The Carawaybou is a fun and tasty cheese with a great story to boot! It’s made by the folks at Deer Creek Creamery, located in the small lakeside town of Sheboygan, roughly in the middle of Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan coast. Originally settled by Ojibwe people—the name comes from the Anishinaabe, “hearing distance in the woods”—European colonists came to the land in the 1830s, around the time that the house and barn at Zingerman’s Cornman Farms were being built. In 1848, the town saw the arrival of a fair few liberal German immigrants who had fled their homeland after the failure of the German Revolution earlier in the year. The German influence gives context to the addition of the caraway!
The base of the cheese is a Colby, but not just your average, easy-to-find, 21st-century commercial Colby. This one is made from a recipe that cheesemaker Kerry Henning came across in family papers, written out by hand by his grandfather Otto, dated to 1914. While WWI was commencing in Europe, Henning’s grandfather had his hands in the cheese vat, working to master his craft. Colby cheese was then relatively uncommon, having been created in the 1880s as a variation on the American version of English traditional cheddar. It was made first in central Wisconsin, in the small town of Colby, where Ambrose and Susan Steinwand set up a small Colby-crafting cheese factory. Colby was quicker and easier to produce than the old cheddars and soon became quite popular. The old version of Colby that Kerry Henning’s grandfather was learning became one of the key recipes that Master Cheesemakers in Wisconsin were required to make to get certified in the state, so it has a long and prominent history.
All that said, the recipe had been out of production for decades. Deer Creek did us all a historical service by bringing it back a few years ago! Deer Creek founder Chris Gentine, who has been working with cheese professionally since he was 14, calls The Carawaybou “a forgotten language of cheese … a time machine for your taste buds.” Like all of the Deer Creek cheeses, Chris and crew chose an animal-related name that’s as fun to say as the cheese is to eat—Carawaybou, as in caribou! Firm textured, mild enough for cheese novices, interesting enough that aficionados are also drawn to it, The Carawaybou is really tasty. I eat it right off the cheeseboard at room temperature. Cube it up for salads, or lay a slice on a burger. Really nice with a good mustard or on a sandwich with roast beef, or with slices of Nueske’s applewood smoked ham. It holds up well for picnics—carry some of The Carawaybou wherever you go this summer!
