Tony Hook, of Hook’s Cheese Company Inc., Mineral Point, WI, knows a thing or two about cheese. He has been selling his cheeses at the Dane County Farmers’ Market in Madison, WI, for more than 30 years and has about 50 years of cheesemaking experience. “We sample all of our cheeses every Saturday at the outdoor market, and we get feedback about all of our products directly from the consuming public,” says Hook. That feedback and Hook’s knowledge have resulted in dozens of awards on numerous levels, from the state fair and the American Cheese Society to the World Championship Cheese Contest. Hi ..read more

Celebrating its 10th anniversary, California retailer Milkfarm has surpassed owner Leah Park’s expectations. When Leah Park was searching for the perfect place to open a cheese shop, she didn’t have to look far from home. It turns out that Eagle Rock, CA, in northeast Los Angeles, just 10 miles from where Park was born and raised, was the perfect spot. Milkfarm, which opened its doors on April 7, 2014, is currently celebrating its 10th year in business. Getting Educated Park set out on her foodie path right after high school in 1999, when she enrolled at San Francisco’s now-shuttered Californi ..read more

Briar Rose Creamery has accomplished big things in Oregon. In 2005, Sarah Marcus was hired at Cowgirl Creamery in San Francisco, CA, as a cheesemonger, working at the city’s historic Ferry Building. “I was born into a food family. My mom was a food and travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, so I was raised visiting cheese factories and other craft producers and hanging out on farms,” she says. “So, I always had an interest in local food.” Her curiosity led her to wonder how cheese was produced, and Marcus started experimenting with making cheese in her kitchen, knowing that all the div ..read more

Packing worlds of flavor and functionality. A hybrid generally refers to an animal or plant that is the result of breeding two different types of the same species, usually to improve upon some trait or traits. Such crossbreeding can produce a grape that withstands cooler climates or a cow that produces more milk. Often, something is lost in the process, perhaps a particular aspect of flavor. Nothing you can buy in a produce market today, let alone a supermarket, approaches the Jersey tomato of my childhood. An unfortunate result of successful hybridization tends to be standardization, a narrow ..read more

This professional knows every step of the cheesemaking process like the back of his hand. Eric Meredith can look at a piece of artisan-made, exquisitely aged cheese and see right down to its roots. Roots, that is, of the fragrant pasture the ruminants ate to make the main ingredient in cheese: milk. Meredith doesn’t farm. He doesn’t raise cows or milk them. He doesn’t make cheese. But he knows every step of this process like the back of his hand. That’s what it takes for him to carry the highest quality baton right through to its final refining step, the aging process (affinage), ready for ret ..read more

What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum ..read more

When St. Malachi, an aged Gouda, Alpine-style cheese from The Farm at Doe Run of Coatesville, PA, was named first place Best of Show at the American Cheese Society’s 2023 Judging & Competition, the farm says it was shocked to be named the top cheese in the nation. The cheese was entered in the farmstead category and won the title over 1,454 entries in July. “We really weren’t expecting it,” says Meredith Langer, sales and marketing manager at The Farm at Doe Run. “In the past, St. Malachi Reserve (the same cheese, aged for over one year in our caves), had gotten third place Best of Show, a ..read more

Nestled in the foothills just outside of Salinas, CA, sits the Central Coast’s last surviving dairy farm, Schoch Family Farmstead. The Schochs (pronounced ‘shock’) are not only the last dairy farming family in the region, but they are also Monterey County’s last producer of Monterey Jack, one of the few truly American cheeses. Until recently, the Schochs delivered 75% of the milk their 85 cows produced to a regional processor. Cheesemaker Beau Schoch used the rest to make raw milk cheese and yogurt in the farmstead’s on-site creamery. In mid-August, the Schochs received news that the neighbori ..read more

As retailer Sweet Freedom celebrates its fifth anniversary, it focuses on what it does best. Northwest Arkansas’ first cut-to-order cheese shop, Sweet Freedom in Bentonville can be held up as an example of a retailer that has done everything right. Owner Jessica Keahey was able to turn her passion into a lucrative business, but it took research and perseverance. Cheese wasn’t yet on her radar when she pursued a degree in engineering at the University of Arkansas. After graduating, Keahey served as a consultant in the engineering field for 14 years, before she decided to make a big change. Want ..read more

Gayle Martin curates the best of local and gourmet at Plum Plums Cheese. Photos by Jane Beiles Photography It all started thanks to wine. Gayle Martin and Michael Riahi met while working in the wine business in New York City — she in marketing and he in sales, and the running joke was that they actually got along. “Life takes many twists and turns,” says Martin. “I was 20-plus years in the marketing world, focusing on both small production and mass production wines and spirits, ranging from everything from Dom Pérignon and Hennessy to introducing Yellow Tail wine to the U.S. from Australia.” S ..read more