Tony Hook has been making cheese for over 50 years at his company, Hook's Cheese, in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. He produces more than 70 varieties of cheese, including the popular five-year cheddar, known for its distinctive orange color. Watch as the milk is pasteurized, processed, and transformed into the iconic Wisconsin cheese.
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00:00Wisconsin is known for its orange cheddar.
00:03Wisconsin produces 600 different varieties of cheese.
00:07If Wisconsin was a nation, we'd be the third largest producer in the world.
00:18Our best seller is our five-year cheddar.
00:21I think it's because of the price and the age of the cheese.
00:30So you can see milk in the tank still being stirred.
00:37Milk was being held overnight, what was brought in yesterday afternoon.
00:40And this is the milk we're pasteurizing, running into the vat, and going to make cheese out of today.
00:45First we heat it on water, then we dump the water and start running milk through it, pasteurize all the milk.
00:53Pasteurizing is heating the milk, thermalizing the milk, to try to kill all of the bad bacteria.
01:01On ours, we use a high temperature, short time, HTST.
01:05We typically run 164 to 165, and it has to be held for at least 15 seconds at the minimum.
01:12We want to make sure that the chart is reading exactly what we're showing.
01:17Sometimes you have to adjust the needle.
01:20Now we'll warm it back up again.
01:22It's right on today.
01:24Right now it's circulating all the way through the pasteurizer.
01:28So we ensure that our milk is pasteurized before we're putting it in the vat.
01:34Then we add the starter culture.
01:36It's about 500 grams of mesophilic starter culture, lactose-lactose, and lactose-chromorus.
01:46We're typically at about 86 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit, optimum temperature for bacteria to grow.
01:52We want to ripen the starter culture for about 50 minutes.
01:55We produce a lot of cheese in Wisconsin.
01:57We believe that in southwest Wisconsin especially, the driftless area, that it does affect the flavor of the milk,
02:05the feed, the hay, the grasses, the corn, everything, because of the limestone.
02:10So we do believe that it affects the terroir, affects the flavor of the cheese.
02:16Once the starter culture has been ripened for that long, if we're adding color, we'll add annatto.
02:22A hundred years ago when we were overtaking New York as the dairy state,
02:27we were trying to show, try ours.
02:30Ours is orange, theirs is white.
02:32You know, differentiation.
02:33So we're just mixing the color in.
02:36And that's what basically Wisconsin is known for, is orange cheddar as opposed to east coast white cheddar.
02:43Then we'll add the rennet, which is the enzyme that coagulates milk.
02:47Stir that in, pull the paddles, just let it sit for about 25 minutes and let it thicken up.
02:53So it gets about as thick as Greek yogurt.
02:57Now we're going to cut the coagulated milk.
03:00These are three-eighths inch wired knives.
03:02We'll crosscut the vat, then we'll go all the way up one side, all the way back down the other
03:07with the vertical and the horizontal knives.
03:11We're going to put the paddles back in, so once we do start cooking, we can stir it.
03:16They're pretty delicate at this point.
03:18But see how they're little tiny cubes?
03:20They can start expelling whey out of them.
03:23Ten pounds of milk will get about one pound of cheese and about nine pounds of liquid.
03:29So you have to be able to kick all of that liquid all that way out of the curd.
03:34In Wisconsin, one of the regulations is that every vat of cheese has to be presided over by a licensed cheesemaker.
03:42When I started in 1970, you could get your cheesemaker's license by apprenticing under a cheesemaker for a year and a half
03:49and then sitting for the exam.
03:51And that's what I did.
03:54When we first bought this place, I was about 35 and it was easier on the back.
03:59Everything has to be cleaned and recleaned and sanitized before you use it.
04:06So you want a picture of the thermometer since it's heated to 100.
04:10Now we'll start to push it to the back three quarters, drain away, kind of let it settle to the bottom.
04:16Ditch it in the middle so the whey can drain out of the center.
04:20I can feel the curd down there so I can feel how much is still there to push.
04:25Vats are sloped to the center to the one end.
04:29Drain it out of the valve.
04:32So at this point we're getting down to where the whey is mostly drained off.
