Award-winning cheese is more than a pretty taste
Slow Food International is an organization that promotes traditional food production, including fair prices to farmers, solid environmental practices, heritage breeds of livestock and heirloom vegetable varieties. It began in Italy, but there is a strong U.S. presence with local chapters in many cities, including Milwaukee and Madison.
Every other year in mid-September, Slow Food hosts a festival focused in Bra, Italy, exclusively on cheese. Rawmilk cheese and American producers were featured this year, and Wisconsin’s own Uplands Cheese Co. earned a prestigious prize, the Resistenza Casearia Award. This is the first time an American cheese company has won.
Slow Food International bestows this award on select cheesemakers who make the highest quality cheese while respecting animal welfare and the environment.
Slow Food founder and President Carlo Petrini described Uplands Cheese owner and cheesemaker Andy Hatch as a “model for all traditional cheesemakers, in the United States and across the world. American cheesemaking has come so far in the past 20 years, and Uplands Cheese is the leading light of that movement.”
Uplands makes two cheeses: Rush Creek Reserve, a soft-ripened cheese wrapped in spruce bark with an oozy paste that is available for only a few short months, starting in November. Pleasant Ridge Reserve is an alpine-style riff on French Beaufort, that is made unique with grassfed milk from Uplands' own herd of cows.
Pleasant Ridge is officially America’s most awarded cheese, earning Best of Show at the 2003 U.S. Cheese Championship and Best of Show at the American Cheese Society competition an unprecedented three times.
But this Slow Food Award is recognition for
how these cheeses are made — small-batch, open vat, everything by hand from milk that is from the creamery’s own cows and grassy pastures. This is not the most lucrative way to make cheese, but it is traditional and very delicious.
Hatch says the recognition is “especially flattering because it takes into account the whole of our work, how we manage our land and animals and how we make cheese year after year.
“Most awards focus only on the opinion of judges about one piece of cheese, but this award has a much broader scope. It’s an incredible honor for us personally and it’s also a mark of how far American cheesemaking has come in global esteem.”
Find Pleasant Ridge Reserve at most cheese counters in Milwaukee that carry fine cheese, including Larry’s Market, the Village Cheese Shop, West Allis Cheese and Sausage Shop, Sendik’s, Metcalfe’s, Outpost Natural Foods and Whole Foods.
Here, the nutty, grassy-flavored cheese is used to top a hash of shredded leeks and brussels sprouts, Four eggs nestled in the veggies make this a complete meal for a lazy Sunday brunch or weeknight breakfast for dinner.