James Clapham
Gloves? Check. Goggles? Absolutely. Dust collector running? It better be.
When it comes time for the staff at Jim’s Cheese in Waterloo to make one of its popular products, the food prep precautions go to a whole new level. That’s because working with something called Habanero Ghost Cheese comes with a little more potential drama than a friendly horn of colby would.
“You can tell when we’re making it because we have a big dust collector running to take all the dust away,” says Chip Kubly, owner of the distributor that creates the spicy product on site by adding peppers to a monterey jack cheese made by another company. “Even so, you can feel a little tingle in your throat when we’re making it.”
More and more cheese makers — and their customers — are feeling the tingle. While a black pepper-based cheese from Sartori of Plymouth, Wisconsin, took top honors earlier this month at the U.S. Championship Cheese Contest in Green Bay, that peppery bite is nothing compared to what else is on the market.
“People are looking beyond the jalapeño,” says Rachel Kerr of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, which reports that pepper makes up one-fifth of all flavored cheese sales. “In 2016 we saw a decline in jalapeños but a big rise in habanero and less familiar hot peppers.”
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Jalapeños primarily have been what’s given pepper jack its name over the years, but they’re looking a little wussy these days. According to the Scoville scale, which measures the heat of chile peppers, jalapeños rate from 2,500 to 8,000 in Scoville heat units (SHUs) compared with the peppers that top 1 million (ghost, scorpion and Carolina Reaper) that are going into cheeses now. Habanero peppers rate in the 100,000 to 800,000 range.
“I think we were early on the habanero bandwagon, starting five or six years ago,” says Kubly, whose company uses fresh habanero peppers and dried ghost peppers for its cheese. “There are certainly more out there, but ours has stayed a popular item.”
The hottest pepper in use is the Carolina Reaper, which is featured in a cheddar that is one of 11 hot cheeses made by Nasonville Dairy of Marshfield. Kindred Creamery, a new line of Muscoda’s Meister Cheese Company, has a selection of spicy cheeses that includes sriracha jack and ghost pepper colby jack; Monroe’s Emmi Roth introduced a new sriracha gouda in January, and Henning’s Wisconsin Cheese of Kiel has a variety of hot cheeses, including its Dragon’s Breath cheddar. Even a blue cheese made by Carr Valley and a feta made by Klondike’s Odyssey brand use spicy flavors. Maple Leaf Cheese of Monroe won awards at the recent U.S. contest with its habanero jack.
The emergence of hot cheeses has had an impact in the U.S. and world championship contests that are hosted by the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association. The most recent contests were the first to feature open categories for hot cheeses based on mild, medium and high heat.
Judges look for flavor, not heat, says Dean Sommer, cheese and food technologist at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research. Even when the hotter spices dominate, Sommer says, cheese is a good product to deliver the heat — particularly monterey jack, which doesn’t have a lot of other complex flavors.
“With monterey jack, one can add a small amount of jalapeño peppers to get a nice, balanced, relatively mild spicy-flavored cheese,” he says.
Going beyond that might overwhelm the cheese flavor, he says, and create a challenge for cheese makers who are responding to market demand for more and more heat.
“People just like pain, I guess,” Sommer says.
