Going gourmet

By Betty Wall, The Business News

 

Milk is milk and cheese is cheese.  Right?

Sure – if you don’t possess a discerning palette.

If you ask the partners of Saxon Homestead Creamery, their grass-fed cows make milk that’s the crème de la crème.

“I always had the feeling we had superior milk because of the pride and lengths we took to make it,” says Jerry Heimerl, who oversees Saxon Homestead Creamery, specialty cheesemaker in Cleveland, Wis.

Saxon Homestead Creamery makes old-world style cheeses for upscale markets.  The creamery is a young offshoot of Saxon Homestead Farm, the 160-year-old family farm of the Klessig family.

Several sibling and siblings-in-law started the creamery in 2006.  Along with Heimerl and his wife Elise (Klessig) Heimerl, they include brothers Karl and Robert Klessig and their spuos, Liz and Kathleen.

Saxon Homestead Creamery introduced its first cheese (Big Ed’s, named after the late Ed Klessig) the following year.  It’s since developed several others.

Milk too good to dilute

Heimerl said he had long felt Saxon’s milk was way too good to combine into a tank with other, more average milk.

“Despite the amount of labor that goes into making milk and the quality of the product we produced, every day it was only as good as the worst milk on the milk truck,” Heimerl said.

Hence began a decades-long quest to “add value” to Saxon Homestead Farms milk – in other words, enhance offerings to bring better profits.

Heimerl started educating himself.  He looked in making yogurt and bottling milk in glass before the cheese idea hit him.  He took classes on entrepreneurship.

“I started taking as many classes as I could on how to make cheese, how to develop a business,” Heimerl said.

But not just any cheese – gourmet cheese.

“It took years of meeting people and networking and finding that in order to get into this higher-end niche, you don’t do it overnight,” Heimrl said. “It takes experience – generations of cheese making.”

So, they sought out people who had the experience.

“Wisconsin cheesemakers aren’t going to hand you their recipe,” Heimerl said.

They got help from experts including cheese industry consultant Neville McNaughton, a native of New Zealand who lives in Missouri.

That’s not to say that the knowledge was not in Wisconsin: “I happened to find Neville,” he said.

Why Saxon?

Saxon’s name comes from the northeast German region of Saxony, from which many Manitwooc County settlers, including the Klessig ancestors emigrated.  Several places in the Cleveland area still bear the name Saxon, including a cemetery and a church.

Saxon Homestead Creamery bases its milk and cheese production on old-world techniques and theories prevalent in Europe and New Zealand – namely, that cows are fed grass and allowed to roam outside in pastures.

Wisconsin’s climate is a tad different than New Zealand, native country of cheese-industry consultant Neviille McNaughton.

“They have grass year round,” Heimerl said. “We have grass only a few months of the year.”

Saxon’s 450 cows are put on fresh grass every 12 hours.  They get some corn for protein, but it’s not the basis of their diet.  Saxon stores hay and alfalfa for the cows to eat during the months when grass isn’t plentiful.

“We have a cheese that’s very unique to southern Manitowoc County.  It’s what our cows get, drinking our water and eating our grass.”

Not all cheese the same

Saxon makes its cheese from raw milk, which has more of the natural cultures and bacteria that make it flavorful, Heimerl said.

“Making cheese preserves milk.  Originally, it was a way of preserving milk, making the nutrients available during times of the year when milk was scarce and before refrigeration,” Heimerl said.

The first cheese Saxon Homestead Creamery came out with was Big Ed’s cheese.  It’s a combination of Dutch Gouda with strong hints of alpine cheese and the taste of Swiss in it, Heimerl said.

Alpine cheese are a type of cheese made from milk of high-altitude grazed animals.  Swiss cheese is the one most people are familiar with.

“It’s a production method,” Heimerl said. “What we’ve done is take the techniques of making different European cheeses (and apply them to their own processes) and they come out to be fairly unique.”
Saxon makes a handful of semi-firm/semi-soft cheeses, all aged and naturally rinded, using raw, and unpastereuriazed milk.

“When you make cheese from raw milk, it’s got to be aged a minimum of 60 days above 35 degrees,” Heimerl said.

Aging it isn’t going to make it better and bring out the flavors but rather to prove that it’s not going to spoil.

“Normally, (aging it) intensified the flavor.  In our business, a young cheese is 60 days old, because it’s raw milk, and at 60 days, it doesn’t really have a lot of character,” Heimerl said. “By 80 or 90 days, you’ve got a cheese with a very strong character, and by 120 days, it’s a wonderful piece of cheese.”

But it gets better.

“At a year old, the same cheese is a completely different cheese.  It’s harder, dryer and more intense in falvor,” Heimerl said.  “We have pieces of cheese that are going on two years old (that are) getting to be like Parmesan.”

Just in time for the recession

Twenty-some years after Heimerl took those first classes, Saxon had a business plan that was accepted by a bank.  They “pulled the trigger” and went into business as a maker of fine cheeses.

“We hit the recession of 2008 just in time,” Heimerl said.

There’s no use in sugarcoating it: the first few years have been tough for Saxon Homestead Creamery.  While the first few years of any enterprise can be rough, the down economy and record unemployment have not helped.

Plus, Saxon cheese isn’t the kind you just sandwich between two pieces of Wonder Bread.

“This cheese we produce is in the same discretionary foot budget as wine,” Heimerl said. “It’s a product that you have to treat yourself.  It’s not just a staple, it’s a treat.  So, any time the discretionary dollar is affected, we would be affected.”

Ironically, overall spending on luxury foods increased last year, Heimerl said.  But so did the number of luxury foods competing for the consumer’s dollar.

And unfortunately for Saxon, a little of their product goes a long way.

“When you do buy good cheeses – cheese with a lot of flavor – you don’t need to eat nearly as much,” Heimerl said.  “You can be satisfied with small amounts; it’s a condiment, like blue cheese on a salad.”

On the positive side, Saxon did sell 25,000 pounds of cheese last year, and it’s developed a nationwide market through specialty food distributors.

Saxon has been targeting shops that will cut cheese to order from a wheel of cheese, including delis and gourmet food shops.  In the Green Bay area it can be found at Nala’s Fromagerie in Bellevue.  In the southern part of the state, Saxon cheeses can be found in Sendik’s and Whole Foods.

Saxon recently competed in the World Contest of Cheese in Madison, which featured 2,300 cheeses.  Last year, Saxon’s LeClare Evalon goat cheese got a second-place award in its category.

Cheese making so far comprises a very small percentage of Saxon Homestead Farm’s milk production.  The goal this year is to quadruple sales, by selling pre-cut and wrapped wedges to grocery stores.

 

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