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Richard Wold
- University of Wisconsin Press
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“how’d i get into cheesemaking? I needed a job,” quips Richard “Whitie” Wold, head of the cheese department at Associated Milk Producers, Inc.’s massive Jim Falls plant. His white hair at an early age inspired the nickname; it’s emblazoned on his cheesemaker uniform. “After high school, I went to trade school,” he says. “I wasn’t Wnding a job very easily. Some guys told me they were hiring in Jim Falls, so I drove up and put in an application. I drove home and then I got a call to come back for an interview. Basically they asked me if I wanted to work here, and I said sure. So they asked me if I could be in here at eleven o’clock that night. I was, and that’s how it started.” Wold has worked every job in the cheese department at the Jim Falls plant, which is owned by a dairy co-op based in New Ulm, Minnesota, with more than four thousand midwestern farmers/owners. The plant goes through about 2.5 million pounds of milk a day, making it one of the biggest in the state. 157 Richard Wold Associated Milk Producers, Inc. (AMPI), Jim Falls, Wisconsin http://www.ampi.com/ QW Master of monterey jack and cheddar We run 24/7 for 365 days out of the year. Richard Wold stands in his two-level factory, where he developed his award-winning habañero jack cheese. Unlike many of his master cheesemaker peers, Wold was originally a city boy. “I was born in Milwaukee, but both my parents were from around here,” he says. “My dad was the head chef at the VA hospital in Milwaukee. But then my mother’s uncle had a farm up here. I always liked coming up to visit, every summer ever since I was a little kid, as long as I can remember.” There was always something to do on the farm, he recalled. “As I got older, my mom wouldn’t let me move back. She said, ‘You could be trouble.’ She knew what she was talking about,” he says. Wold’s habañero jack cheese recently won a second prize in its class at the 2008 World Championship Cheese Contest. Had it not been for his initiative, the plant’s prize-winning variety would never have come into being. “We were down at our Portage plant, looking at some other cheese,” he says. “And I noticed he was buying pepper jack from a competitor. I came back and said, ‘You know, guys, we can do that.’ But the company would never give me the OK.” Wold got his green light to give it a try. “So we made a vat, and they said it would be all right. We needed to improve on some things . . . so I talked to some other people about peppers, and it turned out the company we were buying peppers from was having problems because they were more stringy. We found nicer peppers, which we now buy by the truckloads in totes. We’ll make three days of pepper jack in a week.” “Tote” is kind of a cute word to describe the massive, bulging containers of spicy vegetables that Wll much of a large storage room in the plant. About 400 pounds of peppers—12 pails of jalapeños, or 11 of jalapeños and 1 of habañeros—go into each 5,200-pound table of spicy jalapeño or habañero jack cheese Wold makes. The habañero bags are smaller and more thickly packaged. Wold mentions that after handling habañeros, it’s generally a good idea to wash up thoroughly before using the restroom. “You learn that pretty quick,” he adds with a laugh. Despite decades of experience, Wold is modest about his career. When it’s suggested that he knows a lot about cheese, he interjects immediately. “No, no, no, no . . . I’m still learning,” he says. “Just from talking with [fellow masters], you learn. It was great to experience the camaraderie.” Wold expresses a bit of professional envy toward colleagues with the luxury to attend personally to each batch of cheese in process. At AMPI’s scale, he says, production is relentless. “We make a vat of cheese every 22 minutes,” he says. “We start pumping milk at 4:40 in the morning and get done pumping milk at 12:10 at 158 Masters of Northwestern Wisconsin T Ta as st ti in...