Cedar Grove
Cedar Grove’s artisan cheddar cheese spread with mango and habanero.
Because this is Wisconsin and things like this happen, Aaron Rodgers’ broken collarbone had a direct effect on Bob Wills’ cheese.
The owner and master cheese maker at Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain had his new spreadable cheese all ready to make its debut in time for a Packers’ playoff push, but it turned out to be the wrong year for that plan.
“If they had gotten to the Super Bowl, we would have been ready,” Wills says of the Packers, who were eliminated from playoff contention before the holidays hit. “They seem to have fallen considerably short of that.”
But if there’s anything as quintessentially Wisconsin as the Packers, it’s spreadable cheese — also known as cold pack, crock cheese or club cheese because of the way it is made and the containers it comes in.
Cedar Grove’s new product brings an all-natural twist to this popular segment of the state’s cheese production that has the official yet seemingly redundant classification of “cold pack cheese food.” The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board lists nearly 40 producers of cold pack; state cheesemakers produce 70 percent of the spreads made in that way in the U.S.
It’s as much real cheese as curds or aged cheddars that demand premium prices. During production, the cheese is never heated, which differentiates it from processed products. That gives the cheese its name and helps keep its flavor. Other cheeses that are classified simply as “snack spread” have been heated and processed.
“Cold pack will taste exactly the same as the cheese that it’s made from, but with herbs, spices, nuts or alcohol added to it,” says Lizzie Duffey of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. The cold pack method calls for grinding the cheese to a paste, then adding dairy such as cream or butter, as well as other flavors. The most popular combos are cheddar with port wine or with horseradish and Swiss with almond.
Cold pack’s backstory seems straight out of folklore. The generally accepted origin tale is that at the turn of the 20th century, a Wisconsin tavern keeper whose name has been lost to history made some for his customers as a snack. The spreadable cheese took off when a beer delivery man and fledgling cheesemaker named Hubert Fassbender started taking his product with him on his routes. His “club cheese” proved as popular as the beer he was delivering. So he set aside the beer business for the cheese and in 1933 founded what is now Kaukauna Cheese. There he fine-tuned production of the cold pack cheese, which was first packaged in crocks.
It’s a growing segment of the cheese market, up an average of 5.2 percent a year since 2014, Duffey says. Like other cheese categories, more spicy flavors are being added, as well as methods to make the product even more natural. Pine River Pre-Pack Inc., south of Manitowoc, has among its 20 varieties an all-natural twist on the traditional port wine flavor that uses beet juice instead of a red dye to give a boost to that familiar hot pink swirl. Merkts, a Bel Brand company located in Little Chute, uses Point and Capital Brewery beers in spreads it introduced in 2016.
Cedar Grove’s cold pack cheese uses quark and cheddar as its base, and differs from traditional products by being sold in glass, not plastic, containers. The spreads come in two flavors, olive-pimento and mango-habanero.
“We want to bridge generations,” Wills says. “The olive-pimento is a classic flavor that people might remember from supper clubs, and the mango-habanero is a more modern flavor to appeal to younger people.”
Wills says Cedar Grove is experimenting with other flavors, but don’t look for the bright pink port wine stripe any time soon.
“I think we’ll go in another direction,” he says. “There are too many of those around.”
Sample cheese from Cedar Grove and other Wisconsin producers at the Isthmus Beer and Cheese Fest, Jan. 20, 2018, at the Exhibition Hall at the Alliant Energy Center.