04:36So what whey and little bit of cheese is coming out that we're draining on the floor is just what the pump couldn't pump into the whey tank.
04:44The rest of it was already pumped into the whey tank.
04:47And that will be used for fertilizer, bi-tackle, haul it out, land spread it.
04:52We'll get all the whey drained off and then we'll start trimming it up, packing that on top,
04:57and then we'll be able to cut all of the cheese into slabs so we can start cheddaring.
05:03As you turn them over, the weight of the slab keeps kind of pressing itself and making the bottom smoother.
05:09You cut them in half, pile them too high.
05:12Each of those, you're putting more weight on there, kind of pressing them together but also pressing them to stretch out so the texture changes a little bit.
05:20First we go one high, two high, three high, four high, about every 15-20 minutes.
05:25And we'll test the acidity or the pH of the whey to make sure the starter culture is still growing like we want.
05:31Then we'll run them through a cheddar mill and make the cheddar-sized curds.
05:35So I'm just breaking up, sometimes there's some big lumps that have stuck together.
05:39So that when you salt it, the salt can hit all surfaces.
05:44The salt will preserve the cheese.
05:47It slows the starter culture down, prevents it from getting too acidic.
05:52Without salt, pretty bland.
05:54So this is a little bit over half of the salt that we'll put on.
05:58Then I'll put another bucket on.
06:00So once we have those curds, then we'll dip them with a bucket.
06:04From here, we're just dipping it out, weighing it, putting it in the 40-pound forms.
06:08Once we put two pails in each one, they'll be ready to put in the press.
06:12We do it by hand scale in a bucket and we weigh them.
06:15We put about 45-46 pounds of those curds.
06:18They each have cheesecloth in them.
06:20We'll pull the pins, put a lid on there.
06:23We'll press them down to between 41-42 pounds.
06:26We'll press them down to between 41-42 pounds.
06:30So we'll lose about 4 pounds of weight out of every block.
06:33This is the way that's draining out right now.
06:36About 20 pounds of pressure the first 20 minutes,
06:38and then we'll switch it to about 40 pounds of pressure for the last hour and a half.
06:45The cheese has been in the press for about 2 hours now, so we're going to start wrapping these.
06:50We'll pull them out of the forms, take the cheesecloth off.
06:54We're going to have a fully pressed block of just a solid mass of orange cheddar cheese.
06:59We'll put them in a long-hold bag, and then we'll seal them in the multi-bag.
07:07Put it in a cardboard box with a wood liner.
07:09Put it on a pallet.
07:11Start aging it up.
07:13We're going to start sticking them into Cave 1 to start curing them out.
07:17They'll be moved up to another location within about a week,
07:21because most of our cheddar we age in another location.
07:23We can't fit everything in here, so the cheddars are moved out because we age them so long.
07:28Back in the day before refrigeration, most of these factories were built into a hill like this
07:34so that the back end was kind of a cooler spot sort of underground,
07:38so it'd be 55 or 60, and they'd let the cheese cure at that temperature.
07:44The oldest we have ever sold is 20-year-old, and we don't typically have that on hand all of the time.
07:51Some restaurants really want it, but individuals want to buy that.
07:56They want something that's aged that long and hard-sought after,
08:00and it's always fun to try and come up with something new.
08:03Three milks instead of just cow milk, we moved on with cow, sheep, goat, you know, in the combination,
08:09and it's fun to play with all those.
08:11You know, you get different flavor combinations, try to come up with something new,
08:15something nobody else has ever done before.
08:18One of the cheeses, you have to be kidding, Blue, very unique name,
08:23and I actually came up with the name two years before I came up with the cheese.
08:26Most of the cheeses I'll come up with a cheese recipe before I'll come up with a name for it.
08:33We're tiny compared to most.
08:36You know, it'd be kind of nice to be a little more well-known,
08:39but the other part of that problem is how fast can you grow
08:43to supply a double-edged sword in the Madison area?
08:47We're pretty well-known.
08:49Like at the farmer's market where you're actually, people can sample everything we make
08:54and try it and say, wow.
08:56So it's satisfaction with knowing you've made something that consumers will love.
09:01Yes, the making is great too, but it's a lot of work.