Most cheese novices would look at the slab of Red Rock and think it was a cheese gone horribly bad, but you and I know that looks can deceiving. In the case of this blue/cheddar hybrid by Wisconsin’s Roelli Cheese Haus, the craggy, veiny interior of the cheese symbolizes the elevation of your basic mild cheddar to an artisan foodstuff. Red Rock is a case in point why your mother taught you not to judge a book by its cover.

Though Red Rock is relatively new, debuting late last year, the Roelli family has been making cheese in south-central Wisconsin for four generations. Best known for most of those years for making Wisconsin classics like cheddar, brick and colby, the Roellis first ventured into artisan territory with Dunbarton Blue, which has won critical raves since debuting in 2008. Though Dunbarton Blue and Red Rock both feature cheddar bases criss-crossed with blue veins, Red Rock is, as Wisconsin cheese champion Jeanne Carpenter put it, “a working man’s cheese.”

But while Jeanne implies that Red Rock is more suitable for a sandwich than a cheese board, I wouldn’t hesitate to feature it front and center, not only for its striking appearance (it has twice the amount of annatto of a typical cheddar), but also for its delightful flavor. The cheddar, though mild, dances across the tongue, and the blue streaks add a minerally, earthy overtone that boosts the cheese’s overall savoriness. For a kick, try it on an all-cheddar cheese board, comparing its merits to other favorites like Isle of Mull and Lincolnshire Poacher. With some beer (Pastoral recommends Port Old Viscosity from Port Brewing Company), a hearty wheat or rye bread and some apples, you’ve got a ploughman’s lunch that’s sure to satisfy. For as much as we love our fancy-schmancy cheese plates, sometimes you need a cheese that’s solid, dependable and, well, a rock.

Want to hear from the cheesemaker himself about Red Rock? Watch Wisconsin Cheese Talk’s interview with Chris Roelli.

I have to admit that I’ve never been a cranberry sauce fan. The stuff from the can was so unappealing to me growing up, and I think my mom felt the same way, because I don’t remember seeing it on our Thanksgiving table when I was a kid. But I don’t remember homemade cranberry sauce, either, so maybe we just skipped up, just as we passed up pumpkin pie for chocolate cream. But a few years ago, Colleen created a recipe for cranberry sauce that rocked my taste buds – and those of my oldest son, who flips his lid whenever cranberries reappear at Trader Joe’s because he knows that I’ll make him Auntie C’s special sauce. I’ve already made the sauce twice this year, and when a rare cup of leftover berries entered my refrigerator after dinner Friday night, of course I thought, “I bet this would go fantastically with cheese.” Turns out I was right!

At one of the Wisconsin Cheese Originals seminars I attended during our Wisconsin cheese trip, I sampled Dunbarton Blue, a cheddar-blue hybrid created by Chris Roelli of Roelli Cheese Haus. Shullsburg, Wis., has been home to Roelli Cheese for almost 100 years, but only recently has the creamery switched from making commodity cheeses to artisan varieties. Dunbarton Blue is a case in point – Roelli crafts small batches of raw-milk cheddar and adds Penicillium roqueforti to create minerally blue veins throughout the cheese. Some wedges have more veins than others; mine had very few, but I could still taste the hint of blue with each bite of meaty, mushroomy cheddar.

Dunbarton Blue’s hearty flavor is a perfect foil for a sweetly tart accompaniment such as cranberry sauce, and using a cinnamon-spiked biscuit as a base ties together the bite. Pass around a platter of these treats before Thanksgiving dinner and you need no other appetizer besides a glass of full-bodied red wine or a flute of bubbly. You have other things, like that big bird in the oven, to worry about on Thanksgiving. Buy some cheese, spoon up some extra sauce and give yourself a break.

Our group enjoyed our visit to Uplands Cheese Company so much that we were running late for our last cheesemaker stop of the day, Bleu Mont Dairy in Blue Mounds, Wis. So our time with Willi Lehner, affectionately known as the “mad scientist” of cheese in these parts for his constant tinkering of traditional recipes, was short but sweet. Especially sweet, I may add, because we got to see Lehner’s celebrated and sophisticated bandaged cheddar in its natural environment – the 1,600-sq.-ft. cave that Lehner dug out of a hillside on his farm.

No matter how blasé about cheese you may be, you have to admit that carving your own cheese cave out of the side of a hill is pretty bad-ass. It signifies not only a commitment to making cheese, but a dedication to making mind-blowing, truly artisanal cheese. A second-generation cheesemaker, Lehner credits his teenage trip to his father’s native Switzerland as the “a-ha” moment that led him to devote his life to cheese.

