[Capri] Beer... ...and cheese.

Wow, that is what you would definitely call a labor of love.

In the land of brewers and cheeseheads, is there anything more sacred?

[man] They love to get together at a table.

The love to have a drink.

They love to eat.

Don't we all.

But was it always this way?

[man] Some people call it the Nappa Valley of cheese.

[Capri] What makes Wisconsin a mecca for beer and cheese lovers in America?

[woman] It's become part of our culture.

[yodeling] [Capri] That's incredible.

I'm Capri Cafaro and I'm on a mission to uncover the incredible stories of the foods we grow... ...harvest, create... ...and celebrate.

Beautiful, amazing meal.

So, I'm traveling America's backroads to learn our cherished food traditions from those who make them possible... Look at that.

...and are helping keep them alive.

There is so much more to learn.

[man] It's just a tradition here in this area.

-[gunshot] -[woman] Mmm hmm.

[Capri] On "America the Bountiful."

[announcer] America's farmers have nourished us for generations, but today they face unprecedented challenges.

American Farmland Trust works with farmers to help save the land that sustains us.

Together we can work to keep America bountiful.

[accordion music] [Capri] Wisconsin loves a good polka.

It also loves a good Masskrugstemmen... [cheering] ...an old-fashioned stein holding competition imported from Bavaria to test the strength of anyone willing to hoist a liter of beer for as long as their arm will hold.

Testing his strength along with me, astute historian and former Wisconsin Foodie host, Kyle Cherick.

Now it's your turn.

Oh, I know.

I'm on.

[announcer] Ready, set, and go.

Whoo!

Wisconsin is known for its beer and its cheese.

Yes.

[Capri] And so, we're at Oktoberfest, which is a very German celebration.

So, is it the German heritage that has really influenced the Wisconsin flavors along with, I understand, Swiss too?

Yeah, yeah, and that's a big part of it, the Germanness, but really, Wisconsin loves to celebrate.

They love to get together at a table.

They love to have a drink.

They love to eat.

-Don't we all.

-Yeah.

I think especially because of I think probably the Germans and the Eastern Europeans, there's this long culture that says, "Well, these are the things that our forefathers and mothers did in the old country."

[Capri] Like brewing beer.

Yeah, and when they got here, they just did it here.

[Capri] By the mid 1800s, Milwaukee had become known as the brewing capitol of the world.

It wasn't just because they were the biggest exporter of wheat and had access to fresh water of Lake Michigan, but also, because by 1880, native Germans made up roughly one-third of the city's population, the highest concentration of a single immigrant group in any American city at the time.

[Kyle] They were leaving Europe because land was getting scarce and they came to Wisconsin and said, "Wow, this reminds us of where we came from.

"Let's start making the great cheese, brewing the great beer."

And now all those flavors still live here today generation after generation because of the Germans, because of the Swiss.

Even today, nearly 45% of Wisconsinites claim German heritage compared to the rest of the United States, which claims 17 percent by comparison.

[Kyle] And so, Oktober Fest is a celebration of that in that it's the season and embraces the hops that have just been harvested.

And then you've got great food.

And for certainly the southwestern corner of the state there are more Swiss master cheesemakers there than anywhere else in the world except for Switzerland, basically.

Wow!

And in the tiny southwestern Wisconsin town of New Glarus, they're keeping that Swiss culture alive just as much as the Germans at Oktoberfest.

[singing] [yodeling] [Capri] They've also perfected the marriage of Wisconsin's two most iconic foods with beer battered cheese curds.

And not just any beer, Wisconsin's own Spotted Cow, a regional cult classic that's made by the local New Glarus Brewery and can be found only in Wisconsin.

Cooking up some of the best curds in the state, is Gary Westby, chef and owner of The Glarner Stube.

Here to taste and talk about all things cheese with me is Jeanne Carpenter, Mayor of Monroe, Wisconsin and Tony Zgraggen, Chief Yodeler... [yodeling] ...and proprietor of the Alp and Dell Cheese Store.

So, what is the deal with cheese curds?

I mean, why are cheese curds a thing?

[Jeanne] So, cheese curds are very much a Wisconsin thing.

Cheesemakers make cheese curds because when you can make a fresh cheese and make a large quantity of it, and push it out the door right away-- [Capri] That means you're getting money in the door right away.

[Jeanne] Right.

That's your cashflow to age those other cheeses.

So, cheese curds buy a lot of college educations in this state.

They buy a lot of new trucks, a lot of new tractors.

It's liquid gold.

[Jeanne] It's like this underground currency.

And then some brilliant chef somewhere decided to start deep frying them in a traditional beer batter like this one.

[Capri] Which is the greatest marriage of two very Wisconsin things, beer and cheese.

