Landmark Creamery – Transcript

– This week on Wisconsin Foodie:

– When Anna and I came into it we are not, you know, second, third, fourth generation cheese makers. We were brand new. Spent a lot of time talking to other cheese makers, so it’s been a learning process, but we love all of it.

– Well, Southwestern Wisconsin has always I think had a kind of fairly tight-knit group of cheese makers and we started making cheese twenty years ago up at Cedar Grove. As a whole, Wisconsin is so rich with dairy farming and cheese making resources that there’s a lot to go around.

– I’ll teach anybody who wants to know everything I do. And in the process of watching how they develop their products, I learn more about cheese making.

– It’s very fulfilling to think about our philosophy and who we’re buying from and who we’re selling to and just talking to consumers and educating them about why it’s worth to pay that price for a great meal or some really well-crafted small batch cheese.

– Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support:

The Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie and remind you that in Wisconsin we dream in cheese.

[crowd cheering]

Just look for our badge. It’s on everything we make.

Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin, and see where your beer is made.

Milwaukee’s landmark art deco hotel offers luxury accommodations, legendary hospitality, and world-class dining. Paired with the hotels roaring ’20s vibe makes The Ambassador a must-experience destination.

From production to processing, right down to our plates, there are over 15,000 employers in Wisconsin with career opportunities to fulfill your dreams and feed the world. Hungry for more? Shape your career with these companies… and others at FabWisconsin.com. Society Insurance. Small details. Big difference.

Edible Milwaukee magazine.

Also, with support of the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

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– Anna B.: We opened the shop to sell our cheese but also to bring in all these local food products that people are looking for. Because we really care about the small families in this area, our goal has always been to support our families but also support the families of small family farms. So when we can buy milk from Andy Hatch at Uplands there’s two families right there who are benefiting from that. From the Sheep Dairy, it’s a couple with three children and we’re very happy to buy their milk and help provide some of their livelihood. And it trickles on down from there. We just like the idea of even though we’re small we can make an impact in individual people’s and families’ lives.

As a writer I got to tell all of these products’ stories before and then putting together the lineup for the shop was a lot of fun, because I can say that I have met or had a beer with probably 95 percent of the business owners and makers of the things we’re selling here in the shop. Whether it’s cheese or tea or crackers, jam, nuts, and then a few other fun things. We have a little cocktail section with Bittercube bitters and Quince & Apple syrups and lots of nice artisan foodstuffs.

– Anna L.: Ann and I met at a potluck of a bunch of farm women and I was going through the licensing process at the time. I was in my apprenticeship and was trying to finalize plans to be able to launch a business of my own. And I was just talking to her about how much I love the cheese making process, but the marketing was really kind of overwhelming and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to tackle that. And I think I said I would love to have a partner. And a day or so later she’s like “Hey, about that partner, what about me?”- Anna B.: When Anna and I came into it, we are not, second, third, fourth generation cheese makers. We were brand new. The first year we just spent selling direct to local cheese mongers and chefs. And it was a really great way to get started and start being known. In addition to that, spent a lot of time talking to other cheese makers. So it’s been a learning process, but we love all of it.

– Anna L.: The Wisconsin artisan cheese community is wonderful. There are a lot of cheeses made here. You’d think it would be really competitive, but there’s just a tremendous amount of resources here and people who have been willing to help us through pretty much every step of the process. You know, we only make small batches of cheese in the first place and we’re a really small company. So in order to stand out we wanted really special milk and something that really was going to shine to make our cheese interesting to cheese mongers and cheese shops and grocery stores and stuff.

– So, this is Tallgrass Reserve. Made with pasture-grazed milk from Uplands Cheese Company in Dodgeville. And this is about 15 months old. So let’s see what we think.

This was made in August of last year.

– Anna L.: Mm-hmm.

– Anna B.: You can see from the color it’s made with really gorgeous grass-fed milk. It’s golden, it’s creamy, it’s soft.

– Yep, you get some sweet notes to it. Little bit of a cheddary note also.

– You can taste the grass. We try to make a few batches a year with the Uplands milk.

So tomorrow we’re going to make our last batch of Tallgrass Reserve for 2018. We’re going to go visit Andy, tour the farm, pick up the milk.

– Anna L.: Yep, we have a milk truck coming from Cedar Grove. They’re going to pick it up and take it back up to the cheese plant.

– Anna B.: I like to visit the cows, too.

[laughing]

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– I’m a first- generation dairy farmer, but I realized I wanted to be a farmer at a young age. I went to college and I studied Spanish and Sustainable Agriculture and worked on a farm in college. So I started looking for jobs out of college milking cows and ran a dairy farm in California for a year. Realized that I wanted to make a living from Rotational Grazing and that was what I enjoyed the most and dairy farming seemed like the best way to make a full time living from it. Good way to raise a family and make a living and I enjoy working with cows and I enjoy working outside. It’s not always perfect, but it’s not a bad way to make a living, I’m happy.

