Baron Bigod

by Benjamin Roberts

If you sells cheese long enough (16 years!) it is less and less likely that you will be surprised by how delicious cheese can be. I’ve tasted a lot of cheese over those years, I mean a lot of cheese, and so it seems that there might not be anything new under the sun.

So there I was in Northern Italy, it was September of 2019 and I was attending a party with the who’s who of the artisan cheese world. We had landed in Italy only hours earlier, and so, totally jetlagged, I walked into a packed Italian manor and a piece of cheese was immediately thrust into my hand. The warning was: You’re going to love this cheese but you can’t buy it….yet.

Fast forward a couple of pandemic years and then the word comes that this cheese is finally available in the USA. There I was again in a sweaty room brimming with cheese professionals and I stride up to a table and this time I know what I am about to try, yet somehow this time it was even more delicious than the first time I had it. How could a cheese surprise me this much two times?

Baron Bigod! This is what a brie style cheese should taste like. Sweet cream, savory vegetables, a pinch of salt, fresh hay. Milk transformed into an absolute kaleidoscope of flavors. This is what real French style brie should taste like—except this one is made in England. Exported by our friends at Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, there isn’t a more exquisite piece of cheese we can sell you at our counter. Want to learn more? Click HERE for the deets.

Making Apricity with Alemar Cheese

By Joe Kastner

Last week, a team of our Cheese Shop staff had the awesome opportunity to do some cheesemaking with our friends up at Alemar Cheese Company in Northeast Minneapolis. Located in the Food Building, along with Lowry Hill Provisions and Baker’s Field Flour & Bread, Alemar is definitely the creamery closest to France 44, which makes for a great working relationship. We get their cheese delivered along with bread and salami from the same building, and when we need cheese in a pinch, Alemar is our first call! Head Cheesemaker Charlotte Serino has been with the company since 2021, and we are very grateful that she invited us to come make cheese with her!

Apricity has become one of our favorite soft cheeses at the shop, and for good reason! Charlotte just started making this cheese last fall, and it has already gained a lot of buzz. Apricity most recently won Best in Class at the 2023 American Cheese Society Awards, giving it national recognition along with our local appreciation. The name Apricity means “the warmth of the sun in winter”, which I think is just a perfectly romantic name for a new cheese to represent Minnesota.

Apricity is a “lactic-set” cheese, which works a little different than your typical curdy, rennet-set cheeses. This technique is seen frequently in goat’s-milk cheeses, which is where Charlotte learned it. Apricity uses very little rennet to coagulate the milk, instead relying on natural acidification and fermentation over a longer period of time to transform the milk into a smooth, creamy curd. This gives the cheese a great brightness and tangy flavor, along with an almost ricotta-like texture. To turn this curd into cheese, we as a team got to salt the curd, mix it up, and then scoop it into snowball-sized spheres and roll into perfect orbs.

The batch that we helped make is now on sale at our shop!

We thank Charlotte and the Alemar team for inviting us in and showing us around. Connecting with local, talented cheesemakers is one of the best parts of working in a small cheese shop, and seeing how cheese is made and where it comes from can only help us be better stewards of their products! If you’re looking for a new softy to fall in love with this fall, come give Apricity a try!

France 44 Farm Visits: Redhead Creamery & Shepherd’s Way Farm

by Joe Kastner

Last week, a group of our mongers from the Minneapolis shop got the chance to go visit a couple local creameries and see first-hand where some of our cheeses come from. We got to go visit Redhead Creamery out west in Brooten, and Shepherd’s Way in Nerstrand, which is just down by Northfield. Seeing these family farms, hearing their stories and why they make cheese, this is what our cheese counter is all about: connecting with our neighbors through food and celebrating the talented makers of cheese near and far. 

Redhead Creamery has been making cheese for 10 years now, but this year in particular is bound to be a big one for them. We were greeted by cheesemaker Alise Sjostrom with a bowl of squeaky fresh cheese curds made earlier that morning, who then proceeded to give us a tour of all the new goings-on at the farm. Just within the last month or so, they’ve added some awesome automation for the farming side of things, including an automated milking machine, where the cows milk themselves! This will give Alise and the team even more time for cheesemaking and playing with recipes, as well as their other big project, a new distillery! The Redhead team plans on using the whey from cheesemaking to distill into spirits, and then serve those spirits at their all-new dine-in expansion, which we got to see the development of! We’re all very excited for these next steps at Redhead and can’t wait to see what’s next for them!