[Jeanne] Yeah.

Now, try going to any restaurant in Wisconsin that doesn't have a deep-fried cheese curd on it.

It's become part of our culture.

That's incredible.

Cheese curds aren't the only way Chef Gary uses New Glarus beer.

Another fan favorite on his menu is the beer cheese soup for which he uses their Two Women Lager.

Oh, dude!

[Tony] Whoa.

Dig in.

Next course.

Cheese.

It's like cheese confessions right now.

I've never had beer cheese soup.

You've never had beer cheese soup?

Okay.

No, I'm a loser.

[Jeanne laughs] [Jeanne] They're all different.

So, in this one there's ham.

There's actually a few vegetables.

That's shocking.

We don't eat a lot of vegetables here.

[Capri laughs] We eat a lot of beer and meat and cheese.

Ain't nothing wrong with that.

[Jeanne] The vegetables are a nice touch.

Yeah, this is really good.

Yeah, we excel at comfort food.

Mmm-hmm.

The bounty of the harvest all in one bowl.

[Tony chuckles] [Capri] That's right.

Chef Gary uses only Wisconsin cheese in his dishes and sources the majority of it from right here in Green County.

[Tony] Green County is the, some people call it the Nappa Valley of cheese.

That is really fascinating.

Because we have 13 cheese factories in Green County and only 11 towns.

So, there are more cheese factories in this county then in anywhere else in the United States.

[Tony]Any other county in the United States.

Oh, my gosh.

So, you are literally in the cheese mecca of the United States, right here.

And where we are at in New Glarus which is, you know, very much-- I mean, here we are in this very sort of traditional Swiss, you know, environment here.

You have individuals like yourself that came here from Switzerland and decided to settle here, and you can see that all around us.

The Swiss influence also extends to Gary's cooking.

The best-selling dish at Glarner Stube?

Gary's fondue.

So, I've got to tell you, fondue is by far like probably one of my favorite foods in the whole world.

I mean, because basically it involves bread and cheese.

It doesn't get any better than that.

Where does fondue actually come from?

[Tony] It's several hundred years in the making.

It actually was mentioned in a cookbook in Switzerland published in 1699, melting cheese and wines, and became of course very popular today.

Fondue is kind of what they call like a national dish in Switzerland.

In Switzerland.

[Tony] Yeah.

It's such a great meal.

We have fondue all the time like at Christmas.

Kids come home and so we eat and talk and chat.

And everybody dips in the same pot and, you know, we are family.

The food creates memories.

[Tony] Yeah.

It creates memories.

It creates communities.

It creates cultures as well.

I mean, the Swiss culture has informed what Wisconsin culture is now.

That's what we call a melting pot.

The melting pot of cheese here, but the melting pot of culture.

Right.

That we adopt and that we accept and respect.

And we share.

And share.

Absolutely.

To good health and good cheese.

And a fantastic year.

Here, here.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Thank you.

In the land of 12,000 cheesemakers... ...Sid Cook is known to many as the father of Wisconsin cheese.

His family has been making cheese here since 1883 and he is currently the most awarded cheesemaker in North America.

[Sid] We're up to nearly 800 national and international awards for our cheeses.

And so, in fact, we've actually backed off a number of the contests that we enter.

You're trying to give some fair competition to other guys?

Well, let some other people have a chance to win some awards.

[Capri] So, we have cheese, and I can't wait to try it.

Why don't we start with a very traditional cheddar that my family made more than 100 years ago.

It's going to have a really nice mellow front forward flavor with some earthiness on the finish.

It has a bold flavor, but it's not like, super overpowering.

That's great.

Now, a certified master cheesemaker, Sid got his cheese making license at just 16 and has been at vat professionally for over 50 years after learning the craft from his father and grandfather.

We make cheeses traditionally but as well, we've been very innovated and we make American originals.

So, in other words, we make them up.

[Capri] So, you have all these cheeses, but you've got to have a favorite.

Do you have a favorite?

[Sid] Well, you know, I have a lot of favorites, but it's like you're asking me which one of my kids do I like the best.

[Capri giggles] I could see that you've made all of these.

They're like your kids.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it kind of depends on the time of day.

It depends on if I have a hankering for a certain flavor profile.

Do you have a hankering for any particular today?

Well, the Mobay is fantastic.

Let me give that one a shot.

What's this all about?

It looks a little bit different than the rest of them.

It's a layer of sheet milk and a layer of goal milk with ash.

It's a vegetable ash.

Cheese has acidity, ash has alkalinity.

And so, you have that juxtaposed flavor profiles.

Wow!

And you can see it, and you can taste it.

This is a good reason why you've been craving this cheese, I can tell you.

