Willi’s Cave For Cheese, Not Tourists

By Ron Johnson, Dairy Editor
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 3:21 PM CDT

You won’t find Willi Lehner’s cave on any map. True, it’s practically a neighbor to the tourist-attracting Cave of the Mounds, but Willi’s cave contains no stalactites or stalagmites, and it’s not home to any bats.

Instead, Willi’s cave is home to cheese. That’s right: Cheese.

Willi, a second-generation cheesemaker, began constructing his cavern n or “cheese curing vault,” as Willi likes to call it n in 2006. He deposited the first cheeses in it last June.

There, in the cave’s almost-unchanging humidity and temperature, the cheeses age, developing subtle, new flavors.

“…Those cheeses are getting completely covered with mold. They can breathe. They’re totally in a living environment,” Willi explains.

The cave’s natural coolness of 55 degrees, coupled with the high humidity at approximately 90 percent, provides a perfect place for these infant cheeses to mature into adulthood. A multitude of enzymes and bacteria are still working on them as they rest on their wooden shelves of spruce and cedar.

“There’s a lot going on,” Willi confirms.

This cave really is a cave n not merely a well-insulated building above ground. Earth and limestone were excavated to a depth of 14 feet. Then three-inch I-beams bent to the arc of the cave were installed.

A grid of steel reinforcing rod lies atop the beams. Two layers of Styrofoam provide extra insulation beyond what seven feet or more of soil and stone on top already provide. A type of concrete plaster covers the cave’s walls and ceiling, making them shiny and smooth.

Willi purchased the cave as sort of a “kit,” with plans approved by an engineer. Even so, Willi says building the cheese curing vault was “a tremendous amount of work.”

Limestone blocks as much as three feet tall and six feet wide form two walls that guard the vault’s entrance. While the place looks like a working quarry, Willi says he plans to have the area landscaped and topsoil hauled in. Then he plans to seed prairie plants and wild flowers.

“There’s no one in the country that has a structure like this,” Willi assures.

At the cave’s double-door entrance, the cheesemaker slips off his sandals and exchanges them for rubber clogs waiting inside. His Agri-View visitor obligingly does the same. The idea for the change of shoes is to keep out unwanted microorganisms that might affect n even ruin n the valuable cheeses.

An anteroom complete with sink and running water hints at the coolness that lies deeper within. Through another door lies the larger of two rooms.

Both rooms have concrete floors. The walls arch gracefully upward a dozen feet. The place resembles a chapel, making one expect to look up and suddenly see delicate frescoes adorning the ceiling. But there are no paintings n just racks of cheeses resting on damp boards.

Together, both aging rooms measure 66 by 24 feet. The smaller room has a slightly higher humidity than the first. Both rooms echo immensely, making normal conversation virtually impossible.

Willi has work to do, visitor or not. He washes his hands and dons a yellow, plastic apron.

Then it’s into the more-humid environs of the smaller aging room. He will spend half an hour “dry salting” several dozen small, round cheeses. The salt is coarse, carries a pinkish tint, and is mined in Utah.

These cheeses are, at this point, Havarti. But they won’t stay that way. Willi will see to that.

In a day or two he will inoculate these with his own “earth schmier.” In modern English, that means he will literally smear their outsides with liquid containing bacteria and yeast that came from his farm’s woodland soil.

Willi relates how he placed the topsoil into a jar, added water, shook it, let the sediment settle, then strained off the water. He cautiously did all that away from the cheeses that he has stored in his aging rooms and basement, so they would not become accidentally infected.

Next he rubbed four small cheeses with the woodsy liquid. “What grew on those cheeses was absolutely magnificent,” Willi proclaims. He describes the taste and aroma of those experimental cheeses as “earthy” and “mushroomy.”

As a precaution, he had samples of those cheeses tested at a lab. The results came back negative for anything dangerous, Willi says. And thus his “Earth Schmier” cheese was born.

Much like some folks save a bit of batter from their sourdough bread for the next batch, so Willi reserves some of the earth schmier liquid, adding to it so he can inoculate his next batch of cheese. After the earth schmier has changed these cheeses, they no longer resemble Havarti at all. Willi describes them as resembling Limburger instead.

Judges in the American Cheese Society contest liked Willi’s Earth Schmier cheese. They ranked it third among all the cheeses in the “washed rind” category.

There’s another cheese curing room on Bleu Mont Dairy and Big Sky Organics, the businesses of Willi and his partner, Quitas. This one is small n only about the size of a bathroom n and it’s tucked into the farm’s greenhouse that’s made mainly of bales of straw covered with plaster.

The greenhouse’s roof really is green. Although it’s made of rubber, plants have taken hold in the rotted straw, making it look like it should have at least one goat frolicking on it. Inside the greenhouse is, according to Willi, what was “at one time the smallest licensed dairy plant in Wisconsin.”

