Oser Communications Group

GOURMET NEWS DECEMBER 2016 www.gourmetnews.com YEAR IN REVIEW 2 0 Dairyland Continued from PAGE 19 to become vertically integrated by finding a value-added product that they could make on the farm from their milk. That's all it took to set George's wheels in motion, and after some more kicking the idea around, the brothers decided to build a creamery and make cheese, and George would run the operation. "We started a lit- tle naively," George said. "We said, 'We have cows and milk. You think we might as well make cheese?' That makes about as much sense as a farmer who says, 'Hey, we have hay and corn; we might as well make milk.'" The creamery started making Fresh Moz- zarella cheese in 2002. These days, the opera- tion has branched out just a bit, and Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese also makes Queso Oaxaca, which is the Mexican version of mozzarella, and Mascarpone. And this being Wisconsin, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, Crave Brothers also makes fresh cheddar curds for sale locally. Those cheeses are so well thought of that the American Cheese Society gave the fam- ily some pretty good exercise as they made repeated hikes up to the stage at last sum- mer's awards competition. Those awards, in addition to the rest of the collection of plaques and certificates hanging up on the walls and sitting on tables all over the place, seem to have presented a bit of a dec- orating challenge as well, but they didn't seem to mind the clutter any. After the introduction, George led us out into a hallway that ran alongside the cheesemaking operations. Windows let us see into the big room filled with stainless steel equipment where a crew was making mozzarella. "Just spread out and pull up a window," George said, and then he started explaining the process. I'll make this short for you. About 100,000 pounds of milk comes into the factory every day from the milking barn across the road. It's pasteur- ized for 16 seconds at 160 degrees F. and coagulated with rennet, and then the whey is drained off and the curd is cut and stretched and molded into shapes dictated by the orders that came in the previous day. The mozzarella rolls out of the molds and and then it's packed into cups or buckets, depending on whether the order was for lit- tle pearls salads or balls to be shredded up in pizza restaurants. Every day, Crave barns we'd been promised, stashed the camera away in its bag and then dished my- self up a plate of a salad made of sliced strawberries and mozzarella cheese. Here's a riddle that will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about that tour of the open-air barns where the cows are comfortably housed – right down to misters to keep them cool during hot summer days: What's black and white and black and white and black and white and nosy as all get-out? Answer: A herd of Hol- steins jostling for a good place to gawk at the tourists as we paraded by in our bus. Our next stop on the tour was at Wid- mer's Cheese Cellars in Theresa, Wiscon- sin, where Joe Widmer came out to the bus to welcome us into the tiny shop at the front of his cheese plant. "I always tell a story, family story, history," he said. Joe's grandfather came to the U.S. from Switzer- land in 1905. He was 17 or 18, and times were so tough in Switzerland that it seemed like a better deal to leave everything and everyone he knew for a place where the fu- ture didn't look so much like starvation. He found himself a job as an apprentice at a Wisconsin cheese factory, not too far up the road from where Widmer's Cheese Cellars is now, and started writing letters to his girlfriend back in Switzerland. The two of them exchanged letters for a while, until fi- nally, she sent him one that said she had a ticket, and would he pick her up in New York? His grandfather got on the train and made it to New York in time to meet the ship, Widmer told us, and he was there on the dock to watch the passengers disem- bark. Passengers came down the gangway, and more came down the gangway, and his girlfriend wasn't among them. So he grabbed a sailor and asked. The sailor said that the immigration authorities had noti- fied the ship that the day's quota had been filled, and everyone still remaining on the ship was to be sent back where they came from. Widmer's grandfather protested; he asked how he could get his girlfriend off the ship. "You'd have to marry her," he was told. "He married her on the dock," Widmer concluded in a triumphal tone. In 1918, his grandfather bought a cheese factory in northern Wisconsin and in 1922, he bought the building in which Joe Widmer works today. The family lived above the plant and raised their children there and made cheese every single day. "He was sur- rounded by Germans, so he had to make something that Germans could eat," Wid- mer said. Widmer's still making the kind of cheese his grandfather made, and today, he's best known for both Brick and Colby, two Brothers packages up to 20,000 individual packages of fresh mozzarella, Queso Oax- aca and Farmers Rope Cheese and sends them out for distribution across the coun- try. Meanwhile, brother