Posted in General on July 7, 2008 | No Comments »
From USA Today:
It’s George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln — carved out of a giant block of cheese. [Little Chute, WI resident] Troy Landwehr used his carving tools to turn a 700-pound block of Land O’ Lakes cheddar into a replica of Mount Rushmore.
Not much that we can add to that, except, [...]
Posted in General on June 19, 2008 | No Comments »
Much of the vocabulary of cheesemaking is self explanatory: the place where the cheese stays warm to age? The warm room. The place where cheese stays to cool down? The cool room. The silver T-shaped instrument used to try cheese so it can be graded? A cheese trier.
The cheese trier is one of the few [...]
Posted in General on May 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I’m punch drunk after days of writing, as hard as I can, to get this book done by the end of the month. It’s entirely possible that the cold light of reason will make this analogy seem ridiculous down the road, but here goes. Writing a book or article is not unlike making fine cheese. [...]
Posted in General on May 17, 2008 | No Comments »
Gaze upon the glory that is the completed cheesemaker interview map. We did our last interview, with David Lindgren of Lynn Dairy, on Friday. So, every blue pin indicates a cheesemaker we’ve driven out to visit, interview and photograph.
Astute observers may count only 43 map pins, although there are 44 active master cheesemakers. We won’t [...]
Posted in General on May 5, 2008 | No Comments »
We’ve conducted (and in large part transcribed) more than 25 straight hours of interviews in order to research this book, and we’ve got another 4-6 to go, at least. This would not have been possible — in the slightest — without our Olympus VN-3100PC Digital Voice Recorder. It’s never failed us, runs for hours without [...]
Posted in General on April 27, 2008 | No Comments »
Some of you may be wondering why the flow of posts seems to have slowed to a crawl. The answer, in a nutshell, is that we’re now tackling the job of transcribing the 20-30 hours of interviews we’ve done so far. By the time we’re done, I hope that we’ll have a nice little oral [...]
Posted in General, Travel Log on April 1, 2008 | No Comments »
We headed to southeastern and central Wisconsin in mid-March for what may have been the biggest trip of our entire book — seven cheesemakers in four days. We started with Joe Widmer, who is one of the most mediagenic master cheesemakers we’ve been lucky enough to meet. The only cheesemaker (to my knowledge) with his [...]
Posted in General, Photos, tagged cheddaring, Joe Widmer on March 27, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Though we have visited a number of cheesemakers who cheddar their cheese (notably Bob Wills, Sid Cook, and David Metzig), we have not been around to witness it before this most recent trip to southeastern Wisconsin. Joe Widmer (of Widmer’s Cheese Cellars) was kind enough to let us tromp around his operation for hours as [...]
Posted in General, Photos on March 16, 2008 | 2 Comments »
We were lucky enough to be writing this book during the biennial World Championship Cheese Contest in Madison, WI. This is one of the few international cheese competitions, and features 3 days of judging by a host of experts from every corner of the cheesemaking globe. Cheesemakers send in their samples to be judged on [...]
Posted in General on March 15, 2008 | No Comments »
For your entertainment: Here’s the map + map-pin system we’re using to keep our travels organized. Blue pins are masters we’ve visited; red are masters we’ve yet to visit. The four “sectors” (plus the sector for Green County) each represent planned sections of the book.
