Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

Day 2 of the World Championship Cheese Contest went well for me. (My account of day 1 is here.) For the time I was there, it was gouda and more gouda.





At the back of the room by the windows the trophies basked in the glow of the sun.



An adjacent table had a pair of gentlemen laboring over a wheel of one of my favorite cheeses, gorgonzola. Mmm…



Man! Those blue veins looked mighty fine! One of the judges noticed me standing there drooling on my camera and he brought the wheel over to me for a close-up.



Oh mama!

At a nearby table judges were working on Pepper Flavored "American" Style Cheese.



I was offered a sample of the next cheese they judged. It had more than a little bite to it. While I enjoyed the heat, another judge who was also tasting it remarked that the heat was overpowering. Fair enough. You don't really eat it for the cheese flavor. Instead the cheese acts as a vehicle for the pepper.

Traipsing down the aisle, I came across a couple judges having a wee problem with some aged gouda, but they eventually overcame it.





Did I mention there was also a country ton of parmesan just waiting to be tasted?



I kept thinking about it as I was getting hungry. So my imagination took over and I fantasized about a big plate of spaghetti with cheesy garlic bread…mmm…This led me to stop over at the sampling table. My wish for some bleu from yesterday came true and I was greeted a plate of chunks from Black River.



Just look at that puppy! It must have been fairly fresh as it didn't crumble. I can assure you I had my share of the stuff.

I finished my time at the contest by watching these guys do their thing on a wheel of gouda.







I asked the gentleman whose hands you see above what he was feeling for. He explained that he was checking out the texture and making sure it wasn’t grainy and checking out how flexible it was. Truth be told, it seemed like all of the judges were exceptionally friendly and willing to take questions from us. And they came from all over the world. There was Shigenobu Murayama from the Cheese & Wine Academy in Tokyo and Kobus Mulder from the Agri Expo in Western Cape, South Africa plus Mark Johnson, a local boy who works at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research here in Madison. So, if you go, don't be afraid to approach the judges and ask questions. The ones with whom I spoke were all very nice and very willing to help those of us less well-informed on cheese standards understand what makes a quality cheese. Plus, as I noted above, they hand out samples as there's a lot of cheese to be had. Here's the temporary holding space:



The finals are tomorrow and I'm hoping there will be commentators there doing the play-by-play as there was in 2006 along with the guys holding up the big blocks of cheese over their heads as they are introduced. This gives the proceedings that whole thrill-of-victory-and-agony-of-defeat thing going for it.