The very next day another group got to travel down past Northfield to see Jodi Olsen Read at Shepherd’s Way Farms. Despite some issues with their water well that had just come up the night before, Jodi very graciously hosted us, showed us around the farm, and served us a delicious assortment of sheep’s cheeses, some of which you can find at our cheese counter! We got to tour the milking and make facilities, and even got to see the cavernous upper level of the barn that had just been used for a family wedding reception. Jodi has been making cheese for about 25 years now, and has really honed her craft with the different varieties of cheese Shepherd’s Way puts out. You can also find them at many farmer’s markets around the city, where they also sell their sheep’s milk by the bottle, which is a real treat. We love selling Shepherd’s Way cheeses and hope you’ll try one next time you’re in the shop!

ACS Winner: Sequatchie Cove Creamery

By Austin Coe Butler

Last, but not least, in our six-week series celebrating American Cheese Society Award Winners is Sequatchie Cove Creamery! Sequatchie Cove Creamery won in the following categories:

Cumberland – 1st Place – American Made/International Style made from cow’s milk

Cumberland – 2nd Place – Best in Show

Coppinger – 3rd Place – Washed Rind Cheeses made from cow’s milk

Having been raised in the South, I can’t help but rejoice at seeing a Tennessee-based creamery coming in 2nd for Best in Show. In fact, of the six different creameries we’ve featured so far, Sequatchie Cove had the biggest wins of the bunch. And while this may be the first time some of you have heard of Sequatchie Cove, they’ve spent more than a decade working diligently at their craft.

In the late 90s, Nathan and Padgett Arnold met at Crabtree Farm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, an urban farm dedicated to sustainable agriculture and community access to food. The two fell in love and spent several seasons on the farm as their interests in food grew and developed. Nathan eventually went to work for Bill and Miriam Keener on a nearby organic farm just northwest of the city named Sequatchie Cove Farm. In 2004, the Arnolds and Keeners went to Terra Madre, a biennial Slow Food conference in Turin, where their interest in cheesemaking was sparked by French alpine cheeses like Tomme de Savoie and Morbier.

Nathan and Padgett moved quickly. By 2010, after years of travel, tutelage, and licensing, they bought the farm from the Keeners and converted it into the creamery it is today, and by 2012 they had their first category award from ACS for Dancing Fern. The last three years have been astonishing in growth for Sequatchie Cove. Nathan and Padgett went from hard-scrabble cheese makers trying to balance labor shortages, milk access, cheese sales, and the pandemic, to requiring months-out preorders for their cheeses. Last year saw the massive renovation of the creamery to better meet demand.

Sequatchie Cove has made many cheeses over the years, but they’ve settled into a rhythm with the following four. Cumberland is inspired by Tomme de Savoie, and just like that humble cheese, it is the ultimate snacker and a workhorse in the kitchen. Beneath its suede-like rind is a springy paste with straightforward and tangy flavors that make Tomme style cheeses so craveable. Coppinger, a Morbier inspired cheese with its decorative ash line and washed rind, has the fruity, yeasty flavors of a Saison with a deeply satisfying fudgey texture that will fill your head with intrusive thoughts that you should take a bite directly out of the wedge. (Go on, do it.) 

Sequatchie Cove also makes the delectable, boozy Shakerag blue that is wrapped in fig leaves and soaked in Chattanooga whiskey. Padgett, the resident horticulturalist, goes out into the Tennessee woods to gather fig leaves that she trims, cooks, stacks, and macerates in whiskey before they are intricately wrapped around the cheese. The result is a blue that is crumbly yet creamy, bold and boozy, with a sweetness reminiscent of sugar cured bacon, root beer, or sasperilluh’ (sarsaparilla), and may even rival Rogue River Blue.

Lastly, Sequatchie Cove also makes a Reblochon-inspired cheese named Walden, a smaller format of their now discontinued cheese, Dancing Fern, which put them on the map. With its delicate flavors of walnuts, button mushrooms, and cultured butter, and a pudgy, mochi-like spring that made it go viral when we posted a video on our Instagram.

We’ll be promoting Sequatchie Cove Creamery cheeses all weekend long, so stop by the shop to pick up a wedge or two of some incredible cheese for 15% off and savor the calm, cool days of autumn.

