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March 11: Cheese of the Day - Pleasant Ridge Reserve

March 11: Cheese of the Day – Pleasant Ridge Reserve

Saturday at the Facebook Cheese Study Group is dedicated to Alpine-style cheeses which are explored by ACS CCP® Pat Polowsky. This week he is highlighting the only cheese to win Best of Show three times at the ACS Cheese Competition. Here’s what Pat has to say about Uplands’ Pleasant Ridge Reserve:

Saturday is Alpine-style day. Today is devoted to Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese Company

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Velvet Red Room: Sierra Drifters honor music of Lou Reed

Velvet Red Room: Sierra Drifters honor music of Lou Reed

The Sierra Drifters walk on the wild side includes the Crystal Bay Casino.

Chris Seal

The South Shore band paid homage to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground with a recent show dedicated to the music at the Divided Sky in Meyers. Now the Sierra Drifters, which only formed a few months ago, get its chance to play in the North Shore casino’s Red Room, a venue which sometimes serves as a launching…

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I just had to share a photo this wedge of Pleasant Ridge Extra Reserve, purchased at Brooklyn Larder, because of the striking profusion of tyrosine, or amino acid clusters, aka the "flavor crystals"; all of those little white spots that are sparkling like stars in a cheesy sky. The Extra Reserve is, as the name implies, extra-aged, in this case as much as 18 months, and it is in aged cheeses, such as Parmagiano Reggiano, aged Alpines, or probably most familiarly a well-aged Gouda, that one sees the development of these pockets of concentrated cheese goodness. In the Pleasant Ridge, each bite pops lightly, little bursts of texture on the tongue that contrast with the creamy smoothness of the cheese.

So where do the crystal come from? During the cheesemaking process,the casein undergoes proteolysis, or the breakdown of proteins into smaller polypeptides and amino acids. In this case they convert into the crystalline amino acid, tyrosine. This is not to be confused with crystallized calcium lactate, which presents similarly, but is more often considered a defect, although in some cheeses, like British Cheddar, it can be desirable as well. One will often get a bit of a gritty, sandy texture on the outside of washed rind cheeses as well, but this is not tyrosine, but rather the minerals and salts that are left behind by repeated washings with a brine solution; each time the brine evaporates or is absorbed into the cheese, the solids are left behind in microscopic quantities, until they eventually build up. 

The crystals are only found in well aged cheeses because the process of proteolysis occurs very gradually, and relies as well on the gradual reduction in moisture within the cheese, so that the tyrosine precipitates out of solution as it is forming. 

I've heard that tyrosine has health benefits, including stress and depression reduction and promoting better sleep, so eat up! It not only tastes great but does the body (and mind) good.

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The Grocer: US Cheesemakers plan charm offensive in UK

Via the UK site TheGrocer.co.uk:

First American craft brewers set out to win over UK consumers. Now artisanal US cheesemakers are launching a charm offensive. Only a small amount of US artisanal cheese is currently exported to the UK, but this week the Artisan Cheese Exchange - a US marketing company - brought four cheesemakers to the UK to showcase 16 cheeses to leading UK cheese retailers including Neal’s Yard dairy, Paxton & Whitfield and La Fromagerie. The ACE is also main sponsor of this week’s 2012 World Cheese Awards. Paxton & Whitfield met with the ACE this week with a view to permanently listing some of its cheeses next year. Interest in artisanal cheesemaking had exploded in the US in the same way it had in the UK 20 years ago, said MD Ros Windsor. “I’m keen to get some over and start showing them to our customers,” she said, adding that it was important to challenge perceptions that it was “just plastic cheeses that they do over there”. Neal’s Yard Dairy currently stocks Uplands Cheese’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve as well as Rogue Creamery’s Rogue River Blue. The company was also considering selling cheese from Vermont producer The Cellars at Jasper Hill, said manager for buying and quality, Bronwen Percival. “More and more US cheeses are world class,” she said. “They really hold their own against European cheeses.”

Read the full story. 

(Photo ©2012 TheGrocer.co.uk)

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HeavyTable.com, the site for "The Heavy Table", a Twin Cities-based food magazine, has an excellent interview with Andy Hatch, the acclaimed cheesemaker behind Rush Creek Reserve and Pleasant Ridge Reserve, accompanied by great photos of the cheese and the maker:

HT: What kind of development goes into making a new cheese?

AH: Oh geez, it’s impossible to count the hours that it costs. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of experiments and failing and tinkering and talking to people and reading books. With Rush Creek, for a whole year in 2009, I just played around with it to get a feel for the big issues. Then I went back to France and worked for somebody making Vacherin Mont d’Or.

