Cheesemaker

All hail the cheesemaker

Behold the cheesemaker – a magician of milk who creates the world's most perfect food. An alchemist who, with four simple ingredients, makes cheeses as different as ricotta and romano, gouda and gorgonzola, and mozzarella and mascarpone. Without the cheesemaker, macaroni and cheese would be dry pasta, a grilled cheese sandwich would just be bread, and pizza would be burnt crust drowning in tomato sauce.

Here in Wisconsin, we get a little starstruck when a cheesemaker is in the house. Then again, it's hard to think about anything when you're daydreaming about the tastiest, highest-quality, most award-winning cheese in the world.

Take a spin through our website to meet some of the 1,200 cheesemakers in Wisconsin. Get answers to your burning questions about cheese, like "How is feta cheese made?", "What is burrata cheese?" and "Where can I get some more cheddar blue?" Or scroll down to learn more about how cheesemakers do that thing they do.

How does the cheesemaker do it?

How does the cheesemaker turn a vat of unremarkable milk into the miracle of cheese? The process is simple to describe but painstaking to master.

Cheese starts off as milk from cows, sheep, goats, or even buffalo. Cheesemakers add a starter culture with bacteria to begin transforming lactose in the milk into lactic acid, and in some cheeses, to begin a process of fermentation. Rennet is added to coagulate the milk and separate the solid curd from the watery whey. Rennet may be animal rennet taken from the stomach linings of young ruminant animals, vegetable rennet from plants with coagulation properties, or microbial rennet that relies on yeast, fungi, and mold to curdle the milk.

After most of the whey is released, the curd may be cut, scalded, washed, salted, pressed, pulled, immersed in brine, or manipulated in other ways to create hundreds of varieties of cheese. Ultimately, cheesemakers press the curd into a cheese mold and leave it to age for a few days to a few years. During the aging, cheese may be continually washed to create washed-rind cheeses, pierced with needles to create blue cheeses, sprayed with yeast and mold to create bloomy cheeses, or exposed to smoke to create smoked cheese.

Wisconsin cheesemakers: the best of the best

In Wisconsin, our cheesemakers have been perfecting old-world recipes and inventing new cheeses for 180 years – since before we were even a state. Today, Wisconsin is the only state in the nation that requires cheesemakers to have a license to make cheese – can you believe that? – and we have the only master cheesemaker program in the world apart from the one in Switzerland.

That just goes to show you how seriously we take cheese – and how much we revere our Wisconsin cheesemakers. So, next time you're browsing the cheese aisle at the supermarket, be sure to look for the Proudly Wisconsin Cheese badge on any chunk of cheese you pick up. That's when you know your cheese has been made by the best cheesemakers in the world.