This past weekend, Becca and I took a drive down to Carr Valley‘s Mauston plant, where we met with Tom Jenny, one of the company’s two master cheesemakers.
If you know Carr Valley, you know that they’re a company on the cutting edge of cheese innovation — multiple milk cheeses, cocoa-rubbed cheeses, cheeses impregnated with all manner of savory morsels — there is little that this company doesn’t do, whether as part of some kind of deliberate master plan or as the result of a happy accident.
We interviewed Carr Valley frontman and master cheesemaker Sid Cook in order to assemble the proposal for this book, so we walked through the doors of the Mauston plant knowing a little bit about what we were getting into.
Jenny was a guy who didn’t fear spinning a yarn, and I think we got a really great stack of stories from him — plus a guided tour of the plant.
Becca snapped some nice shots of cheese in progress, and some swell environmental details such as this collection of labels:
We’ll have tasting notes for a number of Carr Valley cheeses (including their delicious bread cheese and Tom’s own Swiss) coming up later this week. In the meantime, a couple more of our favorite images from the trip.
If you’ve been down 90/94 from Minneapolis to Madison as often as we have, you know the Mauston Kwik Trip truck:
Gotta love it. It’s easy to ignore — (it kind of just looks like yet another sign) — until you realize the sheer three dimensional ambition of turning a semi into a massive, impaled advertisement.
And, of course, we found another highway cheese mouse. Can’t promise we’ll find one every trip, but I realize we’re two for two now.
