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GOURMET NEWS JUNE 2016 www.gourmetnews.com NEWS & NOTES 1 0 washed-rind cheese, Widmer said. "It's a family recipe, our cheese." Widmer's picks up milk every day at local farms, and cheese is made every Monday through Saturday. The next day after it's picked up at the farm, the milk is pasteur- ized and beneficial lactic acid-producing bacteria are added to make Brick Cheese. After 35 to 40 minutes, veal rennet is added. "Thirty to 40 minutes later, it's thick like pudding," Widmer said. The curd is cut with two knives, one horizontal and one vertical, and then it's cooked and stirred slowly to ensure uniformity. "After we get this product cooked, we drain it down," he said. The cheese is scooped into forms, which are covered and weighted with bricks – Widmer still uses the bricks his grandfa- ther used. "We're staying authentic in all our products, which is pretty hard to do in this day and age, but we're adamant about it," Widmer said. "See the bricks up on the shelf? We make cheese like the Flint- stones." The brick stays on top of the mold for three hours, and then the cheese sits overnight in the forms before it goes into a brine solution the next day. "The brine gives the cheese flavor and helps to preserve it," Widmer said. "No shortcuts here." From the brine, it goes to a curing room, which is warm and humid to encourage growth of bacteria. Widmer ages his cheese on fiberglass shelves because the Food and Drug Administration told his father that he'd have to get rid of his wood shelves one day in the 1960s, when Joe Widmer himself was about 10 or 12 years old. "You remem- ber that fight about wood shelves a year or two ago? Well, that wasn't the first time. The FDA comes around to it every few years," Widmer said. The cheese requires a lot of extra care as it ages on the fiberglass because fiberglass isn't as friendly to the beneficial bacteria as wood is. After a week or 10 days, though, the cheese gets quite a lot of bacterial growth on its surface, which begins to change color from its natural white to a golden yellow. Four or five months later, it's reached its peak, and it's packaged in parchment paper and foil for sale. "Brick Cheese is probably America's first washed-rind cheese," Widmer said. The last stop on our tour was BelGioioso Cheese's Glenmore facility in Denmark, which turns out to be right down the road from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Francis Wall, the company's Director of Sales, a cheerful man dressed in a lab coat and hair net, met us in a conference room and asked us all for just one favor: "Mention provolone," he said. "It's a great cheese, but today, no one knows what provolone is supposed to taste like." Wall blames the mass market sand- wich shops for that – they ask their cus- tomers if they want cheese on their sandwich, and then they give them a slice of what they call provolone, and it has no taste, he said. He wasn't sure how he'd de- scribe the taste that he wants consumers to expect, except that their provolone should have a flavor as well as a texture. "When you taste ours, you get an appreciation of what provolone is supposed to taste like," he said. "Don't settle for imitation." B e l G i o i o s o Provolone has a mild flavor, but it adds a definite flavor to the sandwich, he said. "When you open our pack- age, you're going to get an aroma," he said. "It's that different, side by side, from any other provolone in the marketplace." This matters to him so deeply because provolone is part of BelGioioso Cheese's DNA. The company was started in the U.S. in 1979 by Errico Auricchio, whose family had been making cheese in Italy since the late 1800s. "When you're in Italy, you don't ask for provolone – you ask for Auricchio," Wall said. "That's how popular their pro- volone is.... Auricchio makes other cheeses, but it's the provolone that sets them apart." When Auricchio came to the U.S. from Italy, he brought along two cheesemakers, Mauro Rozzi and Gianni Toffolon, and the three of them went looking for the right milk for their Italian cheeses. They found it in Wisconsin, and set up shop in a rented factory in Wrightstown, about 25 miles west of the Glenmore plant we were stand- ing in. Today, BelGioioso Cheese operates eight facilities, seven in northeast Wiscon- sin and the eighth in New York, that make 27 varieties of Italian-style specialty cheeses. Rozzi and Toffolon are still in- volved with the company's cheesemaking today – making sure that BelGioioso's qual- ity stays high and developing new cheeses. Each of the BelGioioso plants is designed to make particular varieties of cheese from milk purchased from 200 family dairy farms, each within 30 miles or so of the plant that picks up its milk each day. Herd sizes range from 35 to 500 cows, and there's a waiting list of farmers who want to sell their milk to BelGioioso. "The farmer who has 35 cows still names his cows," Wall said. "They're names like Betsy and Susie, and they have them up on plaques on the wall. I always joke about the farm with the cow named Kicker because she kicks." He knows that because he grew up in this part of the country. "I know a lot of the farmers we pick up from, and our field men work directly with the farmers," he said. Each BelGioioso plant picks up milk from its particular farmers every day. The milk is tested before it leaves the farm to measure