April 6, 2007
For a listing of other previous Retail Watch stories, please see our Retail Watch Archive.

By Kate Sander

LA VALLE, Wis. — In the not-so-distant past, a consumer’s best bet to find a unique cheese was to turn to a specialty cheese shop and peruse the imports. Not so today. Over the past decade or so, production of specialty cheeses has exploded across the United States, with small boutique cheesemakers as well as larger companies experimenting and introducing American Originals — that is, cheeses that are unique to the American cheesemakers producing them.

One of the leaders of that movement is Sid Cook, a Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker who has been involved in the cheese business most of his life. For Cook, owner of Carr Valley Cheese, La Valle, Wis., producing and inventing cheeses isn’t just a job — it’s a passion.

“I’m lucky; it’s almost like I don’t have a job,” Cook says. “I like all aspects of it. I can’t imagine doing anything I’d like better.”

Carr Valley Cheese offers more than 60 kinds of cheeses, about 20 of them original creations. Among Cook’s specialties are Benedictine, a washed rind cheese made with fresh sheep, goat and cow’s milk, and Gran Canaria, a mixed milk cheese aged at least two years and cured with olive oil. Both cheeses are award-winning, and Gran Canaria beat out more than 700 entries to win Best of Show at the American Cheese Society’s (ACS) annual competition in 2004.

The company has won many awards over the past few years, and with the success Cook has found himself increasingly busy with marketing and handling overall company growth. Still, one of his favorite things to do is make cheese, particularly the mixed milk cheeses.

“I equate the mixed milk cheeses to music,” Cook says. “There’s a melody in the flavor profile. Cheese curds are squeaky, salty and really good but they’re a couple of notes and then you have to have more. The mixed milk cheeses are several measures of melody.

“I like cheeses with a lot of flavor and a big finish … it doesn’t get any better than that,” Cook adds.

Still, Cook hasn’t turned his back on those simple notes — cheese curds are the company’s best seller. Also very popular are a variety of Carr Valley’s Cheddars, some aged as long as 10 years. The company also makes other traditional cheeses like Colby, although Cook says Carr Valley’s Colby is quite different from mass-produced Colby in that it is traditional in style, produced in 12-pound wheels with a very open texture. In addition, the company handles other companies’ cheeses, often putting its own Carr Valley twist on them, such as aging a Parmesan for four years.

Cook says courses at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research (CDR) have helped him hone the skills he utilizes to create so many different kinds of cheese. In addition to taking several intensive courses that culminated in his receiving his Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker certification in 2002, several years ago he studied Mexican, Spanish, Polish and British cheeses, among others, when CDR hosted people from around the world to demonstrate a variety of cheesemaking methods.

It also hasn’t hurt that Cook has cheesemaking in his blood, growing up the son of cheesemakers who made Monterey Jack, Muenster, Cheddar and Colby. In fact, as a fourth generation cheesemaker who grew up in a cheese plant, Cook knew early on what he wanted to do for his career, obtaining his cheesemaker’s license in 1968 at the age of 16.

Cook became a cheese company owner when he and his brother purchased their parents’ company, Irish Valley Cheese, in the mid-1970s. Later, in the 1980s, Cook bought out his brother’s portion of the business, selling Irish Valley and purchasing Carr Valley Cheese in La Valle, Wis. In 1994, Cook also bought out of bankruptcy a cheese plant in Mauston, Wis.

When Cook purchased Carr Valley Cheese in the late 1980s, the company was making daisies and midgets and operating a cheese store. Cook saw a great deal of potential to specialize there, but in the earlier years of the business much of the experimentation only was noticed quietly by consumers who stopped at the company’s retail stores and by chefs.

By the mid-1990s Carr Valley operated retail stores at its two factories as well as one additional retail store, so it had an audience to try its new cheeses. The company had — and still has — a lot of visitors watching the cheesemaking process, and Cook says the company began making a lot of different cheeses to give visitors both variety in cheesemaking viewing as well as in the cheeses they sampled. Still, just because there was an audience didn’t mean it was always easy to convince interstate travelers to buy cheeses they hadn’t heard of.

