Happy Cows Come From...Wisconsin Door County Magazine Winter 2007-2008 By Paige Funkhouser I am a native Californian transplanted to Wisconsin, and I say: Wisconsin cheese is better than California cheese. This isn't based on any sort of exact scientific tests, nor do I have any professional experience in, as the French would say, "fromage." Wisconsin cheese, as many of my Californian friends and relatives who've been on the receiving end of Wisconsin cheese will tell you, is just creamier. The cheese is smoother, fresher tasting, as though the animals that produced the milk were better cared for and loved. I hypothesize that part of the better care coincides with the smaller dairy farms scattered around Wisconsin, compared to the stinky megalopolis farms that span Central California. One of these farms, in Waterloo, Wisc., is owned by the Crave brothers, who regularly produce four varieties of cheese: Les Freres, a semi-soft European-style cheese; mozzarella; part-skim roped mozzarella; and a sweet, creamy mascarpone. I got a first-hand look at the cheese-making process when one of the Crave brothers, George, traveled to Savory Spoon Cooking School in Ellison Bay to teach a class with Janice Thomas, owner and teacher of the school. That night's lesson: making mozzarella cheese.
Cheesy business The creation of a small batch of mozzarella cheese in a home kitchen is a hands-on operation, from the chemical brew George concocted using a 10-gallon pot, thermometers and funky smelling cultures in small, dark jars, to the massaging of the soft cheese into bite-sized balls. Even though George told our small class we could replicate the cooking process at home, skeptical glances and raised eyebrows shot around the room and few — myself included — ventured to ask where the cultures could be purchased. To save prep time (or so he told the class), George had traveled from Waterloo with the pot full of milk and some of the cultures already added. He told us the liquid was straight from the Crave brothers' own mozzarella mixing vats, direct from their own happy cows. According to George, the Crave Brothers Farmstead is home to 600 Holstein cows, which, on average, produce 60,000 pounds of milk per day, which can make 6,000 pounds of the various Crave Brothers cheeses. The Craves take pride in feeding their bovines homegrown forage, cut from the rolling fields that surround the farm. I vaguely remember vistas of rolling green hills dotted with black and white cows in California during road trips with my parents — that was pre-tract home sprawl. It's fitting that Janice Thomas offered a class on making cheese at Savory Spoon while the school was still in her home in Ellison Bay. The house and 50 acres of property Janice and her husband, Michael, purchased on Highview Road was an old dairy farm, circa 1847. The couple restored the log home and built the kitchen to accommodate cooking classes of 14 to 16 students. Janice has since moved the school to an old schoolhouse along Highway 42-57 that she and Michael lovingly restored. The schoolhouse, built in 1877, now houses a larger classroom for students, a state-of-the-art kitchen and a small culinary marketplace filled with such specialty items as ceramics and cookbooks and homemade foods — some made to order — as sauces, pastas and quiche and tarts. Taking a cooking class with Janice is a throwback to cooking with my mom and aunts during the holidays, only in a kitchen with less clutter and fewer whisk lickings. Janice explained to our class that she'd encountered the Craves by accident while on an appliance quest. "I met the Craves when I was driving through the countryside looking for the Wolf Sub-Zero plant," Thomas said. "I just barged right into their dairy." Fingers in the cheese After cooking the milk and culture mixture for a bit until the yeasty smelling liquid reached 105 degrees, George informed us that the curds had "set" and began spooning them into a bowl. Handling warm, spongy and slippery mozzarella between my rubber glove-encased fingers was a new experience, similar to rolling chewing gum slathered in vegetable oil around in my hands. Standing around the kitchen counter massaging mozzarella into small balls is not an exact science; some people have soft, limber hands and palpate the young cheese, while others with muscled, calloused hands kneaded it to work out a muscle knot. When worked too much, the cheese becomes a rubbery mass able to soar over small bowls in a single bounce. We slyly practiced with the slightly gray masses nobody wanted to eat. The successful just-ripe-and-soft mozzarella balls were bite-sized mouthfuls of white, creamy goodness. A really creamy, fresh mozzarella ball leaves a smooth film on the roof of your mouth, which washes down nicely with a dry red Merlot. I learned from the Craves that the mozzarella cheese I've always purchased for making comforting dishes like lasagna, does not compare to the pinched-off balls stored in milky water. Apparently, others before me have already learned this lesson. According to the Wisconsin Dairy Council, 33 percent of cheese produced in Wisconsin is mozzarella. Cheddar comes in a close second at 28.6 percent. As of 2005, Wisconsin still led the U.S. in cheese production with 26.4 percent of the total; California is second at 23.4 percent. It's been well publicized, however, that California is expected to surpass Wisconsin in the near future. Cooking with cheese My favorite part of Janice's classes is eating what the class cooks up. Students pair up on different recipes Janice develops for each class — never the same recipe twice. My partner and I were delegated to "Mozzarella and Harissa Toast with Egg." I had never heard, nor tasted (to my knowledge) harissa sauce. According to Janice and my taste buds, it's a fiery Tunisian sauce, usually made with chilies, garlic, cumin, coriander, caraway and olive oil and had a bright smoky redness. The paste can be found in a can or tube in Middle Eastern markets (a Google search yields many recipes and purchase options). Other duos in the class concocted such recipes as "Sirloin with Blue Cheese Mascarpone," "Fennel Potato Le Frere Cheese Gratin," and "Tiramisu Tart." There's something about adding extraordinarily good cheese to a dish that instantly punches it up a notch to the next level of savoriness — especially Wisconsin cheese.
Savory Spoon Cooking School, All Rights Reserved 12042 Highway 42 • Ellison Bay, WI 54210 • Phone: (920) 854-6600 Email: savoryspoon@aol.com Join our newsletter:
Calendar | Gift Certificates | Culinary Vacations | Events | Culinary Marketplace | News & Comments | Gallery | Info. | Directions | Contact Us | Home