ACS Winners Pt. 4: Uplands Cheese

by Austin Coe Butler

In our weeks-long celebration of American Cheese Society Award Winners, there isn’t a cheese as near and dear to our hearts, and our customers’, as the next big winner: Uplands Cheese Company’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve. As the most awarded cheese in American, Pleasant Ridge Reserve added three more prestigious awards to its name:

Pleasant Ridge Reserve – 3rd Place – Best in Show

Pleasant Ridge Reserve – 1st Place – Washed Rind Cheeses made from cow’s milk

Pleasant Ridge Reserve – 2nd Place – Farmstead Category Aged 60 days or more less than 39% Moisture made from cow’s milk

Pleasant Ridge Reserve is a special cheese for us. It’s been in our case since the shop opened, and over the years our relationship with cheesemaker Andy Hatch and the team at Uplands has become one of our most cherished. Now, with over fifteen years of friendship, we hand-select the batches of Pleasant Ridge we sell during visits to the dairy. Last year, in an exciting development, we invited Andy to the Events space to invite customers to participate in batch selection as well. Put simply, Pleasant Ridge is great cheese made by great people doing great things for their cows, community, and environment. Whenever an inquisitive customer comes to the cheese counter unsure of where to start eating their way thoughtfully through the multifarious world of cheese, I hand them a wedge of Pleasant Ridge Reserve.

Fans of Uplands’ other cheese, Rush Creek Reserve, might wonder where it is on the list of ACS winners, and the answer is, it isn’t! For good reason. Rush Creek Reserve is a highly seasonal cheese, made during the autumn when the cows transition from fresh pasture to cured hay producing a milk that is less in volume but richer in fat. It arrives in October and is sold out by January, so you won’t ever see it judged by ACS in May, which, frankly, I find refreshing. In an increasingly institutionalized world where we use awards and accolades to justify our tastes, or worse, build our tastes from them, the personal pleasure of food remains a radical tool for conviviality. De gustibus non est disputandum. Pleasant Ridge Reserve doesn’t taste any better with each award it wins. It tastes great in spite of them.

As a beautiful melter and a great snaking cheese that can handle the summer heat, Pleasant Ridge Reserve is the perfect cheese to have a big wedge of this Labor Day weekend. And as an added level of intrigue, those of us who tried the day’s batch that was judged at ACS this year thought the two batches we selected alongside our customers were even better! Come visit the shop the weekend to grab and wedge and taste why it continues to remain America’s most awarded cheese!

ACS Winners Pt. 4: Redhead Creamery

by Austin Coe Butler

Next up in our continuing series on American Cheese Society Award Winners is another Minnesota native, Redhead Creamery! Redhead won in the following categories:

3rd Place – Cheese Curds – Ridiculously Good Cheddar Cheese Curds

Redhead Creamery is based in Brooten, MN, about 120 miles northwest of the the Twin Cities. The creation of the creamery was the fulfillment of Alise Sjostrum’s (resident redhead) childhood dream of becoming a cheesemaker. After completing a 4-H program in Wisconsin, Alise returned to the family farm and announced, at the age of sixteen, that she was going to stay on the family farm and open a creamery. After acquiring a decade of experience working, studying, and traveling from Wisconsin to Vermont, Switzerland to Brazil, Alise and her husband Lucas returned to the family farm and got down to work. They’ve been producing farmstead, artisan cheese since 2013, winning awards along the way. (In addition to cheese, Redhead was also recently given a grant to research and produce an alcoholic beverage from fermented whey!)

We carry quite a few cheeses from Redhead Creamery at the moment. Their Little Lucy Brie is a bright, creamy American Brie that is so adorable (and delicious) it demands to be on every cheeseboard. We also carry their North Fork Munster, a pungent, gooey, washed rind, and their Red Temper Cheddar, which is rubbed down in a chipotle pepper and honey paste and brought home a blue ribbon at last year’s State Fair!

And then there are those aptly named, award winning cheese curds. They’ve got that perfect cheddar sharpness and cheese curd squeak that just them as easy to polish off as a bag of chips. With the State Fair just a few days away, it’s the perfect time to pick up some cheese curds! You can fry them, serve them in poutine, or, if you’ve taken one of our mozzarella classes, you can make cheddared mozzarella!? All Redhead Creamery cheeses are 15% off this weekend, so stop by the cheese counter to try some and see how good ridiculously good cheese tastes!

ACS Winners Pt. 3: Shepherd’s Way

by Austin Coe Butler

Continuing our series on American Cheese Society Award Winners, this week we’re featuring another Minnesota winner—Shepherd’s Way Farm in Nerstrand! Shepherd’s Way won in the following categories:

Burr Oak – 3rd Place – Sheep’s Milk Cheese Aged Over 60 Days

Sogn – 3rd Place – Farmstead Category Sheep’s Milk Cheese Aged Over 60 Days

What more needs to be written about Shepherd’s Way Farm? I maintain that Jodi is the nicest person working in cheese, which is saying a lot, and that Shepherd’s Way is producing some of the best cheese in the state. 