[whistling]

This is my favorite part of the day, though is taking the cows to the paddock. Once you get done milking you put the cows out to graze and that’s a big chunk of the morning chores. But the cow’s a built-in harvest machine and manure spreader and milk maker. So if you get the cows to the right place at the right time and take off the right amount of grass, it’s a pretty nice mix. So we put all these lanes, there’s lanes across the whole farm. And it gets the cows to and from the different paddocks. And so what I do weekly is I measure the grass and I sequence the paddocks based on the available dry matter. And then I kind of plan my rotation around that. Cows actually prefer cooler weather. So this is really cow weather right now when it’s in the 50’s and 60’s. When it gets hot and humid, they don’t like it so much. Especially being outside all the time. Cows spread out, they select high-quality feed. Going to eat till they’re content and then hopefully lay down and chew their cud and make milk for the afternoon. I really enjoy this system because you get a chance for a cow to be a cow. But sometimes they suffer too; there’s not always perfect weather outside. Wisconsin’s a challenge. We grow high-quality feed, but our season’s pretty short in the scheme of things, because you can’t grow any grass in December, January, February or March. Seasonal farming has a way of keeping costs low. And utilizing grass growth to maximize profitability. The good way for young farmers to start. We milk 200 cows and provide milk for cheese for Uplands Cheese. The cheese plant really gives us some financial stability that a lot of farms are lacking right now with the fall of milk prices. And we’re lucky to have a product that people enjoy. And a lot of dairy farmers I don’t feel like they feel like the average consumer appreciates their product. And it’s because the commodity. We try to produce something special that kind of highlights the work that we put into it and the highlights are our landscape and our rural environment. Today, it’s going to Landmark Creamery who’s going to make cheese at Cedar Grove. The two Annas, they’re two really talented cheese makers who we’re really happy to see use our milk. And I don’t know what they’re going to make today with our milk so I’ll be excited to see that.

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– Hey Andy, how are you?

– Hey, Anna. Hey, Anna.

– Hi Andy, how are you?

– Great! Busy, busy. What brings you guys here?

– Anna L: We’re just on our way up to Cedar Grove to make Tallgrass Reserve today so we thought we’d swing by and say thank you for the help.

– What’s left is in the Rush Creek vat if you guys want to come in and take a peek.

– Anna L.: Yeah! All right.

– Andy: Here we are.

Everyone, these are the Annas. Annas, everyone.

– Together: Hello.

– And so this is yesterday’s cheese being put in the spruce bands. So what we’ve got here is about half of our milk. It’s the fresh morning milk. And so what was sent up to you was the evening milk. Six weeks ago this all would have been turned into Pleasant Ridge but now it’s cold outside, we’re feeding hay, the fat content goes way up in this autumn milk which is perfect for Rush Creek. And this is so labor intensive, as you can see. We can’t use the full days worth of milk. And I think perfect for what you’re doing with Tallgrass. And if you want to see the next stop, we can take you into one of the ripening rooms.

– Anna Landmark: Yeah, that’d be great.

– Anna Thomas Bates: What’s happening here?

– Andy: After being banded, which you just saw, they come in here and they go through a stage of being brushed and brined. And starting to grow some of the white mold on the bark which will eventually cover the top of the cheese. This batch here is about a week old and what you see behind you is fresh cheese and then chronologically it goes around the room this way and you can see how it transforms.

– Anna B.: What happens inside the cheese as the weeks go by?

– Goo, very slowly. So at this stage it’s more or less the texture of like a kitchen sponge, bouncy. And as it ripens and the proteins break down it will slowly become softer and softer until about two months old when we sell it it has that beautiful kind of glossy sheen and custardy texture. And eventually after a few weeks of brushing we’ll move into another room and let white mold sort of grow over the rind. So this has many weeks to go, but our first batch is over in the next cave; they’re just coming right now. So I can send you home with some. So glad you guys could stop by; thanks for coming!

– Anna L.: Thanks for the tour.

– Yeah, if you got a minute, I’d be happy to go out and introduce you to the cows.

– Anna B.: I’d love to see the cows.

– I’ll probably jump on the milk truck and head up so I can get the make started.

– Andy: Yeah. Good, good. Well good luck with the vat.

– Anna L.: Thank you!

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– Anna: How long will the cows be out on pasture?

– Andy: Well, I mean their whole lives, really. This is the tail end as you can see of the grazing season, so we’ll start feeding hay by rolling it out right here in the pasture. And then they’ll spend the winter outside. They’ll be dried off and not milking.

