News From The Cheese Caves

We have cheese-makers, cheese tastings, cheese classes and now—cheese carvers? Just when you thought curd nerds couldn’t get anymore obsessed, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve witnessed Sarah Kaufmann, one of the nations few professional cheese carvers at work.

I had the pleasure and fascination of watching Sarah and her crew at work at last year’s American Cheese Society Conference in Chicago. Her cheese creation was the crowning glory of the Festival of Cheese, where over 1100 types of cheeses were beautifully displayed and eaten by the conference attendees. Thirty famous Chicago area buildings carved from hunks of cheddar, blue, Parmesan and goat cheese were started and completed in one day.

Sarah isn’t the only famous cheese whittler. There’s champion carver Troy Landwehr. He sculpts cheese all over the world. In one of his interviews he claims that young cheddar cheese has just the right amount of oil and butterfat content and works best for sculpting. Cheddar also has the right consistency — not too soft and not too hard. Too soft of a cheese would not stand up and would lose its shape. Too hard of a cheese would flake and crack apart. The best tools for carving cheese are pottery tools, knives and piano wire.

According to Troy, a cheese carving is no different than a wedding cake… people eat the carvings so the cheese doesn’t go to waste. That’s a lot of cheese!

-Erin Hedley
Drop Ship and Corporate Gift Culinary Advisor

Posted by Erin Hedley

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Artisanal Cheese News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.