Their ACS winning cheeses are no exception. Burr Oak an extra-firm, extra-nutty aged cheese is a special release and isn’t currently available, but Sogn Tomme (pronounced SOHN) has become a year-round counter staple for us. It’s bright, mineral tang makes it the perfect companion whether you’re enjoying the summer sun or burrowed away in the bleak, midwinter. Sogn is one of Shepherd’s Way’s newest cheeses, and last year at ACS it actually won 1st place in its category!

We have a lovely selection of Shepherd’s Way cheeses in our case at the moment from their creamy brie-like Hidden Falls and tangy Big Woods Blue to Sogn Tomme and a few flavors of Shepherd’s Hope, their divine, fresh sheep’s milk cheese that is somewhere between feta and mozzarella in taste and consistency. To me, Shepherd’s Way Farm’s cheeses all scream refreshing, something we’ll need this broiling weekend. Swing by the shop this week to try some more award winning cheese made right here in Minnesota (and enjoy the AC)!

ACS Winners Pt. II: Alemar Cheese Company

by Austin Coe Butler

This week, in our month-long celebration of American Cheese Society Award Winners, it’s time for the hometown hero: Alemar Cheese Company! Alemar won in the following categories:

Apricity – 1st Place – Soft-Ripened Cheeses made from Cow’s Milk

Blue Earth – 2nd Place – Soft-Ripened Cheeses made from Cow’s Milk 

This means that in the category of soft-ripened cheeses made from cow’s milk Alemar took both top spots! Let me rephrase that: Out of all the soft-ripened cow’s milk cheeses that were submitted from across the nation, not one but two cheeses from right here in Minneapolis rose to the top in America’s fiercest food-fight!

What’s also remarkable about Apricity’s win is that Apricity was only created last September—this is a debut win. Within just a few months it’s become the darling of the American artisan cheese scene, and it’s easy to see why. With its gorgeous orange glow, mouse-like texture, a bright, lactic tang, Apricity is a crave-able cheese for all occasions.

Alemar Cheese Company was founded in 2008 by Keith Adams in Mankato. Keith wanted to make artisanal, French-inspired soft-ripened cheeses like Brie and Camembert using milk from small Minnesota family farms. Their first cheese was Bent River, a Camembert-style cheese that quickly picked up two ACS honors and a Good Food Award. In 2019, Keith and his team moved to the FOOD BUILDING in NE Minneapolis where Charlotte Serino joined as Head Cheesemaker. 

We currently have Apricity, Boom Island, their smaller camembert-style cheese, and Sakatah,  a soft cheese wrapped in grape leaves and soaked in Brandy, in our case. Stop by the cheese counter this weekend to try a sample of Alemar’s cheeses and taste what makes them award-winning!

ACS Award Winners Pt. 1: Blakesville Creamery

by Austin Coe Butler

Now that both the American Cheese Society (ACS) Judging and Competition in Minneapolis and ACS Conference in Des Moines have passed, we know the winners of this year’s coveted ACS awards. To our delight, we carry many of these cheeses, so for the next month we’ll be promoting ACS award winning producers and the cheeses they make, celebrating one maker each week. First up, Blakesville Creamery in Port Washington, WI, who won big in the following categories:

Linedeline – 1st place – Soft Ripened Cheeses made from Goat’s Milk

Shabby Shoes – 1st place – Goat’s Milk Cheese aged 31 to 60 days

St. Germain – 1st place – Goat’s Milk Cheeses aged over 60 days

Sunny Ridge – 2nd place – Washed Rind Cheeses made from Goat’s Milk

Blakesville is led by head cheesemaker Veronica Pedraza alongside their dedicated team of cheesemakers and farmers. Veronica, who may have the best laugh of anyone in the cheese business, has an impressive career in cheese-making, working at Sweet Grass Dairy, Jasper Hill, and Meadowood Farm before leading Blakesville. There’s a playfulness in the cheeses reflected in the names—Shabby Shoes being a play on the French Chabichou; Linedeline, a sly reference to the beguiling pronunciation of Lynde Uihlein’s, Blakesville’s owner, first name (pronounced Line-DAH-line not Lin-DAH-line); and Holiday Cheer, a nod to the Wisconsin brandy Old Fashioned). Recently, Alisha Norris Jones, the mind behind of the inimitable Immortal Milk, creator of edible art installations, joined the Blakesville crew as Sales Manager, and the energy at Blakesville has never been more “chaotic good.”

