Farm Features: Hook's Cheese

The Liliana's family likes to know exactly where our food comes from. Come with us on a weekly tour of Wisconsin and surrounding areas to meet the people, places and animals that bring fresh, local food to Liliana's.

This week we are visiting Hook's Cheese. We've featured Hook's Cheese since we opened in 2007. We always offer them on our artisan cheese plate and frequently utilize their delicious options in salads, entrees and sometimes even desserts!

Here is Chef Dave visiting the Hook's at the Dane County Farmers Market last spring

So we were thrilled when the Hook's said they would show us around their cheese factory.

All the equipment is so big and shiny and clean!

yummmm.. imagine that whole thing full of delicious cheese!

They have a room just for all the ginormous holding tanks full of milk from local Wisconsin dairy farms. Did you know that the Hook's used to be contractors for a large cheese company but after years of doing everything in bulk, their love of cheese led them down a new delicious path to artisan cheese-making. Unlike the bulk cheese production they used to do, they can spend the time on every detail of each wheel and batch and try new and ongoing challenging projects all the time. Wandering through the factory we even came across a 20 year cheddar, due to be ready in 2015. We can't wait!

And a cooler room for the extra stinky cheese! I'm disappointed to see that we don't have any pictures of all the cheeses at different stages of turning into blue cheeses. I must have been too busy watch Lily realize it was stinky and make stink-face. Chef Dave, who loves blue cheeses, assures me it was a "good stinky"!

And they had another room full of completed amazing ready to eat cheese! Or, if you ask Lily, "they have cheese all the way up to the sky! Like, even taller than Daddy!"

They even sent us home with some cheese we'd never tried, so that's just an all around good day.

Farmyard to Fabulous: How we use the foods we've found

So we visited a farm and are thrilled to bring their product to our customers at Liliana's. Now we want to share with you where on our menu you can find it, and how you might cook that product at home, should you find yourself lucky enough to prepare these delicious foods in your kitchen.

On Wednesday we told you all about our family visit to Fox Valley Berkshire Pork. Our chefs love working with this high quality meat and finding new and exciting ways to utilize the products. (Lily loves their all natural hot dogs the best!)

So here is why we think Fox Valley Berkshire Pork is so great

In the 80's Americans went crazy for diet foods. Any food was inherently better if it contained less cholesterol, less fat, less sodium or less calories. Pork futures plummeted and the pork marketing board reinvented itself using "the other white meat" campaign. Commercial pork farmers bred the US pork population to be leaner and leaner to fill Americans demand for "less". Here's the problem: Americans started to wonder why pork didn't taste as good as they remembered it. Why wasn't it a little more filling, and little more tasty, a little..."more"?

Well, as you remember, pork farmers had spent over 20 years wrecking most of the US pork population by breeding it to be very lean and not very tasty. Innovative farmers like Bruce and Todd at Fox Valley Berkshire Pork have recently started raising pigs from the Berkshire line where they were smart enough to continue raising them the way they always have, healthy and yummy!

On our dinner menu, you can find Fox Valley Berkshire Pork in a number of dishes.
Jambalaya-Tomatoes, Andouille, Tasso ham, lardon and blackened shrimp with rice.
and these, available on our seasonal dinner menu, but may not be available forever:
Pork Chop-Huge 1-1/2 Berkshire pork chop with strawberry chutney, roasted red potatoes and fresh from our garden herb salad.
Pork Pasta- Pork pasta with peaches, cilantro, jalapeno and red onion with citrus sauce, topped with feta.


At lunch, try Fox Valley Berkshire Pork on these items:
Jambalaya- Tomatoes, Andouille, Tasso ham, lardon and blackened shrimp with rice.
and these, available on our seasonal lunch menu, but may not be available forever:
Pork Pasta- Pork pasta with peaches, cilantro, jalapeno and red onion with citrus sauce, topped with feta.
Berkshire Pork Burger-Fox Valley Berkshire pork, ground and mixed with herbs and spices. Grilled to order and served with guacamole and pico de gallo with Fire Lily aioli

Sneak Peek!
Our chefs are working hard to capture fall with the best that Wisconsin harvest season has to offer.
Fall menu (starting next week) will feature Fox Valley Berkshire Pork in at least 2 new ways:
At dinner:
Fox Valley Berkshire Pork Chop-with warm apple cranberry compote, swiss chard risotto and parsnip puree with chive oil

At lunch:
Turkey Bacon Sandwich-Turkey and berkshire pork bacon on a housemade roll with mixed greens, tomatoes and spicy aioli.

Here are Chef Dave's pork cooking tips:

1: When purchasing, look for marbling. A good cut of pork will have a nice mix of pink flesh and white fat.

2: If you can't find a nicely marbled cut, brining might help compensate.

-a great brine recipe is

-2 parts water

-1 part oil

-1 part apple cider vinegar

-1 part salt

-1 part brown sugar

- Fresh crushed garlic

- Fresh thyme

Combine in ziploc bag, add pork, squeeze out air, mush brine around pork. Let sit for one hour.

3: DONT OVERCOOK PORK. Know where your pork comes from, medium is fine.

4: When all else fails, let the Chefs at Liliana's prepare a delicious pork entree for you :)

Farm Features: Fox Valley Berkshire Pork

The Liliana's family likes to know exactly where our food comes from. Come with us on a weekly tour of Wisconsin and surrounding areas to meet the people, places and animals that bring fresh, local food to Liliana's.

Fox Valley Berkshire Pork

This post is being authored by Liliana's mom, Tiffany, because Fox Valley Berkshire Pork brought bacon back into my life after an 11 year void. And as we all know, bacon is a wonderful thing.

You see, I'm an animal lover. I became a vegetarian in high school and though I reintroduced some meats during the last few years, I was never able to find a source of pork where I felt confident that they were treated humanely during their lives.

Then I met Todd and Bruce of Fox Valley Berkshire Pork and I knew, 11 years later, I found it! Bacon!

So we picked a lovely day and drove out to the farm to meet the piggies.

Todd introduced us to all the pigs and how things work around the farm. And Chef Dave wore sandals to a pig farm. Oh yes. There was shoe scrubbing when we got home.

AND LILY MET A ONE DAY OLD PIG. Seriously. True love.

but piglet had to stay at the farm because part of why Fox Valley Berkshire Pork is so special is that the babies are milk-fed from their mamas until their sharp little teeth become too much for mama to handle.

when piglet starts teething on mama it will get switched to cows milk, which comes from their cows in the same farmyard, of course!

They had a nice little bunch of free ranging chickens to keep charlie occupied.

Our visit to Fox Valley Berkshire Pork was a lovely summer day on the farm, and gave me such a sense of peace. I love knowing farms like this really exist in the world. Not just as tourist field trip farms, but real food production farms that care for their animals and their environment in a loving and responsible way.

Bacon!