Willi still uses this small curing room. He says he wants to one day make a blue cheese, and he would age it in this room, to keep it away from the cheeses in the cave. At any rate, this small room gave Willi valuable experience, paving the way for him to build the larger vault.

With a straw bale greenhouse and an aging cave, it’s evident that Willi is a cheesemaker who likes to think outside the vat. The way he goes about making his six or so types of cheese is far from the norm, too. In fact, Willi says he might be the only person in Wisconsin making cheese this way.

First, he only makes cheese in the spring and summer. That leaves winters open for Quitas and him to travel to such places the United Kingdom, where they n of course n visit fellow cheesemakers.

This cheesemaking schedule also provides Willi with the type of milk he wants n milk from cows that are mainly pastured. Most of the milk he buys is also from farms that are certified organic.

He explains his preference for milk from pastured cows by saying, “For one, that’s what cows evolved to eat. They didn’t evolve to eat grain and silage. It’s much healthier for the cows. And the health-giving properties from grass-fed animals come to us, also. I feel strongly about that.”

Willi adds, “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just energetically, too. It just makes sense. It just feels right.”

Willi’s cheesemaking method is also different because he does not own a cheese factory n not even a cheese vat. Instead, he leases space in four factories for a short time, buys milk from each factory, and hires the plant’s employees to help out as needed.

Why use four factories? Why not just one?

“Usually a factory is set up to make one kind of cheese, or basic style, like cheddar or Swiss,” Willi explains.

One kind of cheese just won’t do n for Willi’s imagination and talents or for his customers. He sells much of his yearly production of 30,000 pounds of cheese and curds at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. This is the farmers’ market on Madison’s Capitol Square, and it might draw some 20,000 people on a fair-weather Saturday.

Most of Willi’s cheese is made at Cedar Grove Cheese Factory, Plain. There, he crafts some of his cheddars, along with Havarti, the same Havarti that becomes his Earth Schmier. Most of the milk from Cedar Grove Cheese is organically produced and comes from the plant’s own patrons, Willi points out.

In eastern Wisconsin, at Henning’s Cheese, Kiel, Willi turns his attention and skills to making “bandaged cheddar.” This is “the traditional way cheddar was made before refrigeration and plastic.” Willi admits to saying those words a “few hundred times” each Saturday at Madison, to shoppers inquiring about the cheeses that are wrapped in cloth.

Before the advent of climate-controlled aging rooms and refrigeration, cheddar would dry out and crack. Mold could then enter the cracks and ruin the cheese.

Thus the bandage. It keeps the cheese moist and also protects it from tiny critters called “cheese mites.”

“The cheese mites, inevitably, will come,” Willi assures. “And you’ve got to deal with them.”

His bandaged cheddars also get a thin coating of lard, a traditional way of further protecting them.

Another plant Willi works at is Swiss Valley Farms, Platteville. There, Willi makes Swiss.

Again, his Swiss cheese is a tad different. Instead of standardizing the milk to 2.9 percent butterfat, Willi takes it to 3.2 percent or a bit higher.

“It makes a huge difference,” Willi says. “I’ve reformed a lot of people on Swiss.”

This Swiss cheese is made with milk produced in the spring, sometime around early June. Willi remarks, “It’s great cheese.”

The fourth cheese plant he works at is Uplands Cheese, Dodgeville. There he makes raw-milk, surface-ripened cheeses like Gouda, a farmstead Kasa, and Lil’ Will’s BIG Cheese.

Uplands Cheese is a “true farmstead” operation, Willi says. Owners Mike Gingrich and Dan Patenaude use the milk from their own herd that consists of cows representing nine breeds. Willi proclaims Uplands’ “the best milk I work with.”

All of Willi’s cheeses come back to his western Dane County farm for aging. Besides selling them at the farmers’ market, they are available at Fromagination, a specialty cheese shop on Madison’s Capitol Square.

Willi welcomes mail-order sales, too. His telephone number is 608-767-2875. His e-mail address is: mailto:bleumont@tds.net.

Willi and Quitas also grow and market garlic. The 8,000 to 10,000 bulbs occupy about a third of an acre.

Plainly visible against the sky at Bleu Mont Dairy stands a towering symbol of another of Willi’s interests. It’s a wind-powered generator atop a 122-foot-tall tower.

Behind the house there’s a solar panel. It’s set up to follow the sun in its daily arc across the sky.

“My goal,” he says, “is to bring my energy consumption to zero.”

His goal is also to produce top-shelf cheese. To do that, he knows he needs the best milk he can find.

“I never quibble about the price” of the milk, Willi says. “I just pay them whatever they want. To me, the cost of the milk is secondary compared to what I know I can make with it.

“I’ve been really fortunate,” he adds. “I’ve developed an excellent relationship with these four cheese factories.”

A licensed cheesemaker 25 years, Willi got his first taste of the work from his father, Billi Lehner, who learned the skill in his native Switzerland. Since he worked with his father from an early age, there’s truth in this statement of Willi’s: “I guess I grew up with my hands in the vat.”

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