“That’s where I made the connection between what cows ate and the cheese that resulted [from their milk].” — Cheesemaker Willi Lehner

You may think that someone who builds his own cave leads a solitary, caveman-like existence, but Lehner’s cheese exemplifies the cooperative spirit shared among Wisconsin cheesemakers. He buys milk from his pal Andy Hatch’s pasture-grazed cows at Uplands and rents space at Cedar Grove Cheese Factory (or, depending on availability, another local cheesemaker’s facility) to craft his cheddars, goudas, havartis and Alpine-style cheeses from the spring through the fall. Lehner then brings his baby cheeses back to the cave, a capsule-shaped cocoon with a 12-ft.-high ceiling and two rooms with varying degrees of moisture. Though temperatures in southern Wisconsin can reach well below zero in the winter and close to 100º in the summer, Lehner’s cave design allows the interior temperature to fluctuate only within a 10-degree range throughout the year. The cave usually hits a low temperature of 48º in March and peaks at 58º in September.

Lehner’s signature cheese – bandaged cheddar – dominated the shelves of his cave when we visited. He wraps the heavy rounds in muslin bandages and smears the exterior with lard to keep the bandages from drying out too fast. The lard never penetrates the rind to mingle with the cheese paste, however – the mold that grows on the rinds in the cave consumes it within six months. Lehner chooses heavy muslin to prevent cheese mites (yes, they do exist!) from burrowing through the rind during the cheeses’ years in the yeasty-smelling cave. He sells the bandaged cheddar between the ages of 2 and 3, and the cliché is true – the best cheeses come to those who wait.

Lehner offered us samples of his 2-and-a-half-year-old “reserve” bandaged cheddar and Alpine Renegade, a nutty, creamy cheese that coated the mouth with its subtle flavor. The real stand-out, though, was the cheddar. Full of caramel notes and crunchy crystals, the cheddar leaves no doubts that it deserves its best-seller status. As I noted two years ago when I first tasted the cheddar, its sweetness is almost candy-like, making it a cheese to savor over a glass of wine rather than melting into a mac and cheese. Lehner sells it, along with his other cheeses and curds, at the Dane County Farmers Market, where I picked up his very potent garlic cheddar and a creamy havarti.

The cave is home to more than Lehner’s creations; he also ages cheeses for renowned Wisconsin cheesemakers such as Tom Torkelson and Katie Hedrich. And though it was only briefly home to our group’s curious minds, Lehner’s cave – as well as his cheeses – will be hard to forget.

Disclosure: The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board paid for our travel and expenses during the cheese tour. As always, all opinions, words and commentary are our own.

After a week of cheese detox (well, more or less), I’m back with a few more curd developments from the summer Fancy Food Show in DC. Up next, the new and newly-rebranded cheeses from Vermont’s Grafton Village Cheese.

There’s been a lot of chatter in the cheese world in the past year or so as America’s artisanal cheesemakers, after experiencing rapid growth in numbers in the ’90s/’00s, now look for ways to sustainably expand to meet the ever-increasing demand for their cheese. Some have benefited from outside investment that, in some cases, even comes from outside the US. It’s a tricky subject for a movement whose roots were aligned with the locavore craze. Many small cheesemakers got their start selling at their local farmers markets. As they grew to support retail distribution, their products move further and further from the home community — but still support jobs and dairy farms back at home. With the growing “slow money” trend, more cheesemakers seem to be benefiting from investments that can help them expand their operations or simply free up time to create new cheeses &/or invest more in marketing. We may have a soft spot for the true farmstead operations, but we’re not selfish — if a great cheese can be sustainably produced in larger quantities, why not share the love?

Vermont’s Grafton Village Cheese Company has recently made a sizable investment to both ends. Grafton Village has been making cheese in the small town of Grafton since 1892, but the company is now part of the nonprofit Windham Foundation (though Grafton of course is a for-profit operation), whose mission is to preserve and promote rural communities. New investments in their cheesemaking facilities include four new cheese caves, which will enable them to age all their cheeses right there in Grafton. (In the past, Grafton’s cave-aged clothbound cheddar had been shipped upstate and to Minnesota for aging.) While their growth is limited by the amount of milk they can buy, they are rebranding their aged cheddars with new labels that highlight their raw milk status and selling them under the “Grafton Tavern Select” label. Getting the chance to taste the one, two, three and four-year cheddars in succession was a nice treat.