– Anna B.: They don’t seem to be very nervous of us.

– Andy: No, I mean like most dairy cows they’re handled twice a day. We have a relaxed, friendly herd of cows. We also have a closed herd of cows. So any cow who’s milked here has been born and raised here.

– Who’s this?

– Fleur.

She was a pet when she was born three years ago and she’s still pretty much a pet.

– And how many cows are you milking right now?

– About 200.

Yep.

– And what types of grasses are in your pastures?

– Um, a mix. It is not as if there are certain species that contribute particular flavors. The two keys would be harvesting it at the right stage of growth. So putting the cows into the field when there’s sort of maximum sugar content up in the leaves. The cow is getting the most energy from that grass and the milk is the sweetest from all that sugar in the plant. The flavor of the milk is a product of the feed but also of the rumen of the cow. It’s like a big fermentation vat. And all the bugs that are built up in there from a summer of eating nothing but salad. You hear Scott talk a lot about the smell of our cows’ breath. You can smell in their breath, it smells like the milk. It’s sweet, it’s grassy, and it’s the smell you get really when you smell a rind of our cheese, too.

– Well, we definitely notice a difference when we’ve made Tallgrass Reserve with your milk versus a conventional milk. The color of the cheese is golden, the flavor is more complex and grassy and buttery. To be able to really see these amazing cows and how gentle they are and to see what they’re eating and to know that this milk went right in the truck right to Cedar Grove into the vat. And to have that milk and make our own cheese, Tallgrass Reserve, is really an honor and it just brings it full circle for us.

– Andy: Southwestern Wisconsin has always I think had a kind of fairly tight-knit group of cheese makers and our business really was a product of that. We started making cheese 20 years ago up at Cedar Grove. The first four years of making Pleasant Ridge happened at Cedar Grove out of their generosity, really, before we built the creamery here on the farm. And so I see collaborating with Landmark as just repaying that Karmic debt, helping another cheese company get started. As a whole Wisconsin is so rich with dairy farming and cheese making resources that there’s a lot to go around.

I think another key is that at least the people we’re talking about, these small artisan cheese makers down in the southwest part of the state, we all sell everything we make. We don’t really look at each other as competitors. I think we have a lot more to gain by sharing information and resources and there’s a feeling I think that the rising tide will lift all ships. The goal here is really to convert people from industrial cheese to handmade cheese. And if somebody eats a piece of Landmark’s Tallgrass Reserve and loves it I think they’re more apt to go back and buy a piece of my cheese the next time they visit.

– Anna L: I started making cheese because I love to eat it. And I had an interest in just tinkering around.

I bought my own dairy cow. My husband and I had this little property, five acres. So I got a dairy cow and I had a couple goats. And I just started making cheese in my kitchen for fun. And I just loved it. I love the smell. I love how soft the curds feel in the vats.

And I just ultimately decided I’d like to try to make a business out of it. So these are the cultures that we add to give Tallgrass some of the flavors that it has, the little bit of a cheddary note to it.

And also to encourage the ripening, the acidification of the milk.

And then we just let that sit and stir and start the fermenting process for about 30, 40 minutes. We wouldn’t have been able to start if we hadn’t had access to this make room. Without this little vat, we would’ve had to have had millions of dollars of investors to help us build a cheese plant or huge bank loans. And I don’t know that we would’ve been able to make a go out of it, so. Yeah, I mean, without Bob we wouldn’t have been able to launch our business.

– Bob: We’re happy to share the facility with them. Some of their cheeses are really fussy. And they’re delicious and they win awards but they’re an awful lot of work and very hard to scale up. And so reaching a scale of production that would justify owning a plant and would pay off the cost of a facility I think is going to be a challenge to them. And so we just sort of facilitated her passion.

I’ll teach anybody who wants to know everything I do. And in the process of watching how they develop their products, I learn more about cheese making. I think it’s a unique situation. We get people coming in from other parts of the country. And we get people especially coming in from other industries. And nobody really seems to have the same sort of attitude that we’ve developed here. There was a time when Wisconsin was really a failing cheese center in a lot of ways because we were making commodity cheeses. And getting into specialty cheeses and high-quality cheeses enabled us to regain the leadership and get the respect of the entire world, pretty much. The only way that comes about is if people are willing to nurture each other and cooperate with each other.

– Anna L.: I enjoy coming up here. It’s kind of a relaxing process. For small batches like this, it’s just me back here.

A lot of times I can just kind of tune everything out and just focus on the cheese.

