Cheese is just a part of life in Wisconsin and the holiday season in the Dairyland call for something a little extra special.
Well, we’re having “extra special” meet “extra big” at our Sheboygan location this month. Between Dec. 18 and Dec. 20, our associates at that store will be cutting a 555 pound wheel of cheddar cheese made by actual cheesemakers at Henning’s Wisconsin Cheese in rural Manitowoc County.
Big wheels of cheddar cheese is just something Henning’s does. No one else in the country is making mammoth wheels of cheddar cheese larger than 75 pounds, but Henning’s, a cheese company still run by the same family who started it in 1914, is doing just that.
It’s a big idea for us at Festival Foods … something so big we placed the order for the wheel back in August.
“This is the way grandpa made it, this is the way it was made 100 years ago,” said Kert Henning, who showed us around the facility this month as we checked out the large wheel headed to our store. “The cheese cloth is the same, we use the same kind of a circle … we use the same kind of wax and everything is still hand dipped. It creates a whole different flavor character.”
It’s a lot of cheese, but it’s a TON of milk. Kert explain that Henning’s has a 10:1 milk to cheese ratio. That means you’re looking at 5,555 pounds of milk that went into the wheel headed to Sheboygan. As a point of reference, a gallon of milk weighs 8.6 pounds.
We’ll be cutting that big wheel of cheese from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day from Friday, Dec. 18, to Sunday, Dec. 20 at the Sheboygan Festival Foods. This is the only one of our locations selling this very special cheese. If you’re not in the immediate area, it definitely will be worth a little drive to see it and eat it ! We also have plenty of Henning’s cheese to pick from in our Frozen Foods and Dairy Department.
