A solid profile of Henning’s Cheese in Madison’s Cap Times:

“Where did you get a piece of cheese that big?”

The question came from an onlooker who was watching Sarah Kaufmann, “The Cheese Lady” (http://www.sarahcheeselady.com), carve a Bucky Badger from a huge piece of cheese at the grand opening of a Hy-Vee supermarket in Madison last weekend.

“It came from Henning’s Cheese at Kiel in Manitowoc County and weighs 1,014 pounds,” Kaufmann says. “That’s my home county and Henning’s is the only cheese factory in Wisconsin that makes mammoth cheeses this big” — 30 inches high and 30 inches wide.

I had a great interview with Keith Uhlig of the Wausau Daily Herald, and the results are here to enjoy in a short feature article about The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin. Thanks also to the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune for a mention in the briefs section.

Tenaya Darlington, of the blog Madame Fromage, offers some very kind words for Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin in Madison’s weekly Isthmus. My favorite excerpt sums up Becca’s work on the book quite nicely:

The pictures are exquisite, capturing the essence of small towns in rural Wisconsin and the dairy hives within them. What Robert Frank did in the 1950s, capturing stark images of postwar America, photographer Becca Dilley does for the cheese state, peeling back the shrink-wrap to give us glimpses of Amish milking barns and portraits of hair-netted men with muscled fingers stirring curds. She captures the zeitgeist of artisanal cheesemaking.

You can read the whole review over at the Isthmus.

We’ll be in Stevens Point at 1pm on Friday, Nov. 13 at Emy J’s Garage! Thanks to our old college friend Eric Olson for making it happen at the last moment — we’re really pleased to get out to Stevens Point.

And if you’re in Madison, listen for us on the radio at the indecent hour of 6am on Friday, Nov. 20 on the Joy Cardin Show.

The House of Wisconsin Cheese is offering a master cheesemaker sampler in honor of our book — it looks pretty dang tasty if we do say so ourselves. Here are the details, taken from their press release:

8 oz of Apple Smoked Cheddar by Sid Cook of Carr Valley Cheese

At a cost of $39.99 in store, $54.99 delivered—I’m confident you won’t find these cheeses at this low a price anywhere nearby. We’ll also include a BioCard® about each cheesemaker and their cheese, so you can keep track of which Awesome Cheesemakers and Awesome Cheeses you most adore.

We’ll be appearing at 10am on Thursday, Nov. 11, on KARE 11’s Showcase Minnesota show. Now we just have to come up with some cheeses to share with Minneapolis-St. Paul area TV viewers… shouldn’t be too hard…

You can check out our entire 14-event tour on our tour page, but this post is just a rundown of all the places we’ll be. Look for us in November and December in:

Wisconsin Rapids, Wausau, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Monroe, Green Bay, Madison (again), Minneapolis, Minneapolis (again), Milwaukee (again), Brookfield, and Oconomowoc.

We can’t wait to meet folks all over the Upper Midwest and chat about cheese — there should be lots of cheese tastings and show and tell along the way.

Just a brief blurb in a roundup of upcoming cheese books, but it’s nice to see. Check out the original on the PW site.

If Wisconsin master-made cheese has an analogue in the world of honey, it’s the hand-crafted, fussily selected, gorgeously pure stuff made by beekeeper Doug Schulz and the Wisconsin Natural Acres team. WNA was kind enough to send some of their product our way for our Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin tour, so look for it at the various tastings we’ll be hosting along the way.

If you’d like to learn more about WNA honey, Becca and I did a story about them for the Heavy Table.