5 Cheeses We're Crazy About

Sandwiches, smoked fish and smoked meats aren't the only things we do here at Northern Waters Smokehaus: We're also purveyors of fine cheeses, olives, sweet and savory baked goods, and variations on fermented cabbage—and that's just the short list.

The holidays are a great time for cheese (though what isn't?), so this week we're going all-in on "the adult form of milk." When I asked TK, the brains and the brawn of our cheese operation, for a list of his five favorite cheeses we're carrying this holiday season, he went above and beyond with detailed notes on each. What follows is a sort of mind-meld between TK and myself.

Rush Creek Reserve

This time of year, the hyper-regional, hyper-limited release, hyper-delicious Rush Creek Reserve from Uplands Cheese Co. is already on everyone's mind—and may as well be on everyone's tables too.

Rush Creek Reserve is made in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. It's a washed rind, raw cow's milk cheese that is a late autumn and winter exclusive. Don’t let “raw milk” cheese freak you out—after 60 days of aging, raw milk cheese passes the FDA’s raw milk laws.

In late autumn and leading into winter the cows diet changes from the fresh pastures of summer to the fall and winter hay, making their milk extremely rich and silky.

Rush Creek Reserve is made to show off this change in the cow’s diet. Made in the French & Swiss Alpine-style of Vacherin cheese, Rush Creek Reserve is wrapped in a hand-harvested piece of spruce bark. This helps the cheese keep its shape—due to its runny texture at peak ripeness—as well as adding tannins to its flavor.. The combination of the spruce and rich milk creates a rich custard texture with a very soft, delicate texture and a savory, rich finish. 

Rush Creek Reserve is an absolute must at holiday gatherings. Simply cut the top of the rind off and heap spoonfuls onto crackers, charcuterie, or just eat it on its own! This miraculous wheel pairs perfectly with a fruity Beaujolais wine. TK recommends with a glass of La Boutanche Gamay, which is available by the (re-corked) bottle in our deli.

Friesago

Shepherd’s Way Farmstead cheese is made in Nerstrand, MN by Jodi Ohlsen Read. This Asiago-style cheese is a natural-rind semi-aged sheep’s milk cheese. It's semi-dense in texture and has an amazing grassy nuttiness to it. This cheese is extremely versatile for cooking: a perfect addition to pasta and TK's favorite substitute for parmesan in a Caesar salad.

And TK isn't the only one excited about it.

Friesago is a multiple time award-winning cheese by the ACS (American Cheese Society) in the Farmstead Sheep Cheese category.

Friesago pairs well with wines that have hints of salinity to them. "Salty wines?," you may be thinking? No, winemakers never add salt to wines, ever. Think of it as a soil composition. Vineyards that are near salty bodies of water or grown in volcanic soil will bring salty notes to the wine. Think Sicilian wines. Grab a hunk of Friesago and a glass of Adrianna Occhipinti’s Sicilian made wine, Tami, sold right here at the Smokehaus.

Sakatah

Sakatah is a Dakota word meaning “Singing Hills”. It's also the name of the Minnesota State Park between Mankato and Faribault, near Alemar Cheese Co.’s home.

This soft ripened cow’s milk cheese is seasonally made and is a great representation of an artisanal product. Wrapped in a Marquette grape leaf (a cold weather wine grape grafted by the U of M) Alemar is paying homage to the Banon and Le Mothais cheeses of Europe, using cow’s milk rather than goat’s milk.

Sakatah has balanced earthiness, provided by the tannins from the grape leaves, finishing with creamy, peppery notes.

Before serving, let the cheese sit out for 30-minutes to come to room temperature for its aroma and texture to be at its peak—this is a good practice with most soft and creamy cheeses.

Eat this cheese with wine that has a higher acidity, perhaps an unoaked Chardonnay, crisp Riesling—or if you are into ciders, try it with a French Brittany-made cider. La Brun is a delicious natural cider that pairs perfectly with Sakatah. If you’re in our deli and want to snack on a piece of Sakatah, it's a must-try with the Pullus Pinot Grigio wine, made in Slovenia. 

Alpha Tolman

Jasper Hill Farm, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, leads the US in artisanal cheese-making while being at the forefront of environmental impact & research of their farms. They are driven to be the standard bearer of quality and innovation in US cheese-making. 

Alpha Tolman is a brand new cheese to our deli (and to TK's knowledge, we are the only shop in Duluth selling Jasper Hill Farm cheese). It is made from raw cow’s milk with 100% of the milk coming from a single herd. This herd happily roams the pasture right onsite at the Jasper Hill Creamery and Cellars.

