Carefully crafted by Uplands Cheese in southwest Wisconsin
By Ari Weinzweig
At Zingerman’s we love to go the extra mile. To us, going the extra mile means offering small considerations, small courtesies, and small kindnesses, day in and day out, to build the experience of great service in our many different business contexts. One single extra mile can make someone’s day, but when extra miles intersect, magical things may happen! The story of the Pleasant Ridge Reserve Cheese—currently on the counters at the Creamery and Deli, on the Zingermans.com website, and on the Roadhouse cheese list—is one of the many marvelous examples. This is the official announcement that the Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese we have in-house just won half a dozen awards at last month’s American Cheese Society annual judging. The ACS awards are akin to the Oscars of the dairy world, so six top ribbons are something to celebrate! Given its new-found fame and limited supply, this special cheese will not be around all that long—swing by soon to score some for yourself!
About Pleasant Ridge Reserve
The project that created Pleasant Ridge Reserve began back in 1994. The cheese is made—as all cheese used to be 150 years ago—strictly seasonally. It’s done only in the spring, summer, and autumn when the cows are out in the pasture grazing and the variety of the grasses makes for an exceptionally interesting set of flavors. The rotational grazing methods that Uplands adheres to are also good for the soil—the pastures get a chance to replenish themselves and stay healthy. It’s made only from raw milk, which means that the complexity of the “raw material” is preserved in the flavor of the final cheese. Pleasant Ridge really is remarkable—it’s one of those cheeses that appeals to both aficionados and those who aren’t always up for anything out of the mainstream.
The Extra Miles behind Pleasant Ridge Reserve
So, what are the “extra miles” that make this so special?
Extra Mile #1: Uplands Cheese owner, Andy Hatch, has been very willing to pull samples of a dozen or so days’ worth of Pleasant Ridge and send them our way so that the ZCoB crew can select the one we like best.
Extra Mile #2: In order to make the flavor of the Pleasant Ridge Reserve you get from us even more wonderful than it would already be anyway, the Deli’s Trevor Murray, Mail Order’s Lisa Roberts, and a host of ZCoBbers are willing to take time every year to sit and taste together to do the selection.
Neither extra mile, to be clear, is really necessary. Uplands pretty much sells out of Pleasant Ridge each year regardless. And there are no “bad” days of Pleasant Ridge. All are good, and if we just put in our order like everyone else does, what we sell and serve would still be perfectly fine. But these two intersecting extra miles make it possible for us to get the wheels that are truly fantastic. Andy Hatch and the Uplands crew set those chosen wheels aside for us, and for the next year, we get those special cheeses! It’s a big deal in a Zingerman’s world where exceptional flavor is one of the main focuses of our daily work.
What makes Pleasant Ridge Reserve award-winning?
This year, the Pleasant Ridge selection turned out to be even more special than usual! When our team chose cheese, it was from July 18, 2023. Which is the same day’s production of Pleasant Ridge that won such a wealth of awards at the ACS last month! Which means that when you come into the Deli, Creamery, Roadhouse, or Mail Order and buy Pleasant Ridge, you will literally be buying a slice of an award-winning cheese! Metaphorically, you might say, there are six ribbons in every single slice!
Andy Hatch sums up the way all this works like this:
Our 150 cows turned that day’s 10 acres of pasture into 9,000 lbs of milk, which we made into 900 lbs. of cheese, before aging it for a year and drying it down to 765 lbs. of cheese, or about 70 wonderful wheels.
Pleasant Ridge is a perennial favorite around these parts. Semi-firm, super delicious, meaty, dense, and almost fudgy with a small bit of the aromatic “nose” you get with a great French mountain cheese. It’s terrific to eat as is (at room temperature) or use it for cooking as well. A super tasty, wonderfully terrific example of American craftspersonship at its flavorful best!