A More Perfect Plate Dispatch #1: Introduction & Cheese Curds

Welcome to A More Perfect Plate, a multimedia project about food, drinks, and American history. It's our way of celebrating America's 250th birthday.

Each week, we'll share a dispatch (one of these) on a food or drink with an American story worth telling, plus a podcast episode where we talk about what we just talked about. Yep, we talk about what we're talking about, because talking about food is fun.

I'm Nick, Vice President at Lake Geneva Country Meats. I'm a history nerd, a food aficionado, a fan of wine, beer, and most spirits, and a sucker for the story behind just about anything...food and drink most of all.

To me, those stories are one of the best ways to celebrate what makes America America: we borrow ideas from all over, put our own spin on them, add some good old-fashioned hard work, and end up with something distinctly ours. Sometimes we get it wrong at first. Usually, we keep at it until we get it right.

We're starting small: a short dispatch to kick off the series, on a topic I love. June is Dairy Month here in Wisconsin, so let's celebrate what might be our most iconic product: the cheese curd.

First of all, just what is a cheese curd?

 

A cheese curd is basically baby cheddar. It's cheddar before it gets pressed into a block, a wedge, or whatever novelty shape it's destined to become. God, I love the novelty shapes of cheese that we come up with in Wisconsin. There's nothing better than a candy cane-shaped piece of cheese in a Christmas stocking.

But I digress. When you make cheddar, you coagulate the milk, drain off the liquid (the whey), and are left with small lumps of solid milk. "Little lumps of solid milk" is a terrible product name, so we call them cheese curds. Hopefully, now Little Miss Muffet makes more sense to you.

To make "real" cheddar, those lumps get pressed together and aged from about a month for a mild cheddar to up to 10 years or more if you're really looking to go big.  But why wait 10 years when you already have something that's super tasty? Instead of aging the cheese, just scoop the curds out of the vat, bag them up, and you've got fresh cheese curds.

Great, that's how they're made, but, seriously, why do cheese curds squeak?

The squeak isn't a gimmick Wisconsin cheesemakers invented to move product; it's real chemistry.

Fresh curds are built from a milk protein called casein, knit into a tight, springy mesh, and held firm by calcium. Bite in, and that mesh resists your teeth, dragging across the enamel. The friction between your tooth's enamel and the milk protein is what makes the squeak. It's the same idea as dragging a wet finger across glass, but instead of annoying, it's super delicious.

If you want that squeak, a few things are worth knowing:

• Curds lose the squeak with age. In the days after they're made, the cultures keep turning milk sugar into lactic acid, the acid pulls calcium out of the protein mesh, and the structure softens. No firm mesh, no friction, no squeak. The curd's still delicious, but they're quietly delicious.
• Warm curds squeak more than cold ones. Pull them out of the fridge and let them come up to room temperature before you dig in.
• You can revive an older curd. A quick five-second zap in the microwave tightens the proteins back up and brings some of the squeak back.

So why are curds such a big thing in Wisconsin?

Short answer: because for a long time, this was one of the only places you could get a good one.

A fresh curd is at its best within a day or two, which makes it nearly impossible to ship like a block of cheddar. To enjoy one at its squeaky peak, you need to be pretty close to a cheese factory.

And where could you pretty much guarantee you'd be near a cheese factory? Right here in Wisconsin.

Cheesemaking landed here around 1840 with Swiss, German, and Dutch immigrants, and by the early 1900s, the state was blanketed with small cheese factories cranking out cheddar, and, of course, curds, the first step toward it. Like a lot of great things, curds became a Wisconsin staple out of pure convenience and happenstance. We were the folks close enough to eat them fresh, so we claimed them as a state treasure.

Why do you Wisconsinites always have to talk about cheese?

Because dairy isn't just part of Wisconsin, it's a huge part of Wisconsin! We call ourselves America's Dairyland, and we're proud to spread the good word about our hard-working dairy farmers.

The scale is honestly hard to wrap your head around. Little old Wisconsin makes about a quarter of all the cheese in the country (roughly 3.6 billion pounds a year) with nearly 1,200 licensed cheesemakers turning out more than 600 varieties, almost double any other state. We're the only state in the country that requires a licensed cheesemaker to watch over every batch, and the only state with its own Master Cheesemaker program. We take our cheese seriously.

I love reading through these stats, and most of them are good, but I do need to share one stat that makes me a little sad.

Even though Wisconsin's dairy industry is bigger than ever in terms of output, the farms behind it are vanishing. Over the last four decades, the state has lost something like 40,000 dairy farms. We're down to roughly 5,000 milk-cow herds today, from well over 100,000 back in 1960.

The good news for dairy lovers is that the cows didn't disappear; they just got consolidated onto far fewer, far bigger operations. So while the milk kept coming, many family farmers didn't make it through these past few decades.

Dairy farming is monotonous, hard work, and I don't fault anyone who decides to hang it up and pursue something else. I bring it up because it's exactly why supporting local, family-run operations matters. It's how we hang on to the variety of milk sources, cheese styles, and inspiration that we've always been lucky to have here.

What's your favorite cheese curd?

There's only one curd in my heart: the Hill Valley Dairy cheese curd. My good friend Ron Henningfeld makes them with milk from his family's farm in East Troy, and they're extra big and extra flavorful.

Here's what I especially love about Ron's curds. A lot of big producers treat curds as an afterthought or a cash cow and cut corners on the steps and the ingredients to get the most possible cheese curd out the fastest for the least amount of money possible.

Ron doesn't. He makes a batch of real cheddar (the kind he'll age for years) and pulls his curds from that same batch. So you get the rich flavor of serious cheddar with the squeak and freshness of a curd. What you eat as curds today, you may eat 5 years from now as a 5-year cheddar. It's incredible to think about, and the curds...they're perfect. At least in my eyes.

You haven't talked about fried cheese curds yet.

You're right. I haven't. People bread them or batter them, deep fry them, and they're delicious dipped in ranch or marinara or whatever you like. 

Everybody has opinions on who makes good ones and who makes bad ones, and I just don't think we need to go much deeper than that, right?

Time to wrap this one up.

I hope this first dispatch gave you a feel for what's coming: a little history, a little perspective, and every so often a bit of science. You'll learn something about a food you've probably never thought twice about, and walk away with a fact or two for the next time the squeak comes up at the bar.

Bookmark our hub or subscribe to the emails to read each week's dispatch, and give the A More Perfect Plate Podcast a listen, that's where my good friend Bridget and I get into our curd love in a lot more detail.

Until next week - cheers!

Nick

Learn More:

Why Do Cheese Curds Squeak - a great round-up from the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin.

The Toll of Losing 40K Wisconsin Dairy Farms in 4 Decades - a Wisconsin Public Radio feature on the cost of what we're losing as dairy farms close.

Hill Valley Dairy - the makers of my favorite cheese curds, and so much more!

Book Suggestions:

Cheese: The Making of a Wisconsin Tradition - Jerry Apps tells the stories of not just how Wisconsin became a cheesemaking behemoth, but also how the foam cheesehead became a thing, and more. 

The Wisconsin Whey: Cheesemaking in the Driftless - Judy Newman Coburn and others paint a beautiful picture of how Wisconsin's Driftless area has shaped an incredible cheesemaking legacy. A new book that's a fantastic read!

American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World - an easy-to-read book by Joe Berkowitz that shares the cultural fun behind American cheese.

The Cheese Chronicles: A Journey Through the Making and Selling of Cheese in America - this book is a little older now, but Liz Thorpe still tells an important story about how American cheese got to where we are now.

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