Alpha Tolman is inspired by French & Swiss cheeses like Appenzeller & Raclette. It has a buttery, fruity & nutty flavor when young, developing a bold, meaty, caramelized onion character as it matures. The texture is dense and pliant, easily portioned and ideal for melting.

The texture, aesthetic, and flavor make Alpha Tolman an ideal choice for fans of Appenzeller (or fondue!). TK strongly recommends pairing Alpha Tolman with Smokehaus ham. Using your oven's broiler, heap thin cuts of Alpha Tolman onto thick-cut Smokehaus ham until the cheese starts to blister and caramelize. Next take a healthy wad of butter and slowly brown it on your stove top. Drizzle the brown butter all over the ham and cheese then serve (on a roll or on its own). Absolute perfection!

Try pairing Alpha Tolman with a robust ale, such as Hoops #21 Ale (sold here in our deli!) or a Belgium-style farmhouse ale.       

Lucky Linda

Lucky Linda is Redhead Creamery’s clothbound cow’s milk farmstead cheddar. Made in the little town of Brooten in west central Minnesota, this six-plus-month aged cheddar has gained notoriety in its relatively young existence (Redhead's first wheel of cheese being made in 2014). Each wheel of cheese is aged right under the creamery in their cellars, allowing natural molds to create their ridiculously terroir-driven cheese. 

Rustic-looking in style, this clothbound cheddar has notes of bold mushroom, with sharp creaminess, nuttiness, and a balanced lactic finish. 

Pairing Lucky Linda with a dry cider is a no-brainer, especially Sociable Cider’s Freewheeler—guess where you can find it. Not a cider person? Try it with Fulton’s Standard Lager. The caramel notes of Lucky Linda and the maltiness of the Standard Lager deliciously compliment each other.   

Cheese is a sophisticated addition to whatever snack you're planning, and can add dimension to many an entree. It's an easy gift—easier if you have any inclination as to your giftee's preferred flavor palate. Cheese, the scientific community tells us, is like a drug. These, and many more reasons, are why we're so excited about our carefully curated lineup of (mostly) local/regional cheeses. We do our best to offer a unique selection of handmade cheeses. This isn't American Cheese Product: This is the real deal. Every cheese in our inventory has a story—the kind you'll be glad to share with your friends and loved ones.

You'll taste the difference.

5 Things: September 27th, 2019

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm ready for September to step aside and make way for October: the best time of the year. There's a whole lot of good things coming to Northern Waters Smokehaus in October. Let's take a look, shall we?

The G.O.A.T. arrives on October 2nd. Yes, next Wednesday you'll be able to feast upon this toasted bagel, dressed in creamy chèvre, toasted Smoked Andouille Sausage slices, local apple slices, and crispy lettuce for $9.50+tax. Catch me eating The G.O.A.T. during every one of my lunch breaks.

Enjoy these photographs of The G.O.A.T.

Next week, our new wine list hits the deli. Keep your eyes on our social media platforms for updates and product profiles.

Are you a creative, yet unpretentious eater? Or a college student on a budget with a knack for maximizing flavor? Do you enjoy zhuzhing-up a grocery store frozen pizza with special ingredients; instant ramen, with a little bit of extra love from the produce section? So do we. And we're glad to work at a place like Northern Waters Smokehaus, where there's plenty of potently flavorful ingredients to bring to our home kitchens.

That's why we're launching #NWSMadeItFancy — the hashtag dedicated to documenting your culinary ingenuity under the influence of Northern Waters Smokehaus. Playing the game is simple: grab some NWS ingredients, find creative uses for them in your favorite "un-fancy" foods—frozen pizza, instant ramen, macaroni and cheese, instant stuffing, cornbread mix, you name it—document it, and share it with the aforementioned hashtag, and...profit?

We'll be keeping an eye on the hashtag and sharing our favorites. Join in with our staff and followers to create a whole lot of fun community content, featuring your favorite items from our deli. Will you be famous? No promises. Will you make our followers feel happy and inspired? It's probable!

Glensheen gave us a ton of basil! Imagine a literal ton of basil. That would be a very large pile of basil. Back to business: At the end of the season, the folks at Glensheen have a ton of produce and not much to do with it, so they donate it to the community. Basil tastes great, but it doesn't exactly feed people, so it isn't high on the priority list for the handful of local organizations feeding the marginalized populations of our community. We're grateful to make use of this windfall, and look forward to providing you with the finest Glensheen-tinged Italiensks, Silence of the Lambwiches—that's how you pluralize it: you're welcome—and Spring Rolls.

