The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin

Randy LaGrander

it’s pretty well understood that cheesemaking in Wisconsin is—or at least was—largely a family business. Fathers taught sons, referring back to what they’d learned from their own fathers and grandfathers. And while many Wisconsin plants have a generational story to them, few can—with a couple moments’ notice and a bit of persuasive wrangling—assemble grandfather, father, and sons for a snapshot. This isn’t just a portrait session; until interrupted, all the men were out on the Xoor, all dressed for work, all engaged in the art of making cheese. “Both my parents were licensed cheesemakers,” recalls Randy LaGrander, current plant chief of LaGrander’s Hillside Dairy. “Years ago, in the 1950s, there were a lot of small farmer co-ops. And my parents used to run a lot of these co-ops for di¤erent people. Finally they decided: We’re doing all this work, why don’t we do it for ourselves? So they looked around central Wisconsin and Wnally settled on here. He bought this [plant] in 1960.” The plant that Dannie and Lorraine LaGrander built was also home until recently for the LaGrander family. Climb the stairs to the plant’s upper level, and you discover a cheerful midwestern home disguised now as a conference room and a couple of oªces. “The convenience was nice,” recalls LaGrander. “There was no travel. In the wintertime in a snowstorm you basically just walked down the steps.” 160 Randy LaGrander LaGrander’s Hillside Dairy, Stanley, Wisconsin http://www.lagranderscheese.com/ QW Master of colby, monterey jack, and cheddar You cannot teach somebody to do it by a book. You need to have that hands-on experience. Randy LaGrander shows o¤ some of his plant’s cheddar, matted midway through the cheddaring process. The arrangement wasn’t without its challenges, however. “I remember growing up as a kid, and all the other kids were outdoors playing in the summertime and they had vacation, but you were always working,” he says. “As a kid you think that’s terrible. But it instills in you—all of our kids are very conscientious, and put everything into what they do.” LaGrander’s wife, who still works in the plant on the business side of things, remembers the arrangement a little less nostalgically. Workers, she recalls, treated the house like an outbuilding, strolling up the stairs, storing milk in the fridge, and peering through the front door curtains to see who might be home. Despite the pressures and occasional hassles of the cheese business, for LaGrander, there was never much question of choosing another line of work. “I always enjoyed doing it,” he says. “My personal thought was: Why do something else when you know you’re going to come back here anyway? The younger you start the easier it is. My dad asked me if I wanted to get my license, and I was Wfteen at the time. They had the [dairy] short course at Eau Claire, and he drove me back and forth to go to the classes and stu¤, and I had my cheesemaking license before I had a driver’s license.” When milk comes into LaGrander’s plant, the liquid is eªciently harnessed at a level that would make an old corner plant owner’s jaw drop. First, the milk is pasteurized and standardized for fat levels by adding nonfat milk solids. Standardized milk helps to produce consistent cheese. “Then from the pasteurizer, the skim is added, and then it goes to the cheese vat and you add your ingredients,” LaGrander says. “Then you add your rennet, set it up, and check your sets. . . . It’s all cut, cooked, and it goes to the tables. . . . You remove half the whey from the vats so you don’t have all that liquid.” The remainder of the whey is later pulled from the cheese-in-progress; it then goes to another storage tank, where butterfat is removed, and then onto another. “Then we have to—to keep the quality of the whey—because you’re full of enzymes—now you treat it just like milk,” LaGrander says. “You repasteurize it to kill the cultures. Then it runs through the UF [ultra-Wltration], which is a spiral membrane. Your protein molecules are larger than your other molecules, so that’s how those get sifted out.” That protein then gets cooled and sold to another processor. Lactose (milk sugar) is taken out with a reverse osmosis system...