A wonderful, semi-soft goat cheese with a gentle full flavor

In the small lakeside town of Port Washington in Wisconsin, about half an hour north of Milwaukee, the folks at Blakesville Creamery are making some marvelous cheese. They started only 18 months ago, so the fact that their cheese is already this good is a tribute to their care and their craft. I’m particularly smitten with their Sunny Ridge!

The founder of Blakesville Creamery, Lynde Uihlein, has had a long career in land preservation and community activism. In 1990 she founded the Brico Fund, a non-profit focusing on helping advance women’s issues and environmental causes. While I don’t know that Lynde formally wrote a vision the way we’ve learned to do it here, it’s pretty clear that she had one in her head. Culture magazine writes that, “The folks at Wisconsin-based Blakesville Dairy Farm have had a cheesemaking dream for years but were waiting for the right time and resources to make it work.” Pandemic or no pandemic, they’re making those dreams into a reality. As the writer Varyer says, Blakesville Creamery is “part idyllic goat farmstead and part production and aging facility, built with the cheesemaker’s eye on precision, experimentation, and scale.”

Sunny Ridge is made in the tradition of the great European washed rind cheeses like St. Nectaire. In this case though, Sunny Ridge is made with the farm’s own fresh goat’s milk. The young wheels of Sunny Ridge are washed with beer from Is/Was Brewing in Chicago. The end result is full flavored and eminently accessible. It has a clean, complex, flavor that’s just right to appeal to cheese novices and to folks like me and Tammie who have worked with artisan cheese professionally for decades. Meaty, milky, and mellow at the same time with a nice touch of salt, it’s terrific (at room temperature) to snack on accompanied by fresh vegetables, or eaten with a chunk of French baguette from the Bakehouse. It’d be really tasty, too, with boiled Yukon gold potatoes. I’m not the only one who’s enamored of this new arrival—Sunny Ridge just won a Good Food Award a few months ago. The folks there said it’s “exceptionally delicious [and] also supports sustainability and social good.”

Order Sunny Ridge for pick up from the Creamery.

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I’ve been waiting to have Flory’s Truckle, a wonderful cheese from the American heartland here for years. And now that it’s arrived at Zingerman’s Cream Top Shop, I’m impressed anew with its excellence! If you like firm-textured, full-flavored, nicely aged cheeses as much as I do, I’m pretty confident you will, too.

In the small town of Jamesport, Missouri, Tim and Jennifer Flory raise ten children and a herd of about 30 Jerseys cows, all of which come together to craft this marvelous cheese. The family makes its cheddars exclusively from their own herd’s raw milk, cloth wraps them, and ages them for a fortnight. In old-school English style, the 10-pound wheels are wrapped in cloth (which allows them to breathe as they age) and rubbed with lard (just like traditional English cheddar), which prevents mold from forming.

At that point, the wheels are driven north across the state line into Iowa to the Milton Creamery for maturing. Aging generally is for one year, which gives it a dry-ish, lovely dense texture. Supply of this superb cheese is limited to the 50 or so wheels they make per week. It’s terrific cheese that could well be as big a hit on your counter as it has been on mine!

Want to try Flory’s Truckle? Stop by the Cream Top Shop and ask for a taste!  And don’t forget to sign up for Ari’s Top 5.

After nine months of renovations, Zingerman’s Creamery is set to open a new retail space, the Cream Top Shop. We are so excited, and we’re looking forward to welcoming you to our new digs  at our all-day Grand Opening party on Saturday, April 29 from 10 am to 6 pm. There will be tours, tastings, and even prizes! It’s so close, but we cannot wait. We hope you’ll stop in!

In the meantime, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what we’ve been up to.

We’ve been testing recipes, like our grilled sandwiches—the one above is pimento cheese on Zingerman’s Bakehouse Rustic Italian bread. We’ll have a full menu of sandwiches featuring Zingerman’s Creamery cheese, and we’ll also be serving Munchables, our name for our customized snack trays that we fill up with cheese, bread or crackers, and your choice of other delicious things, like nuts, dried fruit, and cornichons to name a few.

“Make the Cream Top Shop, home of Zingerman’s Creamery your new lunch destination!” says Aubrey Thomason, Managing Partner of Zingerman’s Creamery.

In addition to our own award-winning cheese, we’ll also be selling our favorites from other (almost) exclusively American artisan producers like us. Here’s Tessie enjoying a whiff of a freshly cut half wheel of Flory’s Truckle Cheddar from Milton Creamery!

We’re pretty excited about our new look, too. The cows were created by hand by our in-house illustrator Ryan Stiner and will be proudly displayed in the shop very soon, and how about those  red stools? They’ll be available for guests who’d like to eat in (along with seating in our brand new tasting room), and they look right into our new production space—we’ll keep the lights on during the day, so you can see us in action.

Speaking of production, our equipment is shiny and ready to go. We’re already making our fantastic cheese and gelato. All that’s missing is you, and we’re counting the days. See you at the Grand Opening!

The Grand Opening for the Cream Top Shop is April 29th. New name, new look, same great location and tastes.

