Cheese lovers rejoice! - Followup Story

annysa johnson

This is a follow-up to the previous cheese post on 9/6/2012. Thanks to Annysa Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A link is provided to their news website below, as well as a link to the original post:

As cheeses go, a 28-year-old cheddar is ancient. And only tasting will tell, after all those years, how it's fared.
Veteran Wisconsin cheesemaker Ed Zahn sliced into a vintage block - one of the oldest known cheddars ever made available for commercial sale - at the Wisconsin Cheese Mart downtown Saturday.
"It's good," the 73-year-old Zahn pronounced to the friends and fellow cheese lovers crowded around the butcher block table in the front of the store at 215 W. Highland Ave.
"If there's too much acidity, it can sour and go bitter," Zahn said in a brief primer on cheesemaking. "And aging's not going to help it any."
Cheese Mart owner Ken McNulty is selling a cache of the rare, super-aged cheddars, some four decades old, that were discovered this spring at Zahn Cheese in Oconto as founder Zahn prepared to retire. They were produced by Zahn and later by cheesemaker Wayne Hintz at County Line Cheese, where Zahn worked for nearly 30 years before spinning off the retail business.
The 40-year-old cheddar is all but gone; there were about 20 pieces left at $10 an ounce on Saturday. But there's plenty more 20 years and older ranging from $60 to $96 a pound.
Until now, the sharpest cheddar McNulty had ever seen for sale was around 15 years old; he'd once tasted 21-year-old cheddar in a privately held piece.
McNulty called the quality of the Zahn's cheddar after all these years a testament to the cheesemaker's skill and the superior milk he used.
"That's one advantage we had," said Zahn, noting that the milk was usually less than a day old when it was turned into cheese.
"It did not sit around for two, three, four days," Zahn said.
David Cisar, a Milwaukee attorney whose father delivered the milk used in the cheese, was on hand Saturday, as were the owners of Dufeck Wood Products Manufacturing in Denmark, whose wooden crate protected the aging cheddar.
That box will now be making its way to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
McNulty and his wife, Melissa, handed out slivers of the pungent cheese to the crowd, eliciting pinched faces from some who got the crystallized outer chunks.
"It's really acidic, really powerful," said Ken McNulty. "It's definitely an extreme food."
Click here to jsonline.com
Link to the original post here, cheese-lovers-rejoice-recently.html