THORP, Wis. (AP) - The rise of Holland’s Family Cheese is an old-fashioned love story.
It’s the story of a Dutch couple’s love of dairy farming, each other and, of course, cheese.
Dutch-style Gouda cheese, in particular.
Marieke and Rolf Penterman, co-owners of Holland’s Family Cheese in Thorp, have taken the cheese world by storm since entering the business seven years ago.
In that relatively short time, their passion for cheese has helped them collect an almost unprecedented number of awards in national and global cheesemaking competitions, highlighted by winning the overall top prize in the U.S. Championship Cheese Contest last year and taking fifth in the World Championship Cheese Contest in March in Madison.
“I think we have a great team, and we all work together and try to accomplish a great piece of cheese,” Marieke, 37, said in the distinct Dutch accent that she and her husband retain.
The acclaim helped boost the creamery’s nationwide sales by 48 percent last year.
But winning piles of prizes and selling tons of cheese aren’t enough for the Pentermans, who want to share their love of dairying and cheesemaking with the world. To that end, they are in the final stages of an ambitious project to make Holland’s Family Cheese a major tourist attraction.
The couple, who previously operated a small dairy farm and creamery a few miles out of town, recently opened a new 100-acre facility within the Thorp city limits that includes dairy, cheesemaking and retail operations. The rare setup means all of the major functions, from milking cows to making cheese, can be viewed by visitors independently or through guided tours.
The easily accessible facility, which still needs landscaping and a few other finishing touches (such as hanging the awards piled high on a table in the store) is located right next to the Thorp exit off Highway 29.
“I think it’s a perfect location to draw in a lot of people,” said Rolf, 41.
The store sells cheese made on site and by other Wisconsin dairies as well as ice cream, wine, chocolates, souvenirs and a variety of Dutch gifts and food items.
Eventually, the Pentermans, who have five children between 4 and 10, plan to open a kitchen area to make grilled Gouda sandwiches and possibly try their hand at making ice cream and yogurt.
An influx of visitors to the company, drawn by the notoriety that comes with winning more than 100 awards in seven years, could be a boon for other local businesses as well, said city administrator Randy Reeg.
“We’re pretty excited about what we think it might bring,” Reeg told the Leader-Telegram (https://bit.ly/1i6NWCm). “They got quite a bit of traffic when they were off the beaten path outside of the city. Now that they’re right in town, we think it could bring lots of new traffic to the city that otherwise didn’t stop.”
He acknowledged that a few people were concerned about the potential of foul odor, but said it wasn’t a widespread concern in Clark County, which has more cows than people.
But the real story of Holland’s Family Cheese begins back in the Netherlands, also known as Holland, where Marieke and Rolf both grew up on small dairy farms.
What Marieke (pronounced mah-REE’-kah) calls “this little love story between my husband and me” started when they were just friends. One night in May 2002 Rolf invited her over for a cup of coffee, saying she should come quickly because otherwise they might never see each other again.
After Rolf broke the news that he was leaving the next day to join his brother Sander in a dairy operation in Wisconsin, Marieke, acknowledging that she was enamored with Rolf, asked if she could join him and help out for a few days.
A few months later, she flew to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
“I thought, ’If he comes and picks me up, I’ll tell him right away how cute he is. If his brother picks me up, I’ll figure the feeling’s not mutual, and I’ll just do my work and go back to Holland.’ Well, guess who picked me up: his brother. It’s a miracle I’m here now,” Marieke said, chuckling as she explained that they worked it out over a 10-day visit.
Sixteen months later Marieke joined Rolf in Thorp for good.
Once in the United States, Marieke missed the Gouda cheese from her native country and began researching how to start her own business - something she hoped to do before turning 30.
She obtained her Wisconsin cheesemaking license, spent time at a farmhouse cheese plant in Holland learning how to make authentic Dutch Gouda and completed an apprenticeship with Virgil Schunk, owner of Gingerbread Jersey Cheese in Augusta.
Marieke crafted her first batch of commercially produced Gouda on Nov. 22, 2006, and the Pentermans’ original retail store opened on Dec. 18, 2006 - 10 days before her 30th birthday.
Just three months later, she captured a gold award at the U.S. Championship Cheese Contest in 2007, amazing other longtime cheesemakers in America’s Dairyland.
“I’m really happy for her, and I’m also really proud of her,” Schunk said. “But I’m not surprised. With Marieke, you could just tell she had a passion for cheesemaking and she grasped everything you tried to teach her right away.”
John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, also has been extremely impressed by Holland’s Family Cheese from the start.
“From their very first vats forward, Marieke’s team has made great cheese,” Umhoefer said.
He said the creamery’s consistent winning sets it apart.
“Cheese, like wine, is a living thing, and making it flawlessly time after time is the real art of cheesemaking,” Umhoefer said.
Marieke explained that Rolf and his brother were attracted to Wisconsin because it had a great infrastructure for dairy farms, fewer regulations than the Netherlands and plenty of available land. The Netherlands, by contrast, has more than three times as many people as Wisconsin and they are crammed into a country with less than a quarter the geographical area.
Yet even in Wisconsin, where the residents are often referred to as “cheeseheads,” Holland’s Family Cheese has sliced out a market niche by specializing in what it calls artisan farmstead Gouda, a creamy, semi-hard cheese. The company sells Gouda in several age ranges and in about 24 flavors, including pesto basil, smoked cumin, honey clover and jalapeno. Its Goudas took the top three spots in the world championships in March.
The cheeses are made with raw, unpasteurized milk, meaning they must age for at least 60 days before they can be sold, said general manager Kim Rabuck, part of the operation’s 16-member staff.
Holland’s Family Cheese takes pride in its extremely rare, if not unprecedented, system of pumping the warm milk (visitors can touch a pipe by the observation deck overlooking the milking parlor to feel the heat) directly from udder to cheese vat, thereby minimizing any damage to milk molecules from transportation or temperature changes.
The result is a remarkably fresh product: The BST-free milk is transformed into cheese just five hours after it leaves the cow, Rabuck revealed.
As an extra precaution with the raw milk product, even though it isn’t required, Rolf said the creamery tests every batch of cheese for listeria, salmonella and E. coli.
Once the cheese is formed into 18-pound wheels, it is stored in the curing room and aged on special pine planks imported from Holland. About 4,000 golden wheels of cheese at a time are kept in the 55-degree room, visible through windows in the adjacent store.
But Rolf wanted to make sure the creamery didn’t get all of the attention. That’s why the dairy also has viewing windows and visitors will be able to see the real stars of the operation - the cows - from outside the barn.
He recently acquired a number of brown Swiss cows from a dairy farm in Elk Mound, and the big-eyed animals now account for about a third of the total herd of about 300 cows.
“When we first saw them, we fell in love with them right away,” Rolf said, noting that Holland’s Family Cheese names all of its brown Swiss cows. Tags on their ears list names such as Ivana, Betty, April and Peaches.
The herd, which is milked three times daily, also includes red and white Holsteins, black and white Holsteins and some mixed breeds.
Through all the changes, Marieke and Rolf have remained grateful to their adopted homeland.
“For us,” Marieke said, “America is truly a land of opportunity.”
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Online:
https://www.HollandsFamilyCheese.com
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Information from: Leader-Telegram, https://www.leadertelegram.com/
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