Zingerman’s Creamery has been in business since 2001. Started by John Loomis in Manchester, Michigan as the fifth business to open under the Zingerman’s banner, the Creamery has resided on the Southside next to Zingerman’s Bakehouse since 2005. Aubrey Thomason, the Creamery’s current Managing Partner, came to Zingerman’s in 2002 at the age of 17 when she started at the Deli, taking sandwich orders. By 2007, she had managed to garner an education in sustainable agriculture and production—she raised pigs and worked for Slow Food in Italy, worked behind the counters at our brother business Neal’s Yard Dairy in London and worked on a vegetable farm in Michigan, among other adventures. A love for the hard work of making food by hand was born. Aubrey began working at the Creamery in 2007 as a production assistant. She immediately showed a talent for cheesemaking and has been improving the cheeses day by day and week by week ever since.

In 2010 she shared her first long term vision for the Creamery with Ari and Paul, and asked to pursue the Path to Partnership. She became a partner in 2012. A key piece of her vision included a modern production facility. The Creamery has been closed since July 2016 and with a lot of hard work and hope for success, they will reopen in April 2017.

What will the new shop look like? Smell like? Feel like?
AT: The Cream Top Shop (as we have decided to call it) will welcome you with a view of production, and the cheese will be there with open arms. We have aimed for a modern farmhouse look and feel. The walls will have beadboard up to 5 feet, slate gray walls above that, highlights of wood, metal, and red. Production looks pretty stark and sterile through the window as it is all stainless steel, white, and grey (of course with happy, shining cheese and gelato makers inside). You can sit at a counter and eat your gelato, sandwich, or munchable as you look through the window at the gelato being made, and cheese draining. The shop will be populated with beautiful graphics created by our award-winning marketing department. The shop is there as an edible and visual showcase for what the Creamery makes, but it has it’s own identity. We want you to come and stay awhile!

What kinds of products will be sold in the shop?
AT: We will continue to sell cheese and gelato made by Zingerman’s Creamery. We will highlight a variety of ages of our cheeses, as people like them at different stages in their flavor development. We will also be featuring simple sandwiches with our cheeses on them, as well as what we call “munchables.” You will be able to build your own munchable with cheese, nuts, pickles, vegetables, olives, dried fruits, sliced meat…Gelato will expand to include shakes, malts, gelato sandwiches, housemade waffle cones, and sundaes. We will also feature more goods from Zingerman’s Bakehouse that can be eaten with cheese or gelato. Our emphasis will be on selling only what we are serving, so you can buy it on a cheese tray or you can take it home by the pound. You can eat it on a sundae here, or you can take it home to make your own.

Will you have space for classes?
AT: We will have our own public tasting room, which is super exciting! We will continue to teach classes on cheese and cheese styles, as well as classes on pairing outstanding beers and wines with our cheeses and other great American cheeses. We may do public cheese-making classes at some point in the future, but first we need to see how the space works.

What are the top 3 improvements in the new Creamery you are most excited about?
AT: Top on the list is environmental control. The production space will have segregated, conditioned HEPA filtered air, meaning the cheese and gelato can be kept at a consistent temperature throughout the process. Second is a dedicated maturing room, with a fancy air handling system that monitors humidity and keeps the conditions constant while the cheese is aging. We will be able to make our already excellent cheeses world class and do so consistently. Third, I am really stoked to have our own public tasting space!

What’s the biggest thing you learned undergoing the construction process?
AT: This process has taken almost 5 years to complete. I have learned a tremendous amount about sanitary design, architecture, and construction. We thoroughly vetted every version of this project that could happen. Throughout the process I’ve built so many business cases, and dug into every number concerning our business. This process has given me much more awareness about what is necessary and important, and what can wait.

What role has food safety played in the design of the new space?
AT: The production facility is built around sanitary design principles. Mainly this means that processes are segregated (Raw Milk Receiving, Processing, and Packaging). The design also maximizes flow so that milk moves in one direction. Looking to the future, we had to build a facility that could pass a third party food safety audit. We already make excellent products, and now we will be able to have them distributed coast to coast. We will have a lot more control over a lot of factors in our facility, which will give us peace of mind in producing a safe product.

What has been most challenging?
AT: I have been working on getting this project off the ground for about 5 years. It took a long time to get to the right size project, that would cover our needs, and that we could pay back. The iterative process was the most challenging. Also, I have been telling my staff and everyone at Zingerman’s for 5 years that “this is going to be the year we get a new Creamery”. The years where it did not happen for one reason or another, it was hard.

What surprised you?
AT: I have learned so much about my business. I have really gotten a chance to reinvent the Creamery brand. Because I was not the founding partner, it was what it was when I got there. Going through this process gave me the chance to go through the opening of a business, so now I feel like the Creamery truly belongs to us who are there now. We have written new long-term visions together, we have picked out fixtures and flooring, brainstormed the name for the shop, and shared dreams about what this space means to us.

The Creamery’s Cream Top Shop will be opening very soon! Keep checking back for updates and follow Zingerman’s Creamery on Facebook to keep up with construction.