Cheese of the Month - Cheddar

Welcome to Cheese of the Month at Tale to Table. No, it’s not a club, there are no dues or fees. Simply, each month we’ll look at a different type of cheese, how it’s made, and how you can best enjoy it. Throughout each month, we’ll also share recipes and tell you about specials we have in the shop for that month’s cheese.

First, let’s go over some basic about cheese, starting with the most important (and perhaps the most challenging to understand): cheese is alive. It lives, it breathes, it changes over time, from the moment it is first made right up until the moment you eat it.

Cheese is really a product of what some might call “controlled spoilage.”

The basics of cheesemaking are easy. You start with milk, and you add some type of culture, which is a good bacteria that will consume part of the milk and transform it into a cheese component. You might add something like rennet or some type of acid to make it coagulated — that’s the separation of the solid curd protein from the liquid whey protein. You then take the curds and pack them up and let the whole thing age.

The basics are easy, but there are thousands of variables: What type of milk from what animal, how much cream is in the milk, and what did the animal eat? What type of culture did you add? How much moisture did you press out of the curds, and how much salt did you add, and how tightly did you pack it? How long will it age, and where, and what will you do with it along the way that will change the flavor?

In all that you get thousands of types of cheese, and nearly as many ways to categorize it. Type of milk, country of origin, hard vs. soft, fresh vs. aged…the list goes on.

So let’s start by talking about the cheese that might be most familiar to Americans — cheddar. The US makes about three billion pounds of cheddar each year, which is quite a lot, until you learn that more cheese is produced each year, worldwide, than coffee beans, cocoa beans, tea leaves, and tobacco…combined.

Cheddar isn’t just a type of cheese, though, it’s also the process of managing the curds to get a specific type of cheese. (It’s also a large village in England where the cheese originated, so technically they cheddar cheddar in Cheddar.)

So when a cheddar is cheddared (in Cheddar or elsewhere), the producer packs the drained curds into blocks and stacks them up. Then they flip the blocks and restack them, and then they keep doing this for a proscribed amount of time. The cheddaring drains the liquid whey and raises the acidity of the curds, resulting in the sharpness of many good cheddars. When the cheddaring process is complete, the blocks are minced into small bits that are then pressed into a final form, be it a wheel or a block, and aged for a few months or many years.

Or, you can just take those minced bits and sell them as fresh cheese curds.

We have some fantastic cheddars at Tale to Table. Marcoot, run by Amy and Beth Marcoot in Greenville, Illinois, make some great cheddars, including Tipsy Cheddar — made with beer from Schlafly Brewery — and Hatch Pepper Cheddar, made with (you guessed it) peppers from Hatch, New Mexico.

We also carry two cheddars from Milton Creamery in Milton, Iowa. They use milk from the surrounding farms to make a lovely Old Style Cheddar, and one of our favorite cheeses, Prairie Breeze, which is aged for at least 9 months, just enough to give it a little crunch from the calcium crystals that develop from as it ages. We use Prairie Breeze as the base for the grilled cheese sandwiches we serve for lunch every Friday at Tale to Table.

And, of course, we always have Marcoot Fresh Cheese Curds, plain and Garlic Herb.