Sara Stathas
Clothbound cheddar from St. Isadore's Dairy.
Inga Witscher has been into cheese since she was a teenager. The host of Wisconsin Public Television’s Around the Farm Table has gotten back to her roots with her latest project: her own creamery. The debut cheese from her St. Isidore’s Dairy comes out this month.
It’s a clothbound or bandaged cheddar, made in the British style, says Witscher. It’s also a farmstead cheese, meaning it’s made on her farm with milk that comes only from Witscher’s seven Jersey cows. “I’m very proud of the cheese. Farming is the love of my life, and I needed to find a way to continue farming,” says Witscher. “I love cows. I need to have cows in my life.”
Witscher grew up on a farm in Washington State; she’s a fourth-generation dairy farmer: “My parents had an organic dairy farm and produced milk, cheese, bread. When I graduated from high school they put me in the creamery and for three or four years, I made cheese.”
The specialty took hold. Witscher apprenticed to a cheesemaker on the East Coast. Later, during a trip to France, she discovered the pleasures of raw milk cheese: “I didn’t used to think that raw milk made that much difference, but that cheese completely blew my mind.”
At the time, she thought that herbs and other flavorings had been added to the cheese. “You can taste the diet of the animal — goat, or cow — that comes through in the flavor. That’s where the herb flavor was coming from.”
She ended up in Wisconsin in 2006, after her parents sold their Washington farm and bought another in Wisconsin. Now she farms here with her husband (who’s taken the UW-Madison’s short-course cheesemaking class) and father (also a licensed cheesemaker).
Witscher used to have a much larger herd and sold the milk from her farm outside of Osseo, Wisconsin, to the Westby Creamery. Then as the dairy market continued to decline, she decided to downsize. To be sustainable, she decided to keep a small herd of cows and build a creamery on the farm to make cheese. Sadly her initial creamery burned to the ground just as it was about to launch in 2018. “So now we start in a pandemic,” says Witscher.
Witscher’s clothbound cheddar is made from raw milk, and yes, it’s legal. Raw milk cheeses must be aged at least 60 days in the U.S., and Witscher’s cheese is aged for three months. It will taste different at six months and different yet at a year, “because cheese is really still alive.”
Where raw milk cheese enthusiasts sometimes become especially frustrated with United States raw milk laws is with softer cheeses (such as Camembert or brie) that have a short peak period and may benefit from fewer than 60 days of aging. It’s also sometimes problematic for a small cheesemaker to get a commercial creamery to work with raw milk.
Witscher’s cheese will taste different from season to season. “People need to focus more on what cows are eating. We use rotational grazing around the pastures, which have clover and native grasses,” she explains. As that diet changes throughout the year, so will the flavor of the cheese. There’s more butterfat in the fall, she says, and in spring, the milk is sweeter. “Even the color changes from month to month,” says Witscher. She thinks she has “captured the flavors of summer in this cheese.” In winter, the cows will feed on farm hay.
Sara Stathas
Witscher's Jersey cows graze on grasses including clover, lending distinct flavors to the cheese eventually made from their milk.
There’s an added benefit to this kind of grazing, too. “We keep hedgerows for pollinators and grassland birds. So much of agriculture creates a monoculture, but we need different things blooming at different times for different species,” Witscher notes. “We take care of our cows and we try to make the environment better for other animals, too. If all crops are corn, we are losing all the pollen.”
St. Isidore’s cheddar is made in 20-lb truckles, which means a barrel-shaped cheese. Right now the supply is limited and will be sold only at Fromagination, 12 S. Carroll St.
There are other Wisconsin-made raw milk cheeses out there, like Uplands’ Pleasant Ridge Reserve, for one. “With this style of cheese, it makes sense to use raw milk,” Witscher notes, but most large commercial creameries work only with pasteurized milk.
The cheese will debut at an outdoor event at Fromagination from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on Oct. 17. [Editor's note: Due to the increase in COVID-19 cases, Witscher and Fromagination have opted to reschedule the event to an online format, to be held in the next few weeks. No date has yet been set.] Witscher will speak about her creamery and small dairy farms, and offer samples of her cheese. Attendees should wear masks and maintain social distancing.
Witscher is optimistic about farmstead cheese operations as a model for small farm survival. “I hope other farmers can do this and it becomes a way to save farms. Wisconsin is so interesting, the food scene is amazing. There’s a huge apple scene, the dairy scene. It should be a destination for foodies, like places in France.”
