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A total cheeseballInterviewed by Nathan Leaf
Owner and master cheesemaker of Carr Valley Cheese, La Valle Age: 54 Family: Single, a son and a daughter. Education: Earned cheesemakers license at age 16. Bachelor of arts in political science with minor in French from UW-Platteville in 1975. In 2002, Cook became one of only 43 master cheesemakers in the world after completing a 15-year program through the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research. Background: Born in Richland Center. Grew up in Plain. Attended Sauk Prairie High School. Father owned Irish Valley cheese plant. Company profile: Carr Valley Cheese has about 70 employees at three plants in La Valle, Mauston and Fennimore, and five retail stores in the area. Company sales: $5 million in 2003; $6 million in 2004; $12 million in 2005; about $12 million projected for 2006. Q. Growing up with a father who was a cheesemaker, do you remember when you first became interested in the craft? A. I was pretty young when I was out there helping. And of course most kids have their tricycle or tractor to ride around in the summer. I could ride year-round because I would ride down between the vats in the factory. I was down there quite a bit and I remember I was probably four and I would go out and get the cooler door open and pull a big old cheddar flat out. ... I'd be out there driving holes in the cheese. That was great fun and I would taste it. Of course that was the cheese that he was selling so I suppose when customers would come in there were holes in it and he knew I had been there. He didn't say much about it because he must have known I must be interested. Q. What drew you to cheesemaking? A. I like cheese. And I found the process very fascinating and still do. How you can make so many different products from milk, and all the different flavor profiles that you can get and all the different milks you can use. We use sheep milk, goat milk, cow milk and we mix milk together too. It's the different selections of cultures you can use, different types of affinage. Q. What's affinage? A. It's a French word. It means age, cure, the environment the cheese is kept in. The humidity. It means the finish. It means all of those things in one word. Q. So did you know you were going to be a cheesemaker all along? A. No. I thought that I wanted to be an attorney and then I got out of school and I just decided I didn't want to sit behind a desk all my life. One day it came to mind that if I really need an attorney, I can hire one. There are very few things you can do all your life and I think cheesemaking is one of them. Yes, there are a lot of changes. Yes, the industry has changed. But I think with the basic knowledge of cheesemaking ... there is just a huge future. So I decided that I wanted to get involved in my dad's plant. And even at the time I saw it as kind of an infant industry. Q. Even in Wisconsin? A. It is if you compare it to the California wine industry. I had always had really good cheeses. We had always aged cheeses out and done that sort of thing. And I always thought to myself there's such an opportunity to make other kinds of cheeses to do so many different things. But at that time the rest of the industry was going more commodity (cheese). There were huge consolidations. And there's still the big consolidations but the focus isn't commodity because there is no money in it. It's a penny business. I really saw it as kind of an opportunity and I got on the specialty thing when I bought this plant in '86. Q. What made you look to specialty back then? A. Because that's really the future. I could see where the industry was going. When I was sixteen, there were 32 plants in Sauk County. And now there's three. (Specialty cheese was the future) because of the consolidation., because of all the small plants closing because they just had a living and didn't really change with the times. When this plant came up for sale, there were three brothers and they did an excellent, excellent job of making cheese here. They made the old bandaged wrapped cheeses that my father stopped making in the '50s. I saw that as a huge opportunity to get back into that. To develop that market with a cheese store here even though it's in the middle of nowhere. You would be amazed at the volume of business we do out of this store. It's a destination. People seek us out. Q. Why do you think you draw so many people to such a remote location? A. For one thing, we have fabulous cheese because we do things in a very traditional way. On a Saturday morning, they'll be out there at 7:30, quarter to 8 because they want cheese curds. Well, they don't just want fresh cheese curds, they want them when they're warm and wet and salty and right out of the vat. Because you have people that like cheesecurds, then you have cheese curd connoisseurs, and then you have cheese curd-connoisseur-foodie-snobs. Q. If people can order your products online, why do so many still make the drive? A. It's the whole experience of coming out here. And they expect that we should remember them because they were here two years ago. Everyone has a certain feeling that they've discovered us, and of course we want them to have that feeling because it makes it a very special experience for them. They like to come here because they like to watch the cheesemaking, so it was the cheese curd thing that really got people out there. The other thing is we make traditional cheeses like they were made a hundred, hundred-and-fifty years ago. The only difference is we have mechanical agitation. But the way the cheese is made is the same, so that really sets our product apart. Q. What's your favorite cheese? A. My favorite cow-milk cheese would probably be the 10-year cheddar or the cave-aged Mammoth. nleaf@madison.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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