its protein and butterfat content and the somatic cell count, which is a meas- ure of how healthy the cows on that farm are. The somatic cell count is pretty much the same measurement your doctor looks at when he or she orders a blood cell count to see if you've got an infection. A high white blood cell count most likely means that you're sick. In the case of milk, the somatic cells include white blood cells, and when they're present in large numbers in the cow's milk, that most likely means that the cow is sick. BelGioioso pays for the milk based on the levels of protein, butterfat and the low somatic cell count that means the cows are generally healthy. The milk is also tested for antibiotics – the presence of any antibiotics in the milk means that it'll be re- jected entirely. Each of the BelGioioso plants is dedi- cated to a particular family of cheeses. In the case of the Glenmore facility, those are Fresh Mozzarella, Provolone, Mascarpone, Ricotta con Latte, Ricotta Salata and Man- teche, which is a gourd-shaped mild pro- volone that's filled with butter. Although both provolone and mozzarella each have their own recipe, they both belong to the pasta filata family – the family of Italian cheeses whose curd is stretched during the making, which gives them that gooey stretchiness that we love when they're melted on a pizza – and they're both made the same basic way. The milk comes in from the farm and is heated and the curd is stretched like taffy as its cooked. The curd is cut, and an ingredi- ent is added to coagulate it – enzymes or vinegar in the case of mozzarella and rennet for a provolone. Then it's left to sit for a while, and after it's coagulated, the whey is drained away, and it's shaped and cooled. Fresh mozzarella is then packaged, either in cups or buckets filled with lightly salted water, for a 37-day shelf life or in a Ther- moform package, which is a vacuum- packed plastic shell that cuddles around the cheese and gives it a 60-day shelf life. Bel- Gioioso sells about three times as much Thermo- f o r m - p a c k a g e d mozzarella as the more traditionally water-packed. In addition to its longer shelf life, the Thermoform- packaged moz- zarella is a little firmer and slightly saltier than the w a t e r - p a c k e d cheese, Wall said. It can be as little as four hours between the time the milk comes into the plant and when the Fresh Mozzarella is packaged and ready to ship out to its buyers, he added. The milk for BelGioioso's Fresh Moz- zarella and Mild Provolone is pasteurized before it's made into cheese. BelGioioso's Medium, Sharp and Extra-Sharp Pro- volones are made from unpasteurized milk. The provolones are made similarly to the mozzarella up to the point at which they're shaped. Instead of being turned into cheeses the size of pearls or golf balls or cin- namon rolls, depending on how that day's customers want it, the provolones are made into much bigger salamis or loaves, ranging from the size of a human leg and up – way up. They're brined in a lazy river, packaged and hung up on racks to be stored away in an aging room for five months for a Medium Provolone or seven months for a Sharp Provolone all the way up to 12 months for an Extra-Sharp Provolone. Cheesemakers will check on them along the way, testing to make sure they're aging properly, and when each cheese is ready, it'll be sold to fill an order. When we visited in March, BelGioioso had just started shipping a whole new prod- uct line called La Bottega, which means "boutique" in Italian. The new cheeses in- clude extra aged American Grana, Sharp Provolone, Crescenza-Stracchino, Sheep's Milk Gorgonzola, Peperoncino and Arti- giano (Italian for "artisan). This is a spe- cialty line that's designed to be a step up for consumers who are ready to have a cheese adventure but not necessarily yet confident enough to choose a cheese on their own. Any assortment of these La Bottega cheeses will work together on a cheese board, and the packaging features hand-drawn art that signals to the consumer that this is an arti- sanal product as well as the BelGioioso name that they've probably encountered in the past. This line is already shipping to stores on the East Coast and will be in stores nationwide this summer. In addition, BelGioioso is bringing out Mini Mascarpone and Mini Ricotta, which are the familiar BelGioioso products, except that they're now packaged in a smaller con- tainer designed for the consumer who uses these cheeses occasionally and wants to eat the entire package on one occasion. Bel- Gioioso will also be offering new snack-size packages of Fresh Mozzarella – three bite- size pieces of cheese in a single-serving package that's just right to pop into a lunch box. When we left BelGioioso, it was to head straight down the highway to the Green Bay airport, where the ticket agent with whom I checked my suitcase told me that my flight was a little bit delayed because of weather in Chicago, but I should proceed immediately to the gate anyway. "When they get the chance, the pilot wants to go, so get right down there," she advised. It was raining in Tucson when I got back home, a gentle, warm rain that was a little unex- pected for March. "We need it," people around me were saying as we always do when it rains here in the desert, and I felt like I'd brought a little bit of Wisconsin back home with me. GN

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