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If only everyone and everything could age as gracefully as Tony Hook’s cheddar cheese.
It starts out fresh and full of springiness, unaware of what might lie ahead. Then it gets a little complex and more bitter as the years go by. After a few more years it starts to fall apart more easily but the bitterness eventually mellows in such an appealing way that it is much in demand and worth big bucks.
We should all be so lucky.
The cheese version of graceful aging makes its return this spring. For the third time, Hook’s Cheese will release a 20-year cheddar made at its Mineral Point factory. The company is taking orders now on its website, hookscheese.com, for cheese that will be available in May.
“When we sold some of this [batch] at 15, we thought it was really good so we set it aside for 20-year,” Hook says. “If a cheese isn’t good to begin with, you’d just get more bitter flavors as it got older. But as long as it’s a good cheese, it smooths out and gets almost creamy.”
Courtesy Hook's Cheese
This time, the 20-year is white.
This time around, the cheese will be white. Hook’s Cheese sells its cheddars in both white and orange, a color that comes with the addition of annatto. Annatto, a natural food coloring, adds the hue but doesn’t change the flavor.
The 20-year will also be full of the crunch that comes from the calcium lactate crystals that form over time as fats and proteins break down.
“Most people who like this cheese like all the crystals,” Hook says.
The cheese’s flavor changed quite a bit as it headed toward the legal drinking age.
“Typically with cheddars, when you get past five years, that acidic flavor goes away,” he says. “As it gets older, you get more mellow flavor and you think it would be the opposite.”
Hook knows a thing or two about aging cheese; the cheddars aren’t the only ones the company is maturing. Hook’s has some goudas that have aged three years and they’ll age some up to four years, Hook says. As goudas age, they become sweet with hints of caramel and full of crystals. The Hook’s Emmentaler has labels up to five years but has been aged as much as seven, Hook says, and has gained a real bite. Hook’s has parmesans and pecorinos that are seven years old, and also full of crystals.
The pandemic impacted what cheeses aged longer, Hook says. While cheese was a popular item as people hunkered down at home, Hook says, shoppers were less enthusiastic about sheep and goat’s milk cheeses in that time and the restaurant closures also cost cheesemakers business. That meant things like Hook’s Triple Play cheeses — made from the milk from cow, sheep and goat — didn’t sell as well.
“The Triple Play Extra Innings is almost 3 years right now,” he says. “It has all those crystals and almost gets sweeter like the gouda does. It typically ages 14 to 18 months and would have been all sold out by then but COVID changed everything.”
Hook has been playing around with aging cheese for quite some time. He took a 10-year cheddar to an American Cheese Society contest in 2006 and it won first place; it remains the oldest cheese to win at a contest. He doesn’t generally take cheeses aged that long to contests now because it’s not an economical use of an expensive product. His 15-year cheddar made headlines in 2009, and it’s become a Hook’s staple ever since.
The 20-year debuted in 2015. The 450 pounds of it sold out pre-order in six days. He made another 560 pounds for release in spring 2020, when people had ordered in Before Times — December 2019 and January 2020. When the pandemic hit that spring, Hook let people out of their commitment to their order that cost $209 a pound (most people order a quarter-pound chunk for around $50). About 40 pounds’ worth of orders were canceled, Hook says, but the cheese still sold out with its waiting list and Dane County Farmers’ Market sales.
This time, Hook is selling twice what he has made in the past — 1,000 pounds that will also sell at $209 a pound. Like in past years, he’s giving away half the profits, this time to Little John’s Kitchen, the Fitchburg-based community kitchen and meal service. Little John’s is fundraising for its permanent facility scheduled to open by the end of 2024 and in the meantime is seeking a temporary production facility.
The first batch of 20-year cheddar created a $40,000 donation to the Babcock Hall renovation at UW-Madison. The 2020 cheese benefited the Dairy Innovation Hub, a collaboration between the state and three of the state universities’ agriculture programs (Madison, River Falls, Platteville).
“We donate half of it because the Wisconsin dairy industry has been so great to us,” Hook says. “We have to give back, right?”