Thomas Crave is growing corn, soybeans, alfalfa and wheat on 2,700 acres of land; brother Charles is feeding the crops to the farm's 1,700 Hol- stein cows, who are eating 100,000 pounds of feed a day; and brother Mark is running the milking operation. Cows are milked three times a day, and the Crave Brothers cows are producing an average of 30,000 pounds of milk a year, per cow, compared to the 200,000 pounds a year that's stan- dard for the industry. They're doing that on the strength of superior genetics and indi- vidualized cow care. All the little things from harvesting crops at the right time to proper feed storage makes a big difference, George said. "We're the real thing," Debbie added. "We're farmstead, sustainable, green en- ergy." The family has partnered with Clean Fuel Partners, a Wisconsin company that specializes in organic waste management solutions and biogas energy systems, to make the power that runs the farm and creamery and supplies 300 other families as well with a pair of anaerobic digesters that process the animals' waste into methane that's used to generate electricity, liquid fertilizer that goes back out onto the fields, a plant fiber mixture that goes into organic potting soil and makes a fluffy fiber bedding for the cows. The digesters reduce the farm's carbon footprint as well as the odors from the manure. "We're making the operation a better neighbor," George said. "We're really burning the stink, if you will, of our biomatter…. We were green before green was groovy." After he said that, he looked around to see if anyone in the room looked confused by the word "groovy," de- cided they didn't and continued with the tour. After we'd all looked our fill at moz- zarella dropping out of a cylindrical mold divoted with loaf shapes and eventually disappearing into a packag- ing machine, George and Debbie led us back to a kitchen, where Beth Crave – she's the farm's Customer Service Man- ager as well as culinary queen – had set out a spread of about a zillion different things that can be made from Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese. There were lemon mascarpone tarts, choco- late mascarpone pie, candied bacon sweet onion mascarpone pizza, fresh cheese curds and fresh mozzarella salad, and, to make it all even better, Beth had posted the recipes for the dishes on the Crave Brothers website so we can do it all at home too. I took the chance while every- body else was lining up to grab plates and sample the goodies to set down my camera bag, attach a 300mm lens to the camera and sneak back out the front door to get another look at the sandhill cranes we'd seen as we'd gotten off the bus. They're part of what ornithologists call the Eastern Population of the Greater Sandhill Crane, esti- mated to be between 60,000 and 70,000 individuals, not long back for the summer from their winter in Florida. The sandhill crane populations here in Wisconsin were in deep trouble throughout the Midwest in the early part of the 20th century, and were re- duced to an estimated 25 breeding pairs in Wisconsin in the 1930s. Since that time, hunting bans and habitat pro- tection efforts have helped them recover to the point at which they're now often con- sidered a threat to Wisconsin corn fields, and the state is working with wildlife agencies to find ways to prevent crop damage without hurting the birds. They'd been cavorting in their mating dance, the males dancing before the fe- males with their wings spread out like superhero capes, and I hoped I could still get a shot or two. When I got back outside, though, the cranes were still out there in the field, but they were peacefully grazing along the rows of stubble, conve- niently illustrating the potential for crop damage, and while it made peace- ful scenery, it didn't make good photo- graphs, inasmuch as the cranes were blending into the fields around them. The body plumage of greater sandhill cranes is naturally various shades of gray, which pro- vided a little bit of contrast, but the wild birds preen mud into their feathers to turn themselves the color of the earth around them during the spring and summer, and these birds were clearly more interested in pursuing their natural behaviors than in ac- commodating my photography needs. I was standing there, keeping the camera pointed in their direction in case something more interesting happened when I heard a male voice behind me. "Oh, you're looking at the cranes," he said. I turned, and there was George. "Yes, but they're too far away to get a good picture," I answered. "Last year we had whooping cranes. They're white and about twice as big." We stood together and watched the birds for another minute. I snapped off a couple of frames, figuring that I might as well get the shots I could, since the situation wasn't get- ting any better. Then George said, "They're flying." I followed George's pointing hand with my camera lens, took several more shots, and then we turned around to go back in- side, where I switched out my camera lens for one more suitable for taking pictures of cows during the after-brunch tour of the Continued on PAGE 21 JOE WIDMER BETH CRAVE

• Cover