Cheesemaker Dane Huebner introduces Truffled Bismark

At the Fancy Food Show, cheesemaker Dane Huebner (above) was particularly proud of the new mixed milk cheeses, and enthusiastically shared his efforts to bring sheeps milk cheese back to popularity in Vermont. (While there are sheep in Vermont, all their milk production is currently spoken for by other cheesemakers. Huebner is bringing his from a small supplier just across the border in New York.) The three new cheeses are the Dutch-inspired Leyden, with warm cumin flavor, and the sheeps-milk Bismark and Truffled Bismark. Each was smooth and flavorful, but the truffled really stole the show — earthy and rich with the pleasant mouth feel of a well-made sheeps-milk cheese. The Bismark is named after a legendary Vermont ram, and with the quality craftmanship of expert cheesemaker Huebner (a licensed Wisconsin cheesemaker), the cheese is sure to become yet another Vermont treasure. The cheeses debuted at the show were the first aged in their caves; look for them at fine cheese shops across the country this fall.

I made a truffle mac and cheese for New Year’s Eve 2009 and was disappointed with the result. The cheese sauce seized, becoming an oily, drippy mess, and the noodles were unevenly coated with gloppy cheddar and wads of truffle butter. Yuck. I had been dreaming of a rich, earthy noodle dish with the subtle flavor of foraged ‘shrooms and the silky creaminess of an expensive cheese. What I should have done instead was dig into a wedge of the Ballard Family Dairy’s Truffle Cheddar because it contains all of those flavors and textures without the sad, sloppy pasta.

Well, it turns out that wasn’t an option because I can’t purchase the Idaho-made cheese here in Minnesota, but I found it at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese during my recent trip to Seattle and brought home a healthy wedge. Anyone who loves flecks of umami-rich Italian truffles and the delicate crunch of sea salt will salute this cheese because it offers that perfect package: the mustiness of the truffles, the dance of the sea salt on the tongue and a satisfying mouthfeel, Pair with a full-bodied red wine, some whole wheat crackers, an apple and some grapes, and you have a feast. Hopefully, you won’t have to spend your whole paycheck for the airfare to Seattle to get your hands on it.

It’s kind of ironic that on the same weekend that Seattle cheese icon Beecher’s Handmade Cheese celebrated the grand opening of its new New York shop, I visited the original location in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In town for a long weekend with the family, I paid my first visit to Beecher’s Saturday afternoon with the pie-in-the-sky hope that all the crowds would be in New York instead of Seattle. Fat chance. The store was crazy-crowded with people watching the cheesemakers at work or standing in line for grilled cheese sandwiches and the world’s best macaroni and cheese. But I was able to maneuver my stroller into the line for the cut-to-order cheese counter at the back of the store, and boy, am I glad I did. (Thanks to baby N, whose patience was running thin but was a trooper anyway. The cracker samples helped immensely.)

Colleen and I have been Beecher’s fans for several years – C wrote up its Flagship Reserve Cheddar back in 2009 – but what really amazed me about the cheese counter was the number of non-Beecher’s cheese I found. Living in the Midwest, I see a wide range of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa cheeses regularly, and my regular cheese shops do a great job of stocking favorites from New England and California. But there’s a long list of Pacific Northwest cheeses that I had never seen – or even heard of – before I stepped up to the Beecher’s cheese counter. Choosing just a few to bring home was difficult, of course, but I found some interesting varieties that I’ll introduce here over the next couple of weeks. But here’s a clue – what do you get when you combine Idaho and black truffles? Some kick-ass cheese, that’s what.

The long line of people breathing down my neck made my visit relatively abbreviated, but you can bet I’ll be back the next time I’m in Seattle. Thankfully, I have a good excuse to go, with my parents and much of my husband’s extended family living there. Hopefully, my next trip to the shop will be timed for a more leisurely weekday afternoon when I can have a bowl of mac and cheese and idle the hour away by the cheese counter. Washington, Oregon and Idaho cheesemakers, consider yourself warned. Beecher’s will need to restock after my next visit.

As a rule, Minnesotans like to tease Iowans about…well, everything. Their supposed lack of sophistication. Their abundance of pigs. The aroma that results from the abundance of pigs. But Prairie Breeze Cheddar gives Iowans an excuse to flip their northern neighbors the bird. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Cheddar this creamy and flavorful coming from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Prairie Breeze is one of three Milton Creamery cheeses made by the Musser family in Milton, Iowa, and it’s the one that heads north of the state border most frequently. The Mussers, a Mennonite family who relocated to Milton from Pennsylvania almost 20 years ago, collect milk from pasture-grazed cows living on other nearby Amish farms to craft their Alpine-style Cheddar. It’s a favorite of local cheesemongers (Ken Liss, formerly of Premier Cheese Market and now of Lake Wine and Spirits, introduced it to me a couple of years ago), and I can see why. Prairie Breeze fuses the body of a traditional Cheddar with the sweet, delicate flavor of an Alpine cheese. Perfect on top of a wheat cracker, the cheese also pairs well with Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon or a brown ale, according to my Heavy Table colleague John Garland, who interviewed the Mussers a couple of months ago.

