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Feb 22, 2008 8:32 am US/Central
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The Art Of Making Cheese -- There's A Lot To It!
(WCCO)
If you love great food and fine wine
then you may be headed to Food and Wine Experience at the Minneapolis Convention
Center this weekend.
Among the many foods you can sample
there this year is an artisan cheese made in Minnesota.
Yes, I spent a couple of hours at
the Faribault Dairy where they make St. Pete's Select Blue Cheese and Amablu
Gorgonzola.
You may have seen these cheeses in
the deli section of your favorite grocery stores.
When the plant opened in 1936, it
was a first-of-its-kind in the nation. Inside workers created hand-crafted blue
cheese, aged in sandstone caves.
The plant closed in 1993 and then 7
years later, it re-opened thanks to three friends who used to work there. They
decided it was time to get back at it.
Now the cheese they produce is
getting national attention.
A couple of days ago they gave me
and a photographer a walking tour of the facility and showed us every step of
the process.
It starts with a whole lot of whole
milk, poured into huge vats. The cheese makers then add what's considered a
"good bacteria" and an enzyme to the milk.
They stir it and then watch the
mixture get firm.
"Then we take a special type of
knife called a harp and it cuts the curd into half inch cubes. Those cubes
start releasing whey and that is what is happening now," said Jeff Jirik,
one of the co-founders and owners of the plant.
Next, the cheese goes to what's
called a breathing room -- and get this, it's in a cave.
As I noted, Faribault Dairy Company uses
the sandstone caves along the Minnesota River
to age its cheese, and as the cheese "breathes" its appearance
changes.
"And what is really fun is that the
blue veining starts interacting with the other thing that is going on. It's fun
because everything is working together and that's what our art is," Jirik
said.
After breathing for three or four
weeks, the cheese moves to a cave that's slightly cooler, where it then
"sleeps" for up to five months.
"And what you do is you make it cold
to slow things down. The caves are fantastic for that, they are stable. Cheese
likes stability while it is aging."
The next step is to package the
cheese. Its cut into wedges, wrapped, and sealed.
Faribault Dairy makes between 15,000
and 20,000 pounds of cheese a week.
"We like to keep some of the old
world traditions along with the new technologies that are available," said
Randy Ochs is another co-founder and owner of the plant.
You can find the St. Pete's Select
Blue Cheese and the Amablu Gorgonzola at Byerly's and Lund's stores, as well as Cub Foods,
Kowalski's and SuperTarget. Look in the deli section.
A 9-ounce
wedge costs about $10.
The folks at Faribault Dairy showed
me the best way to serve blue cheese as an appetizer. You want to eat it with
some fresh slices of pears or apples and some crackers, and to really set it
off, drizzle it with some honey over the cheese.
The best
wine pairing is a red wine, like Merlot or Shiraz.
The Food and Wine Experience opens
at the Minneapolis
Convention Center tomorrow,
Feb. 23.
Saturday is sold out, but you can
still attend Sunday.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)