Hedi LaMarr Rudd
Jamie Fahrney
Fahrney: ‘There’s still plenty of people who like a full flavor cheese, so I don’t see us ever stop making limburger.’
I am director of operations and a master cheesemaker at Chalet Cheese Cooperative, the last limburger factory in America. I remember my dad taking me to a nearby cheese plant when I was about five or six years old. It was a Swiss cheese plant, and I had a piece of that cheese. That’s back when they made the big 200-pound wheels, and it was like candy to me. I love that stuff.
After that, I wanted to work in a cheese plant. My sophomore year, my parents told me I had to have a job when I turned 16 after school was out. My mother took me to Monroe, and we did a bunch of job applications at different places. But a couple of weeks later, I hadn’t heard anything. My dad called me during his lunch hour and asked me if I wanted to work in a cheese plant. He knew Albert Deppler, who was the manager at Chalet Cheese Cooperative. I didn’t have my driver’s license yet, but I started working here the day after I got my license. I worked after school and on weekends.
After I graduated high school, I didn’t have any plans on going on to college, so Albert offered me a full-time job. I started working here full time in 1980. In 1985, I got my cheesemaker’s license. Albert sent me to the class at the UW-Madison Center for Dairy Research. They had a class for beginning cheesemakers, and you could get your license through the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture.
When Albert retired, Myron Olson took over and encouraged me to get into the master cheesemaker program through the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin. It’s a pretty intense course, and Wisconsin is the only state in the U.S. that has this level of certification. After you pass that, you become a master cheesemaker. I think there are now 80 masters in Wisconsin. Sid Cook from Carr Valley Cheese graduated the same year I did from the program. I was a master certified in baby Swiss and brick. And in 2018, I became the director of operations at Chalet Cheese Co-op.
After Myron retired, I got back into the master program again for limburger and Swiss cheese. I just finished up my three years of cheese evaluation. Now I just have to write another test for those two. Then I’ll be master certified in four cheeses.
Our plant still uses the hands-on approach — we think it is the best way. We don’t have the push button vats where you’re not even involved in it.
When I started here, we had 52 farms. Now we have 13, but we’re getting more milk from those 13 farms than we were getting from the 52. They have all evolved with the times, and are producing more milk than they did years ago. But they all still are family farms. Some of them are still here from when I first started, like Voegeli Farms, Barker Farms and Riedland Farms. Everybody’s within a 15-mile radius of us. We get the milk in here fast, and we can get it produced the next day. We contract with Lars Transportation and they drive to each of the 13 farms every day. They’re here by 4:30 in the morning.
We’ve won a lot of awards with all of our cheese. I think my best one is the HP Mulloy Memorial Award. That’s pretty much what every Wisconsin cheesemaker strives for. In 2015, I got first place in the world with a baby Swiss — a milder, creamier version of Swiss with smaller eyes [holes].
In our limburger cellar, it’s high humidity — 95 to 100 percent humidity. When we make the limburger, the next day we’ll cut it into six or seven ounce pieces, whatever the customer desires.
And we’ll smear that piece of cheese on our limburger boards. At that time, it does not stink, does not have much taste. It’s the consistency of feta. The next day, we’ll start putting a limburger smear on it. It’s a bacteria solution, a saltwater solution; it’s called bacterium linens. That’s what makes the limburger smell. It will work into the cheese and break down the fatty acids and the protein. That’s what makes it soft.
The shelf life is only about six months. Then it starts to get ammoniated. People can’t eat it after that; it’s too strong. With other cheeses, like cheddar, you can go up to 20 years. We make mild, medium and aged limburger. Mild is going to be one to two months, medium three to four, and aged limburger takes five to six.
The mother culture, the bacteria, we’ve had since 1885. The original plant was at the bottom of the hill. But this plant was built by five farmers as a joint venture with Kraft in 1948. At the time, it was a state-of-the-art limburger place. Kraft bought all their limburger from here.
We keep the mother culture, we’ll brush it into the saltwater, and we’ll keep it. Each piece has to be rubbed individually, with a rag, twice in a seven-day period. It’s a lot of hand labor. There are about 3,500 pieces in a vat, so it takes about two hours. We don’t make nearly as much as we used to, though. The whole cellar used to be filled with limburger.
We still make 400,000-500,000 pounds a year. This is our claim to fame. We want to keep going as long as we can.
We’ve all heard or seen the cartoons with limburger in them — there was one where a cat disguises himself as a skunk using the scent of limburger. Unfortunately, they’re all true. limburger does smell, yes. But there are a lot of cheeses out there that are the same way. But limburger, the granddaddy of them all, gets the bad rap.
Limburger is declining in sales. I think it’s due to the fact that the younger generation coming up was raised on Kraft slices. They don’t know what a full-flavor cheese is. We only make one or two vats a week now.
But if people would try limburger, there’s an easy way to take the smell off of it. You just cut the rind off, a little sliver of the rind. It’s amazing how many people have never had it. Then they try it and say, “Well, that’s not so bad.” It does stink, but if we took our limburger and gave it a fancy French name, it would be a different story, I think. It’s all got to do with the marketing end of it. But there’s still plenty of people who like a full-flavor cheese, so I don’t see us ever stop making limburger.
We are the last limburger factory in the United States. There is another one in Canada.
These days, you can get a limburger sandwich at Baumgartner’s in Monroe. They use pumpernickel bread, with raw onion and a sweet hot mustard or a stone-ground mustard. Then they give you a little Andes mint candy on top of it — for your breath.
This is an edited version of Jamie Fahrney’s story, which was produced by Catherine Capellaro as part of Wisconsin Humanities’ storytelling project, Love Wisconsin. You can find the full story and other stories in their cheese series at lovewi.com.