But again, it’s been a long time since I’ve made a batch so I’m kind of getting to re-familiarize myself with the milk. One of the biggest differences between cow milk and sheep milk is the cow milk curd just feels so much more delicate. It’s a lot softer texture. Sheep milk just has a lot more protein so the curd is, has a little bit more spring to it. So you can see now, it’s knitting together quite a bit better. So here I want it to stick together to make a nice little ball. But I try to scoop whey in with the curds. Keeps it warmer longer. The whey works down through the bottom and it helps the curds knit together. So this is a cheese press. It’s just to help finish extracting the whey out of the curds, and to make everything knit together and to give you the final shape of your cheese. So, this particular cheese if we didn’t press it the curds would end up kind of dry and crumbly and it wouldn’t be very appealing. So we press it into the block and then we get the nice paste and texture for the cheese. Yeah, couple more hours in the press. I’ll do some cleanup while they’re pressing and then we’ll get them salted and over to the store in our cheese case.

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Anna B.: These are the Tallgrass Reserve wheels that we just made yesterday at Cedar Grove. We’re applying a layer of lard which is going to seal in moisture, keep things from cracking, help provide the right environment for tasty molds to grow.

And this one is a natural rind cheese, so we just let the molds that are in the cave grow and it’ll change seasonally, but then it has a really nice earthy taste.

– We’ve got different rooms for each of the different styles of cheese. The Tallgrass Room we like to see more of the fluffier molds, but we don’t want to see the stinky molds on that one. So this is our Washed Rind Room, it’s just Anabasque. a French style, and we wash it. It’s a smear-ripened cheese so it gets really stinky and it’s one of our more popular cheeses, too, that we sell. It’s definitely tricky to age. And we’re having to recreate how we’re aging it now here in our own caves as we get our caves going.

– So we’ve been nomadic for so many years traveling here to make the cheese, here to age the cheese. We were really happy to find a home here in Paoli here last year. So when we were researching how to do a cheese shop right all the mongers I talked to said make sandwiches, make grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s a great way to showcase your cheese, let people know how things melt. How they taste when they’re cooked with. We keep it pretty simple. We do Madison Sourdough Bread, we do three of our cheeses, and then we offer a few preserves from Quince & Apple.

– Customer: So yeah, so tell us what you have.

– Yeah, so we have three different cheeses. All cheeses that we make. The first one is Anabasque. Which is a nice, robust, nutty, a little bit funky sheep milk cheese. So probably the most strongly flavored but delicious. And then we have Pipit which is a sheep milk Gouda. Melts really nicely, really creamy, a little bit sweeter, a little bit milder. And then Tallgrass Reserve is our pasture-grazed cow milk cheese.

– Customer: Oh, I like that.

– Creamy Alpine-style, some nice cheddary notes.

– I think I want the Tallgrass, how about you?

– Okay, and for here?

– Yeah.

– Okay.

It’s very fulfilling to think about our philosophy and who we’re buying from and who we’re selling to and just talking to consumers and educating them about why it’s worth to pay that price for a great meal or some really well-crafted small batch cheese.

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– You want us to go from the top, or.

– Director: No, I think you’re good, we can cut it. Do you have any close ups you want?

– Will you say “Action” please? I like it when you say “Action.”

[laughing]

– We’re starting from here, we’re not walking in again?

– Yeah.

– Okay.

– Director: And, action!

– So glad you guys could stop by and see the cheese. If you got a minute we could go out and say hi to the cows.

– I think I’ll probably catch a lift with the truck driver so I can get up to make–

– I’d like to see the cows.

– Great. Let’s do it.

– Director: Do that again without the pause. Maybe say “Milk truck.”

– Hey.

– Let’s do it again. No, sorry.

[laughing]

– You’re going to leave me hanging?

– I know. All right, are you ready?

– Yep.

– Okay. Thanks so much for letting us come out today.

[laughing]

– Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support:

The Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie, and remind you that in Wisconsin we dream in cheese.

[crowd cheering]

Just look for our badge. It’s on everything we make.

Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin and see where your beer is made. Milwaukee’s landmark art deco hotel offers luxury accommodations, legendary hospitality, and world-class dining. Paired with the hotel’s roaring ’20s vibe makes The Ambassador a must-experience destination.

From production to processing right down to our plates, there are over 15,000 employers in Wisconsin with career opportunities to fulfill your dreams and feed the world. Hungry for more? Shape your career with these companies… and others at FabWisconsin.com. Society Insurance, Small details. Big difference.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The Central Wisconsin Craft Collective.

Something Special from Wisconsin. Illing Company.

Edible Milwaukee magazine.

Also, with support of the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

For more information about upcoming Wisconsin Foodie special events, dinners and tours, please go to WisconsinFoodie.com. There you can sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know about our events and offerings. Also, get connected with us through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

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