The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin

Richard Glick

“i was born and raised on a dairy farm,” says master cheesemaker Richard Glick. “This is the farm.” He gestures o¤ toward the green hill that rises dramatically above La Farge, a town of fewer than a thousand people not far from La Crosse. Family is one of the keys to cheesemaking, from Glick’s perspective—his uncle, Gerald Glick, owned and operated a small plant called Warner Creek Cheese not far from La Farge. “He took me under his wing and taught me a lot about cheese,” Glick recalls. “Making the best cheese was always his goal. He took pride in the product he made and taught me to do the same.” Glick built his career making a variety of Wisconsin classics, such as cheddar and muenster, but he came into his own with a couple special varieties of blue and gorgonzola cheese. But before he arrived at the peak of his career as a master cheesemaker at Swiss Valley Farms, where he would make a blue cheese that would win praise on national television, he logged some hard hours in old-fashioned Wisconsin cheese plants. “It was all canned milk at that time, so you know how long I’ve been around,” he says, grinning. “The cheesemaking job then—and I don’t think people would work this way today—you went to work and you didn’t go home until it was done. Usually going to work was three in the morning, and it was a twelve-hour day.” The work was more physical, too. “Some of us cheesemakers would haul milk, because you couldn’t store it overnight—you couldn’t get it refrigerated down enough,” he says. “So the milk had to come in, and then you had to make the cheese before you went home.” After getting his license under the tutelage of cheese guru Mike Dean in 1966, Glick went through a variety of jobs, including one at a plant in Hillsboro. “We made muenster there, and mild brick,” he says. “We developed that plant into the largest muenster plant in the country at that time. Eighteen percent of the country’s muenster came out of that Hillsboro plant then.” Richard Glick Swiss Valley Farms (retired), still consulting, La Farge, Wisconsin http://www.swissvalley.com/ QW Master of blue and gorgonzola Nowadays, a cheesemaker lets computers do it for him. But a true cheesemaker uses his hands to do it. 78 In 1997 he started working with Swiss Valley at its Mindoro plant. Volume was initially slender—two vats of blue cheese a day—but Glick would help adapt the traditionally Continental cheese into a domestic powerhouse. “We monkeyed around with our blue cheese,” he says. “That’s one thing a master cheesemaker has to ask: What if? What if we’d changed this or done that—what would happen? And I think that’s a proWle of master cheesemakers, in two words: what if?” A blend of two cultures mixed into the milk (rather than injected)—along with rich, full whole milk Xavor—made all the di¤erence for the Mindoro cheese’s unique proWle. “It had a pronounced Xavor that grabbed you right at the front, but then it mellowed o¤ and had a creamy Xavor,” Glick says. “That was with the whole milk; it was real creamy. We made a lot of blue cheese for other companies—and they still do. When I was going through the master’s program, I remember the grader saying, ‘Richard, you won’t win a lot of medals with this blue cheese, but it’s the best blue cheese I’ve ever tasted.’ Because ours was di¤erent, a nontraditional blue.” What Glick did with blue, he repeated with another relatively exotic cheese. “Then we worked with the Center for Dairy Research, because we were going to make gorgonzola,” he says. “We looked at the true gorgonzola recipe, and we Masters of Southwestern Wisconsin 79 Richard Glick displays his collection of antique processed-cheese boxes. didn’t want to do that exactly. So we dropped the moisture, and did a little di¤erent process on the front of that gorgonzola and developed our own type. We called it ‘U.S. Gorg.’ That got o¤ the ground real quick.” The job took a great deal of energy, and Glick credits his wife, Gloria, for not merely tolerating his career choice, but actively encouraging...