A Photo Tour Of Uplands Cheese Company
By Amy Cavanaugh in Food on Dec 1, 2012 5:00PM
As part of our recent trip up to Wisconsin, we were lucky to pay a visit to Uplands Cheese Company, located in Dodgeville. At Uplands, cheesemaker Andy Hatch is making two cheeses, Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Rush Creek Reserve.
Hatch told us that while Wisconsin cheesemakers typically pooled milk from a number of farms, Uplands makes cheese with milk from its own cows. The cows rotate the fields they graze in, which is better for the cow and easier for the farmer, since the animals harvest their own feed and spread manure. The cows are milked May through October.
Pleasant Ridge Reserve is an Alpine-style cheese, which means it picks up floral and grassy flavors from the cow's diet. The cheese is made with raw milk and aged in a ripening room, where it's washed several times a week in a brine. Pleasant Ridge Reserve is a hard cheese, and it's smooth and nutty. There are some salt crystals in the cheese, and I also tasted miso, which gave the cheese an umami, savory taste.
Rush Creek Reserve is a soft raw milk cheese that's made in the fall, when the cows eat hay instead of grass. It's wrapped in spruce bark, which adds a woody flavor to the cheese. We dipped into a round of the cheese with spoons and found a cheese that's incredibly soft and creamy, with a taste of cured ham.
You can find Uplands Cheese Company cheeses at Pastoral and Marion Street Cheese Market.