By Jane Burns
C.J. Bienert noticed a certain pattern to the customer base coming in to buy aged cheddar at The Cheese Shop of Des Moines.
Old guys.
We’re not talking old-as-Methuselah guys, just, as Bienert put it, dads like him and maybe a little older. So it seemed only natural that as Father’s Day approached, he’d come up with a gift pack that had something to really catch the fancy of those old guys: old cheese.
The Cheese Shop currently stocks one of the most rare and conversation-starting cheeses in the country, 20-year cheddar from Hook’s Cheese in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. It’s the Methuselah of artisanal cheese, and it’s released infrequently. It’s also the centerpiece in shop’s Father’s Day gift box, tucked in with some salami from The Good Butcher, some crackers and a couple of beers.
“I don’t know what it is, but old guys love aged cheddar,” Bienert said. “So we thought, well, what better time to get the cheese out there than Father’s Day and celebrate all our favorite old guys?”
Now, this is good old cheese, not the stuff that’s been in the back of your fridge since Christmas. The Hook family has been in the cheese business since 1976, based in a facility that was built in 1875 as a hotel’s livery stable and is now on the National Register of Historic Places, so they know a few things about aging cheddars. The Cheese Shop sells their 3-year, 7-year, 10-year and 15-year cheddars, which made news worldwide when it debuted in 2009.
As the blocks of cheddar age in the factory’s cave, the Hooks monitor some of them to see if they’re continuing to develop well enough to coax into old age. The 20-year made its debut in 2015.
There’s a reflective quality to the cheese that makes it a good gift or a food to share with friends and family, Bienert said, much like a fine wine or bourbon. “What were you doing 20 years ago?” he said. “It’s cheese for thoughts.”
It’s also cheese for the taste buds, and a little goes a long way — which is good, since it costs $300 a pound at the shop. It’s got the bite of an aged cheddar, as well as the delicate crunch that comes from tiny crystals that remain after the proteins break down during the aging process.
So while it has the bite and the crunch that fans of old cheddars love so much, the 20-year does something that all of us would like to do in old age: It mellows. If you’re patient enough to let the flavor linger, it gives you the bite but with more creaminess than its younger siblings and ends up almost like a teeny tiny piece of butterscotch. You can ponder all sorts of things to pair with it, Bienert said, but the best thing is, in the immortal words of “Weird Al” Yankovic, just eat it.
“It’s better for just nibbling,” Bienert said. “You don’t want to wolf it down, you really want to savor it.”
He does, however, suggest maybe checking out other Hook’s aged cheddars and comparing them – from the smooth 3-year that will still melt on a burger, on through the 7- and 10-years to see how the flavors and textures evolve.
The Cheese Shop will sell the 20-year cheddar in as small as 1-ounce packages for around $18; the cheese in the dad pack is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 ounces.
