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.
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