You know, in France they sell that cheese at 25 days old and here, because it’s raw milk, I had to get it out over 60 days [60 days is the minimum aging required for unpasteurized cheese]. I came back with the French process and had to retinker it. Every little step in the make process has implications, especially months down the road when it’s aging, so I had to take the French recipe and change it to make the cheese age 60 days.

HT: How did you land upon Vacherin Mont d’Or as your next style of cheese?

AH: It ticked all the right boxes! It can be made in the fall when our cows are eating hay so that milk is inherently less flavorful. It doesn’t have the complexity of grass-fed milk, so you want a cheese that will develop flavor in other ways from the milk. It has much more influence from the rind, from the molds we grow on the rind, and from the spruce bark. It’s a soft cheese, and the milk from this time of year is much richer and adds to that creamy texture of the cheese. Mont d’Or fits the same niche in their cheesemaking calendar.

HT: What would happen to the cheese if you use grass-fed milk?

AH: Well I do, now, because everybody wants it in October, which means I make it in late August / early September when the cows are still on grass. The Rush Creek season spans this total transition of the cows’ diet. I start making the cheese in late August when they’re on all grass, and then it gets into early October and they get onto hay — about 70 percent hay, 30 percent grass.

HT: How does the flavor change between grass-fed and hay-fed Rush Creek?

AH: Not very much. Now, we only have two years of data on that, so it’s something we’re going to continue to learn about and look at but no, not very much. The flavor complexity in grass-fed milk takes a lot of aging to reveal. You know what I mean? An aged cheese will show off the flavor complexity of the milk whereas a young cheese just doesn’t have enough time to ripen to reveal that complexity. Pleasant Ridge doesn’t develop its flavor complexity for six to seven months. Rush Creek is sold at two months. Rather relying on the flavors inherent in the milk itself you have to rely on the skill of the cheesemaker and especially on the way it’s ripened. The cliché that we are saying is that Pleasant Ridge is made in the pastures and Rush Creek is made in the cave.

Check out the full interview, it's well worth the read. I just got my first wheel of the season at Murray's and am looking forward to slicing off the top rind and digging in!

(Photos ©2012 HeavyTable.com)

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WI State Journal: Much-anticipated Rush Creek Reserve hits store shelves early

Via the Wisconsin State Journal, news that one of the brilliant American cheeses of new American cheese renaissance, Rush Creek Reserve, from Andy Hatch and Uplands Cheese, is hitting shelves early this year. But, while this is good news for cheese-lovers, the reasons for the change in schedule are more sobering:

This year, Rush Creek Reserve lived up to its name.

The much-anticipated cheese was on store shelves ahead of schedule this fall, pleasing the eager fans of the seasonal release from Uplands Cheese Co. in Dodgeville while helping to take the sting off a tough year at the company’s farm. It was released the week of Oct. 15, about three weeks ahead of schedule for the cheese that is often part of people’s plans for holiday tables.

The soft, French-inspired cheese is made of raw milk from cows on the Uplands farm and aged for 60 days. It is made in small wheels that are surrounded in spruce bark, a wrapping that serves as a container once the cheese is opened from the top to then spread on bread or other things.

This year, production will be about 18,000 cheeses.The good news for fans of the cheese is that there will be more of it around; the bad news for Uplands is the jump on Rush Creek had everything to do with a potentially devastating drought.

The company’s signature cheese is Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a hard Alpine-style cheese that has three times been named the nation’s top cheese by the American Cheese Society. It is made from the milk of the dairy cows that graze on the spring and summer grasses on the Uplands farm just north of Dodgeville.

This summer, that grass was hard to come by. “Looking back at it, it was bad. Really bad,” Hatch said.

The warm spring gave Uplands a jump on making Pleasant Ridge Reserve. Hatch began making it on April 13, compared to May 10 last year. But on May 26, Hatch said, the rain stopped. Soon, so did production of Pleasant Ridge Reserve. “We stopped making cheese for six weeks,” Hatch said. “We started making it again but then we ran out of grass.” Without being able to feed the cows on grass, the farm had to buy hay and feed and then sell the milk. The milk was good enough for other dairy uses, Hatch said, but without the flavors from the grass it was no longer right for Pleasant Ridge Reserve.

“It took a lot of self-discipline to not make cheese this year, watching your costs rise and your income shrivel,” Hatch said. “It’s tough not to say, ‘Well, we can make a couple batches on hay,’ but we didn’t.”

Hatch quit making Pleasant Ridge Reserve on Oct. 7, about two weeks ahead of time. Because the cheese ages for eight to 10 months, the company will feel the pinch more next year, Hatch said, with 15 percent less of its signature product to sell. In September, Uplands raised its prices on the company’s cheese.

Read the full story here. (reblogged from the Wisconsin Cheese Originals Facebook page).

(Photo ©2012 Wisconsin State Journal)