Happy new year, cheese lovers! The start of a new year is always exciting, but Jan. 1, 2011 is particularly thrilling for me since my beloved Wisconsin Badger football team is facing Texas Christian University in the Rose Bowl this afternoon. Of course, it won’t really be a contest – Wisconsin is known for kicking major booty during previous Rose Bowl games – but it’s a great excuse to get together with fellow Badgers and cheer on our team. While eating cheese, of course.

In honor of this year’s Rose Bowl competitors, I’ll be serving a cheeseboard with two regional favorites. Wisconsin will be represented by Hook’s 7-Year Cheddar, and since I couldn’t find any Texas cheese at my local shop, Green Hill will stand in for the South. (And I really wanted an excuse to buy a fresh wheel of Green Hill, anyway.) We’ll have my favorite Carr’s whole wheat crackers on hand, as well as gluten-free rice crackers, and lots of beer and other appropriate beverages.

Since both cheeses are amazing, our taste buds will win no matter which team comes out victorious, but you all know my bias. Go Badgers!

Two years ago, not long after Colleen and I launched C+C, we decided to mix things up for the holidays a bit and took a break from the Wine Spectator 100 Great Cheeses list to do two holiday cheese recipe posts. I wrote about the updated fondue I made for my family, and Colleen posted a recipe for a Chesapeake-inspired cheese ball. Little did we know that one post would generate close to half our blog traffic over the next two years. Y’all must love your cheese balls because you always seem to be searching Google for recipes!

Ever obliging bloggers, Colleen and I want to give our readers what they want – hence, we officially proclaim it cheese ball week here at C+C. We’ll be posting original* recipes throughout the week for you to use for holiday gatherings or to motivate you to develop your own concoction. And if you have any cheese ball recipes you’d like to share, please send them our way! We may publish the recipes and accompanying photos later in the week. So let’s get started…

Potato Chip-Crusted Cheese Ball

Our first featured cheese ball is a little low-brow (no fancy ingredients required) but still delicious. I wanted to create a latke-inspired cheese ball for Chanukah, hence the potato chip crust. And what goes better with potato chips than onion dip? I wasn’t sure how much onion dip mix to use and dumped in the entire packet, but if you don’t want the onion flavor to be quite so strong, I’d use half a packet. Serve with thick-cut potato chips or buttery crackers.

8 oz. cream cheese, softened
½-1 packet of Lipton onion soup mix
½ cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 cup rippled potato chips

Place softened cream cheese into a small bowl and mix in onion soup mix and shredded cheddar with a spatula until thoroughly combined. Shape mixture into a ball and wrap in wax paper. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight to set shape. When ready to serve, crush the potato chips with your hands (you want large chunks of chip, not tiny pulverized bits) and spread the crumbs onto a large plate. Unwrap the cheese ball from the wax paper and roll in the crushed chips until the ball is completed coated. Enjoy!

* Though we believe our cheese balls to be original, we realize it is possible that someone else has created comparable recipes and we don’t want to appear that we’re stealing recipes. So please take our word that any similarities to already-published recipes are coincidental.

To the untrained eye, it might look like just another strip of shops along the Tamiami Trail heading south through Sarasota, Florida. But cheese hounds like yours truly could hardly miss a sign like this beckoning in between the surf shops, surf ‘n turf casual dining establishments and auto repair shops.

Naturally, we pulled in to sample the curd. Greenleaf Wisconsin Cheese shop professes to have 140 types of Wisconsin cheese; I didn’t count, but the coolers were well stocked with the ubiquitous cheddars and cheese spreads as well as a handful of Wisconsin’s finer offerings: Carr Valley cave-aged Marisa, the beloved raspberry BellaVitano, Uplands‘ Pleasant Ridge Reserve.

You could also stock up on Sprecher’s, sausages, Door County cherry preserves and assorted Wisconsin paraphenilia.

cheeseheads in paradise

Most exciting to me, though, was a new discovery: Billy’s Midget Bandaged Goat Cheddar from Capri Creamery. Capri Creamery is a one-man operation making cheese in Blue River, Wisc., from nearby organic Amish goat dairies. This raw milk cheddar has the flaky, crumbly texture and salty taste of a traditional clothbound cheddar, with added earthiness from the goats milk.

billy's midget goat cheddar (left) and bellavitano

Capri’s cheeses are primarily found at the Dane County Farmers Market and Milwaukee and Madison, Wisc., shops and restaurants — and at Greenleaf in Sarasota, Florida. Perfect for your next picnic at the beach.