Entries associated with the tag "Willi Lehner":

"I don't think there's a cheese out there that at least somebody doesn't like."
 --Marcel Gravel, Cabot Creamery

That was the plant manager from Vermont's largest cheese maker on Friday during a panel discussion on the economics of affinage at the American Cheese Society conference. I knew there had to be some explanation for the existence of inconceivable crimes against nature such as smoked salmon cheddar and strawberry-chardonnay cheddar, both ribbon winners in their respective categories in ACS's annual cheese competition.

At Saturday's Festival of Cheese those and over a thousand other competition entries from cheese makers all over the U.S. and Canada were cut and laid out in the Chicago Hilton's grand ballroom. Fish cheese aside, an impossible number of these were very fine indeed, including two second-place red ribbon winners from our old pal Willi Lehner. It was a challenge to sample thoughtfully among all this cheesy splendor--about the only spot in the room that wasn't mobbed with turophiles was the deserted low-fat, low-salt cheese table.

Some of my favorites: Vermont Butter & Cheese Company's cultured butter with sea salt, Utah's Beehive Cheese Company's espresso-lavender-rubbed cheddar, and Virginia's Meadow Creek Dairy farmstead Grayson, which I had the great good fortune to try earlier in the week melted on a pizza created by the talented Mark Bello. 

The big local angle here is that Wisconsin cheese makers took away a whopping 91 ribbons in the competition, a third of all the prizes. Sid Cook of Carr Valley Cheese Company won 18 of them, including Best in Show for his Snow White Goat Cheddar, and third runner-up for Cave Aged Marisa. Other local winners: downstate Prairie Fruits Farm took third in soft ripened goat's milk cheeses for their Little Bloom on the Prairie, and Indiana's Capriole took first in flavored goat cheeses for perennial favorite O'Banon. Both are available at the Green City Market.

Many winning cheeses were absent from Sunday's clearance sale at Kendall College, but if you were quick and ruthless you could get some fantastic deals. I scored a four-pound chunk of Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar for ten bucks. I shudder to think of what this red-ribbon-winning hunk of raw milk wonder would have cost at retail.

I want nothing more today than a bucketful of raw cabbage.

Back in May when I wrote about Willi Lehner of Bleu Mont Dairy, it was too early in the season to get a taste of his acclaimed Earth Schmier, a washed-rind Havarti-based cheese he inoculates with microbes harvested from his property in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.

“It’s in the line of Limburger," Willi told me. "But Limburger is real potent and kind of in one dimension, whereas my Earth Schmier cheese—because I usually make it out of raw milk—it’s got a lot of complexity to it."

All I could do was drool, but last weekend that good fellow Hammond made a run to the Dane County Farmer's Market in Madison and returned bearing a fat wedge of this season's Earth Schmier. The rich, oozy-on-the-edges cheese does deliver a strong Limburger-like jab to the nostrils, but it isn't overpowering, and the similarity ends there. It has a slight tang riding a swell of deep creaminess, something I can only imagine will get more multifaceted as it ages. Wonderful.

Hammond also brought back an "experiment," as Lehner called it, a harder cheese with a rugged rind that looks, smells, feels, and tastes nothing like the Earth Schmier, though they're related. (It's in the foreground of the photo.) "The experiment was from a batch of Earth Schmier I made last fall," Lehner writes. "Instead of doing the typical wash I simply put a few wheels in the bandaged cheese cave to let them collect and grow molds. I neglected the cheeses for a long time and then decided it was time to let them go."

The aroma has mellowed quite a bit, and the cheese has a textural resemblance to one of his cheddars, and a bit of sharpness as well. 

Otherwise, Lehner's been busy putting his cave to good use. He says he's made 550 wheels of bandaged cheddar since we last spoke, and he'll be entering cheeses into competition at next week's American Cheese Society conference at the Chicago Hilton. He's not certain he'll be attending himself--he has to work the Madison market next Saturday--but if any of his cheeses place in the competition, he may head down Saturday night for the gala Festival of Cheese, which means there might be some Lehner product to be had the following day at the cheese sale.

This week in Omnivorous we highlighted some favorite barbecue spots in honor of the Southern Foodways Alliance's visit this weekend.  But elsewhere I wrote about Willi Lehner, the "off-the-grid rock star of the Wisconsin artisanal cheese movement" as the New York Times has deemed him. Here's some footage of Lehner's subterranean solar- and wind-powered cheese cave in Blue Mounds, which produces some of the most paralyzingly good Wisconsin cheeses I've ever tasted.

Don't be freaked out by his talk of cheese mites. They're harmless, and most artisanal cheesemakers (and ham makers) have to deal with them, usually by simply brushing the wheels off. In addition to the diatomaceous earth Willi sprinkles his wheels with to ward them off, he also "hoovers" the little buggers with a shop vac, just like they do for Montgomery's Cheddar in Somerset, England.