Blakesville makes an impressive array of cheeses for a young creamery, including everything from fresh chèvre to aged blues, melty goatclette (goat raclette) to Basque-style tommes. Their catalogue only continues to grow, and last year they not only introduced two holiday releases, Holiday Cheer and Truffle Shuffle, but also our summer favorite, a Croatian inspired Grillin’ Cheese that we’ve washed in Dampfwerk’s Barrel Aged Gin. Only a few months ago, Veronica began receiving sheep’s milk from the folks at Ms. J & Co. and is already making two incredible new cheeses, Pecuri in vigne, a leaf-wrapped brebis soaked in Corsican muscat, and Llanes, a large bloomy-rinded sheep’s milk cheese. Veronica always has some experiment in the works (most recently it was an ill-starred goat’s milk torta style cheese) promising more delicious things to come. At the 2022 ACS Conference, Blakesville’s debut in the awards, they took home five! 

Blakesville has something for every cheese lover, whether you like goat cheese or not! St. Germain and Linedeline promise to be gentle forays to the word of goat cheese, while for the bonafide capriphiles can exalt in the billy goat funk of Sunny Ridge and Shabby Shoes. Come into the shop this week to taste what makes these cheeses award winning!

Grayson Returns!

by Austin Coe Butler

Like the vegetable world, cheese, too, follows the seasons. Spring brings the first, fresh cheeses like mushroomy bries with their ramp-like aromas and bone-white chèvres with their bright tang of mint, rhubarb, and radishes. Summer brings with it sweet, milk-laden mozzarella, juicy like a tomato, and the first aged cheeses. Alpines and Cheddars ripen with apples on autumn days, and as the weather cools, the flavors warm. Long winter nights settle in, and the bold, savory melters like Raclette are brought to the fire, truckles of Stilton are cracked open, and decadent, woodsy wheels of spruce-girdled Rush Creek Reserve, Winnimere, and Vacherin Mont d’Or are scooped from their rinds. Some cheeses are ephemeral, having only one season, while others have several. Among the greatest cheeses that follows its own seasons is Grayson.

Grayson is a humble, smear ripened cheese made by Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax, Virginia nestled in the southwestern Appalachian. Its rubrous hue and square shape immediately evoke Taleggio and other smear ripened cheeses. These smear ripened cheeses, soft cheeses that are “washed” in or smeared with a morge or brine, are celebrated for their funky, briny, meaty flavors, and their pungent aromas. There’s a good reason why: bacteria only found in marine environments are inexplicably found on these cheeses, along with various species of Brevibacterium, a genus of bacteria that thrive in damp, salty environments like smear ripened cheeses or… your feet! Grayson has all these flavors in its unique way. It is beefy, barn-yardy, and runny, with some of its best wheels reminding me of heavily larded refried pinto beans. But this is a description of winter Grayson. Summer Grayson is delectably different.

The folks at Meadow Creek Dairy are real American artisans. The Feete family began making cheese in 1998, and ever since then they’ve shown a dedication to their cows and their craft. Their cows are always on pasture, never confined, and they only graze on grass. They follow active grazing practices, rotating the cows from one pasture to the next to avoid overgrazing. Meadow Creek Dairy also keeps a closed herd of Jersey cows bred over the past thirty years specifically for their postage stamp of land in the Virginia highlands. Their cheesemakers work with minutes old milk that comes into the creamery straight from the milking parlor, and they let the raw, Jersey milk shine. All of Meadow Creek’s cheeses have a hallmark, vibrant, beta-carotene rich color from that beautiful milk. Meadow Creek celebrates the seasonal nature of their milk and cheese.

So while winter Grayson is stronger in flavor and softer in texture, summer Grayson is milder, tangier, firmer, and springier. The aroma is subtle, like yeasted bread, or the foamy head of an unfiltered beer. The flavors are bright, salty, and milky, while the paste retains a lovely buoyant bounce in the center and a supple creamline. Because of its milder nature, summer is a great time to try Grayson if you haven’t before or are unfamiliar with smear ripen cheeses. It can be paired alongside crisp whites and medium bodied reds, but it really deserves to be paired alongside a perspiring glass of frothy or Hefeweizen in the summer sun.

There’s always a hiatus with Grayson in the spring. The winter’s batches have been consumed, and while the cows rest and the grass grows, we wait. With the return of Grayson, we know summer has arrived! To celebrate its arrival with summer we’ll be sampling this cheese all weekend long, so stop by the shop to pick up a wedge!