairy cows lounged in lots near their barns, barely looking up as the bus passed, swaying like Scarlett O'Hara in a hoop skirt along two-lane county roads named with letters of the alphabet rather than with numbers. The sky turned from a washed-out blue dappled with mares' tail clouds to a dismal gray. Streams and lakes meandered lazily past leafless trees in a landscape that began to speak more insistently of Wis- consin's glaciated prehistory, and when the bus stopped, we disembarked into a wind that had surely originated over an Arctic ice cap, and edged our way into the tiny reception area at Uplands Cheese, where Cheesemaker Andy Hatch met us at the door with plastic booties, hair nets and disposable lab coats. Uplands Cheese is the farmstead pro- ducer of Pleasant Ridge Reserve, one of the most highly respected cheeses made in the United States. Made only in the summer with grass-fed milk and aged up to two years, it is Hatch's interpretation of traditional Alpage cheeses like Beau- fort and Gruyere L'Elivaz. In some years, he also makes Rush Creek Reserve, a soft ripened cheese wrapped in spruce bark that is made only in late fall, after the Up- lands cows have begun eating hay instead of the summer pasture grasses, and only if Hatch is moved to do so. A farmstead producer is one who makes cheese on the same farm where the animals that produce the milk are raised. Farmstead producers are unusual in Wis- consin, where cheesemaking is usually done in factories served by multiple fam- ily dairy farms, each usually with around 130 cows. Hatch and his partner, Scott Mericka, farm 300 acres here and milk 150 cows. While Hatch makes the cheese, Mericka looks after the herd. The only cows milked here were born here, and all of the milk produced on the farm is made into its cheeses. Bring any group of American farmstead cheese producers together into the same room, and it won't be long before your imagination begins to fill in the cassocks and candles as they begin explicating in unison their creed that their cheese is the product of their pastures. Behind their cheese is milk, they will tell you – fre- quently in so many words – and behind the milk is an animal and behind that an- imal is, well, okay, let's call it fertilizer. But that nourishes the grasses and the forbs in the fields that are strengthened by the minerals in the soil and the water. It's the calcium in the limestone soils that makes the calcium in milk that makes the calcium for strong bones in the person who eats the cheese. The cheese- makers' role here is to be good stewards of all of it, both the visible and the invis- ible, and to do their best to make a cheese that's a true expression of the entire land- scape in which they live. "Not all milks are created equal," Hatch said. "Every- thing we do – breeds of cows, when they calve, what they eat, is geared to the cheese.... We only serve one master." Hatch came to work at Uplands Cheese in 2007 after studying dairy at the Uni- versity of Wisconsin-Madison and an ap- prenticeship with Master Cheesemaker Gary Grussen. He went to work for Up- lands founders Mike Gingrich and Dan Patenaude, who'd bought the farm in 1994 with the idea of joining the separate dairy herds they'd been running as neigh- bors and managing them in a seasonal pasture-based system. In 2000, Gingrich and Patenaude had begun working with local cheesemakers to develop their own version of the ancient Alpine-style cheeses, and Pleasant Ridge Reserve was born. Hatch showed up and started beg- ging for a creamery job, and eventually, Gingrich and Patenaude caved and hired him. In 2010, Mericka showed up to ap- prentice with the herd. The two bought the property from Gingrich and Pate- naude two years ago. "They grew slowly and kept doing things that I consider the right way," Hatch said. "Our intention is to not change the way we do things.... We still don't keep up with demand, so there's no incentive to compromise." The Uplands Cheese herd lives in the pasture year-round, grazing its way through a succession of small pastures di- vided by electric fencing. They're moved from one pasture to another every 12 hours, so that they're always eating grass that's growing at full vitality, neither grazed too short to recover quickly nor left to grow until its exhausted and its protein content has begun to decline. In the winter, they're fed hay raised on the farm. In the spring, when the grass begins to grow again, they're provided with less and less hay until the fields are able to support all of their nutritional needs once again. The cows are all dry during the winter. Calves are born outside in the fields, all at about the same time in April. "It's bet- ter for the cows. It's better for the land, and it's better for the farmer," Hatch said. It is, however, a farming method that pro- duces less milk than