A ton of Basil (Rathbone)

There's a ton of otherexciting Things™ coming up this Autumn at NWS, but I need to hold onto some content for future 5 Thingses—there's another useful pluralization for you. So I'll leave you with the best news I've heard all week—Our DM is returning from vacation, and D&D starts again this Monday! Back to Waterdeep, and into the Undermountain—home of the Mad Mage—we go. Will we return? Who could know? Prepare yourselves for session-recaps for which you never asked, and tidbits of the hijinks of the Midnight Axe, which will have doubled its ranks. That sounds like easily double the hijinks.

Before my words become

quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

This is the way the blog ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

5 Things: August 23rd, 2019

Summer isn't over yet, but the morning air is crisper, and the pace of life is slowing down. The tall ships have come and gone, the flood of students is just beginning to trickle into town. Walking past our deli, it may not always appear this way, but life is on the calmer side, at least for a few weeks.

But that doesn't mean life at the Smokehaus is any less interesting.

We have new faces in the deli.

Faces.

For those keeping score, over the past few weeks we've steadily mentioned that we're hiring, and as a result, we already have a handful of new staff training in. I'd caution the world to be patient with and/or kind to them, since they are new and the pace of our little deli can be overwhelming, but they're already performing like seasoned veterans.

Labor Day Mail Order Sale.

Labor Daybor

Beginning August 26th, we're running a mail order special: 20% off your cart (online only) when you enter the discount code bluecollar. The sale runs through Labor Day (9/2). However, if you want your food to arrive in time for Labor Day weekend celebrations, place your order by Tuesday, August 27th—those orders will be shipped on Wednesday (8/28) and arrive by Friday (8/30). Otherwise, you can schedule your shipping date for whenever you'd like. Pro-tip: this is the best mail order sale of the year, so if you know exactly what you want to order for Fall and Winter holidays, this is a good time to do it.

Speaking of Mail Order, here's our updated holiday shipping schedule: [Outdated link removed - Ed.]

Bookmark this page as an easy reference when ordering for holidays, and you'll be guaranteed to get your orders at the perfect interval for gifting or entertaining. Become the master of your own destiny; know for yourself exactly when to place orders, and when to have them shipped for best results.

Monday night D&D returns to The Midnight Axe.

Images unrelated.

The Summer season of our unofficial office Dungeons and Dragons crew is coming to a close with a short adventure tying us back into our ongoing campaign, right before our DM heads on an extended vacation, leaving us to fend for ourselves.

This Summer, we set our main campaign to the side, in order to focus on a handful of smaller, unconnected adventures. Not only did this allow each of us to test out a number of character ideas, and novel settings, but it also gave us time to miss our main characters, as distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder.

"The Midnight Axe" is the name—generated by rolling percentile dice against a chart of fantasy party names—of our primary party. When we're not embroiled in a scavenger hunt for a cache of money embezzled long ago from the treasury of the Manhattan-esque city of Waterdeep, and avoiding/averting the frequent pitfalls of gangs whose rivalry we earned incidentally, we're just trying to earn a mostly-honest living running a tavern called The Malt Solstice. However, some way or another, we've gained some notoriety as adventurers—and it's drawn some public interest.

In our session on Monday, Harrison (our Dungeon Master) presented each of us with three characters (shout out to Harrison for developing fifteen character concepts in a single weekend) who are looking, for one reason or another, to join our ranks. This coming session, we'll be embarking on a mission with our chosen secondary characters to discover their strengths, and how they'll fit into our adventuring party. Perhaps they'll join us on the front lines, perhaps they'll stick around headquarters and craft potions nonstop, perhaps they'll alternate between venturing into the Undermountain (where our campaign has us heading) and providing security at the Malt Solstice. Only time will tell.

Character biographies forthcoming.

Patricia's corner.

Let's get personal.

Let's get one thing straight: Any week that there are not five immediately obvious other Things™ to talk about, Patricia is going to get a nod. Ever since she moved to full-time baking, we've become accustomed to carrying an assortment of cookies—chocolate chip, ginger, peanut butter curry, carrot cake cookie sandwiches with honey cream cheese, coconut macaroons (which are gluten-free*), and most recently chocolate walnut flourless cookies (also gluten-free**)—pasties, cheddar crackers, savory scones, and even personal pizzas. This week's pizza featured smoked bacon, blackberries, and chèvre, and her pizza sauce, in general, is composed of the odds-and-ends bits of tomato from the morning's prep.

That's honestly one of the best things about Patricia's approach to baking for NWS—by utilizing more parts of the foods we use, we generate substantially less waste as a business, which improves our model of sustainability (not to mention profitability) overall, and in the process, we end up with these delicious, fan-favorite items in our deli

*/**: It's worth noting that these are not baked in a completely gluten-free environment. In terms of ingredients, they are entirely gluten-free, but those at serious risk should be aware of the chance of cross-contamination.