“We started doing a lot of different things, but often it was a tough sell,” he says. “Sometimes we gave away more cheeses in samples than we sold.”

The stores carry a number of cheeses from other cheesemakers, but along the way Cook and his staff also began making cheeses they couldn’t find or wanted to put their own spin on. They have the experience to do it, too — Cook is joined by Tom Jenny, another Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker, as well as Dave Small and Lester Small, both of whom have been making cheese at the company for more than 35 years each. All told, there are 10 licensed cheesemakers on staff.

“We like the best of the best. We kind of pick and choose what we offer,” Cook says, noting that virtually all of the cheeses he sells are from Wisconsin.

“One store has Jarlsburg because that particular manager likes it, and we have one other imported cheese ­­— from Illinois,” he quips.

Mostly, though, Cook wants consumers to be able to try what he considers to be some of the world’s finest cheese produced in his own plants and those of his neighbors’.

Cook credits Chef Rhys Lewis of the American Club, Kohler, Wis., as among those who discovered Carr Valley cheeses 10 years ago and put them on his menu. That, combined with successes Cook has achieved through entering ACS and other competitions over the last several years, has put Cook in the center of the artisan cheese revolution.

“I went to the ACS conference in Seattle 10 years ago, and no one had heard of Carr Valley,” he says. “Then I entered some of my cheeses in (the ACS conference in) D.C. in 2002 and won 16 awards. That’s the first time when a lot of people heard of us,” Cook says. The next year, Carr Valley entered more cheeses and won 20 awards.

“That really blew a lot of people away,” he says.

All told, Carr Valley cheeses have won roughly 150 awards in U.S. and international competitions during the past four years, with many of the awards going to the company’s one-of-a-kind American Originals. The repetition in awards has resulted in a great deal of publicity in various trade and consumer press, which has led more people to seek the company’s cheese and in general has familiarized people with Carr Valley’s variety and quality.

With the company’s growing popularity, Cook now is busy expanding the business. The company presently operates a cheese plant and store in La Valle, a cheese plant and store in Mauston, a second store in Mauston near the I-90 interchange, a plant and store in Fennimore (purchased in 2004) and a fifth store in Sauk City.

The company will be opening another store in Middleton late this spring next to the Blue Spoon Cafe, which will open this summer and offer upscale bistro food including high-end wines at reasonable prices, Cook says. Carr Valley will be working with the Blue Spoon, owned by Culver Franchising Systems Inc., on Blue Spoon menu items using Carr Valley’s cheese, Cook says.

A seventh Carr Valley store also will be opening late this spring in Wisconsin Dells.

Cook says that 20-25 percent of the company’s cheese sales are through its own stores and the Internet. When the percentage differs much from that, Cook says he knows it’s time to open another store or cheese plant. The stores serve as a great test market, he adds.

This past year, the company also began offering classes at its new Carr Valley Cooking School located at its Sauk City store. Carr Valley brings in chefs to its recently-completed, fully-furnished kitchen and offers classes where the chefs buy local foodstuffs and show how to make various dishes using Carr Valley cheeses. The 2 1/2- to 3-hour classes attract both consumers and other chefs, Cook says, and give attendees the opportunity to interact one-on-one with the chefs.

In addition, Carr Valley plans to begin making cheese at its Fennimore plant later this year. Presently, the Fennimore plant bakes the company’s bread cheese, a cheese that is baked until it has a browned crusty top. Cook is quiet about what kinds of cheeses will be produced there, saying only, “We’ll be coming out with some new American Originals in the late summer and fall. We’ve been working on them, sampling them quietly.”

He says the company comes up with its cheeses in a few different ways. Sometimes it takes different milks, cultures, make procedures and affinage and heads in a specific flavor and texture direction the staff wants to target. Other times, the company takes one of those aspects and experiments to make something different. And occasionally, there is purely an accident, where a new cheese is made out of something that wasn’t intended. With more than 200 years of experience behind his staff, though, accidents rarely happen, Cook

says.

CMN