conventional meth- ods in which dairy cows are housed in barns, are bred for the sole purpose of maximizing their productivity and calve year-round to provide a consistent milk supply. The Uplands cows produce about half the milk of a modern Holstein. "It's hard to make a run at it selling commod- ity milk. But when you add value to it with the cheese, you can make it work," Hatch said. "This was not a nouveau con- cept." Once the grass has come in, and the cows have been eating it exclusively for a few days, Hatch starts making Pleasant Ridge Reserve around the first of May. The cows' evening milk is held in a tank overnight, and the morning milk comes in on top of it, hot from the cow. When the last cow is milked in the morning, the farmer taps on the creamery window, the cheesemaker turns the tap to empty the tank, and the milk flows into the cheese vat at 70 degrees. There are a few aspects that matter in the vat: fat content, microbial content, moisture and pH, Hatch said. "We think about what we're doing in here is just nailing it technically," Hatch said. "The magic is latent in the milk itself. It comes to expression in the caves." After the cheese has coagulated, the curd is pressed under the whey for about an hour, and the whey is then drained off. The curd is cut by hand, stuffed into forms and stacked into a press overnight. "The first guy in the next morning pulls the cheese out of the forms, dry salts it and packs it away, cleans the forms and gets ready to do it all again," Hatch said. "Then there's plenty of work to do in the caves.... The cheese is brushed by hand every day for the first three weeks of its life. It's a lot of work. That's one reason why cheese like ours is expensive... because we have to touch it a lot." As the wheels cure, they move through a succession of aging rooms where tem- perature and humidity are tailored to their changing needs. This is the process called affinage, the centuries-old and ex- tremely labor-intensive process of caring for the cheese as it ages. While it costs about 3 cents a pound to age the average Wisconsin cheese, it costs Hatch 28 to 32 cents a pound to age Pleasant Ridge over the year or two it'll spend in his caves. "The old-fashioned way of doing things is now fancy," Hatch said. "You just can't fake the flavor development you get.... we don't do it this way out of nostalgia. If there was an easier way to do it, we would." Cheesemaking continues until the dog days of summer, when there's no rain, the weather gets hot, and the cows' milk pro- ductivity drops as they lounge around in the shade all day, avoiding sunburn and trying not to break a sweat. When the rains come again in mid-August, the weather cools, the cows go back to work, and cheesemaking begins again for a few weeks. When the pastures turn brown in Sep- tember, the cows start eating hay. They're still producing milk, but it's milk that lacks the complex flavors that develop when the cows are eating a diet of mixed grasses, so Hatch won't use it to make his Pleasant Ridge Reserve. The fall milk does have a higher butter- fat content, though, so what it lacks it complexity, it gains in gravitas. Hatch thought about that and decided a couple of years ago follow the example of the Swiss dairy farmers who make soft mold- ripened cheeses with their fall milk and try his hand at a cheese that he named Rush Creek Reserve. "Pleasant Ridge is made in the fields, and Rush Creek is made in the caves," Hatch said. Fermentation by the molds and yeasts that naturally feast on milk sugars devel- ops flavors not present in the fresh raw milk as the spruce bark-wrapped cheese ages for just a few weeks. The flavors de- velop and deepen and the cheese's texture mellows until the microbes have ex- hausted their food supply. That's when the soft cheese is at its peak. A little later, and the beneficial microbes begin to die off, which creates off flavors and odors and a decline in the cheese's texture. Rush Creek Reserve is aged just longer than the 60 days required by Food and Drug Administration regulations for raw milk cheeses and then released to the market. It is one of the most sought-after cheeses in the American specialty cheese world, and because it's only made in win- ter and doesn't last, it is necessarily ex- tremely seasonal, and in the early Wisconsin spring, what Hatch had on hand to offer the food editors was a taste of the last of his two-year-old Pleasant Ridge Reserve, which is as old as the cheese gets, and samples of his one-year- old Pleasant Ridge Reserve that's going to market now. "Everything we make in one calendar year is sold the next calendar year," Hatch said. "The name of the game is to sell each wheel at its peak.... For me, it's the most fun part of the work. It's like watching your kids grow up." GN

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