Pleasant Ridge Reserve Cheese

For nearly 30 years now, one of the best cheeses in the world has been made in the out-of-the-way, South-Central Wisconsin town of Dodgeville! The wheels of Pleasant Ridge Reserve that we have in the ZCoB right now are among the most remarkable versions of this always remarkably good cheese we’ve ever had. Semi-firm, super delicious, meaty, milky, dense, and almost fudgy with a tiny hint of the aromatic “nose” you get with a fantastic French mountain cheese. It’s great to eat as is (at room temperature) or use it for cooking as well. A super tasty example of American craftspersonship at its flavorful best!

The project that created Pleasant Ridge Reserve was begun back in 1994 (the same year we started ZingTrain) by Mike and Carol Gingrich and Dan and Jeanne Patenaude. Mike had been an executive at Xerox and decided he wanted to devote the latter part of his life to doing something more meaningful and more connected to the land. I remember talking to Mike in those first few years and tasting the surprising excellence he was achieving in a cheese that, back then, had only been made for a very short period of time. Over the past couple of decades, current owners Andy and Caitlin Hatch and Scott and Liana Mericka have taken what was already terrific and made it even better still.

Pleasant Ridge Reserve is made—as all cheese was 150 years ago—strictly seasonally. It’s produced only in the late spring, summer, and early autumn when the cows are out in the pasture grazing. The variety of grasses at that time of the year make for an exceptionally interesting set of flavors. “Rotational grazing” like this, where herds are moved to fresh pasture regularly, is as good for the soil as it is for the quality of the milk—the pastures get a chance to replenish themselves and stay healthy. Pleasant Ridge Reserve is also made only from raw milk, which means that the natural complexity and exceptionally high quality of the milk as it comes from the cows is preserved in the flavor of the final cheese.

One of the beauties of working with artisan food as we have here for 40 years (as I wrote about in “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy”) is that we know far, far more about what we’re selling and serving! Cheesemongers from the Deli make the drive around the Lake to Dodgeville to go taste a whole range of different days’ production and select three or four days of their favorites for us to sell in the ZCoB. (The Deli’s Trevor Murray actually went and worked with Andy Hatch making cheese for a whole year!)

What’s more, 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!

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!