I got to observe production of Country Pâté.

Observe.

Compiling recipes for the cookbook is great fun, but not without its challenges. In addition to needing to massively scale down some recipes—we're operating under the assumption you'll never need to make one-hundred pounds of Smoked Whitefish at home—other recipes in our own workbooks lack, well, instruction.

Country pâté, for example, is just a list of ingredients, which our skilled production crew understands how to massage—eh, grind—into the savory loaves we all love. Brandt happened to catch me during a fresh air break yesterday to let me know he was making it.

Seeing that static list of ingredients—browned bacon and onion; Berkshire liver, pork and back fat; brandy; cure; rosemary and thyme; etc.—ground once and then half again (to achieve the preferred inconsistent consistency), mixed with what could reasonably pass as TLC, and packaged to chill overnight before being packed into loaf pans and slow-cooked, was enlightening, and proof that someone needs to write down those steps, because there's a lot of them. If not for our own benefit, certainly for the book.

Once again, I'd like to give a public shout-out to the smokers for the sheer volume of high-quality product they consistently churn out.

I've done it again. Yesterday, I stared at my week's notes and wondered, "which five Things™ am I going to write about? Are there five Things™ that may intrigue or inspire our readership(?)," and here I am, writing Thing™ six-and-a-half. I hope you're happy.

We hope to see you in our deli this weekend—whether you wait in line, or skip the line via pickup —or your name and address in our delivery system. If you're going to be near Canal Park/Downtown, make sure you bring ear protection, because the Tribute Fest will be rocking hard.

Stay tuned in the next handful of weeks for some new sandwich options—including your blogger's own contribution to the Sandwich Lab specials—and exciting collaborations.

5 Things: July 26th, 2019

We had a big weekend (7/19-7/21), and we didn't run out of anything we planned on having in-stock.

That's all. We have evidently found our stride. As always, if you'd like to ensure we have what you're looking for, give us a call before you stop in @ (218)724-7307. You can even place a pick-up order, then skip the line when you arrive.

The D&D Summer Season.

While our epic, levels one-through-twenty—for the uninitiated, that is all the levels—campaign is on hold through the summer, it doesn't mean we haven't been rolling dice and speaking in funny voices. With new characters and varying levels of seriousness, we have taken to a ghostly sea as a cohort of debt collectors-become-zombie-hunters, taken up arms as an elite unit of kobolds to punish another group of kobolds for their crimes against the Dragon Queen, Tiamat—namely stealing magical artifacts from the Queen's hoard—by stealing powerful magical artifacts from the Queen's hoard, and a handful of other brief adventures to come, before we return to our dubious heroes' adventures in Waterdeep.

Good cheese weekend.

Taylor, our resident cheese connoisseur, announced at our morning meeting that this is a great weekend for cheese lovers at the Smokehaus. Primarily, it's the Comté (or Gruyère de Comté) that just arrived at our deli. The flavor of this semi-soft, unpasteurized cow's milk cheese from the Franche-Comté region of France is heavily influenced by the natural pastures and strenuous guidelines for a cheese to carry the name.

My personal favorite cheese that we've ever carried, Shepherd's Way's Sogn Tomme, will also be a regular fixture in our grab and go case until at least the end of summer. It's a buttery and crumbly sheep's milk cheese, with a slightly higher fat content, and it is too good for mere words when drizzled with local honey and decorated with a blueberry, if that sounds good, but slightly lacking, put that combo on top of a cracker and add a bite of smoked salmon to the mix.

A number of other great cheeses are in-stock as well, including Marieke Young Gouda and Carr Valley Apple Smoked Cheddar.

Our current cheese selection has even me, a lactose intolerant individual, drooling.

All Pints North this weekend.

More than 120 MN breweries gather at this enormous Bayfront Festival Park gathering each year, and attendees make their way through the offerings two ounces at a time. Lovers of beer travel hundreds of miles to attend this event (which is listed on the website as "Sold Out"), so expect a busy weekend in Canal Park and downtown, with ancillary events at local breweries and restaurants all weekend.

For more information about All Pints North, follow that hyperlink.

We'll be serving beer on our patio.

In honor of All Pints North, and our newly minted selection of adult beverages, Eric Goerdt himself will be slinging beers on our patio today (Friday) from noon until sometime after noon—weather permitting—to try to cater to the influx of beer enthusiasts and test out the viability of "refilling" beverages on the deck. Hopefully no one has to wait in a summer Smokehaus line just to grab another beer.

Next week on 5 Things™: It's August! Whoa! Where did the summer go?