This is fantastic.

Sid credits Carr Valley's commitment to flavor with helping the company through some tough times.

There were about 70 local cheese factories that closed within a few months.

And so, you know, the transition was from smaller factories because there was a diversity and flavor to large factories that had all the cheese tasting the same.

Right, and so you really shied away from that more commercialized homogeneous type cheese and you tried to hold on to the artisan style and then make it your own too, which created some of these new things.

Yeah, because that's exactly how it was in the '50s and '60s.

There was a lot of diversity, and we lost that in the '70s and '80s.

And I think that that diversity is really coming back now.

[Capri] Sid credits the rise in popularity of Wisconsin cheese to the diversity of flavors.

Alongside a renewed focus on the quality of milk, especially at smaller scale family-run dairy farms.

A fellow Wisconsin cheesemaker also committed to diversity and distinctiveness of flavor is Andy Hatch of Uplands Cheese.

In his case, it's by letting the flavor of the land shine through in his product.

Andy and his business partner, Scott Mericka took over the Uplands Farm in 2014 where they milk 200 cows on 300 hilly acres that have been used as dairy farmland for more than a century.

[Andy] The character of the cheese is made here.

What we're doing in the creamery is refining it.

Turning dials, balancing out flavor.

But the cheese is really created out here.

[Scott] Basically, what we want to do is just create diversity in our pastures and harvest the grass at the right stage of growth with the maximum amount of quality and quantity at the same time.

So, the cows here pretty exclusively eat a grass-fed diet.

How much does that impact the flavor?

How important is that out here?

[Scott] It's really important.

I think what makes our cheese unique is the diet.

We basically-- Let me check this out.

--have a poly culture of different types of plants and you have clovers and chickeries and dandelions.

But the idea is to use one diversity.

And you want a farm system that's based off of resiliency, and perennial pasture does that.

[Andy] The amazing thing about this style of farming is that it stacks all of these beautiful and beneficial things on top of each other.

Here you have hillsides and perennial pasture which is better for the land.

Less erodible.

You have a grass diet which is better for cow health.

And then on top of all that, you get this amazing milk flavor that allows us to add value to milk by turning it into cheese.

I think that's really rare.

Economically the result is, you've enabled two young families to take over a dairy farm and afford to pay the bank and raise our kids here.

[Capri] Time and time again, this is what I'm seeing in Wisconsin is this entrepreneurial spirit married with this kind of social consciousness that is being reinvested and producing something wonderful.

You have almost 200 cows here and you use the milk exclusively from these cows to make your cheese.

How unique is that in the cheesemaking process?

Yeah, so, it's what's known as a farmstead model, and in Wisconsin it's rare.

This model would be more common in central Europe.

It's not common here because it's difficult, and either one of us couldn't do it alone.

And the fact that we have such a good partnership is what makes it work.

Our whole goal here is to make cheese that tastes like our farm which sounds romantic.

I love it.

And it takes a certain amount of romance to commit yourself to this.

But we gave it its own name and we sort of follow our own recipe because we're trying to show off these cows and these fields, and make something that tastes distinctive.

There is only one Uplands Cheese.

[Capri] Just steps away from where the cows graze is Andy's creamery where he transforms the milk into award-winning cheese with techniques he learned at the University of Wisconsin as well as through extensive traveling and apprenticeship in Northern Europe.

Those international techniques, have they informed your approach to cheesemaking here in Wisconsin at Uplands?

Very much.

Those were important formative years.

And some of the ripening techniques we use here in particular aren't common in the U.S., and you'd really have to go back to the old world to learn some of these.

So, we have these two different types of cheeses and you only make two types of cheeses here at Uplands.

What makes these two cheeses different?

Well, same farm, same group of cows, same cheesemaker, but different times of year and that makes the milk different.

So, in the case of the grass-fed milk in the summer, that, for particular reasons, lends itself to a long-aged cheese where over many months of aging, the complexity of that grass-fed milk flavor is going to reveal itself.

So, how long is this cheese aged for?

Typically, about a year.

It starts with what you see behind us with the fresh cheeses being rubbed in dry salt, not unlike you do with a prosciutto or country ham.

And then we begin repeatedly brushing the rines in brine and salt water.

[Capri] In salt water.

Every cheese you see in this room will be brushed every day by hand.

Wow, that is what you would definitely call a labor of love.

It's spent the last year in these ripening rooms developing flavor.

But it's a mild flavor.

Hmm.

It's a hard mouth feel but has a little bit of tart.

Yeah, the tartness is acidity, which you find in a cheddar.

This cheese has some.

We're after complexity and balance more than we're after volume.

[Capri] Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Uplands Aged Alpine styled cheese is currently the most awarded cheese in American history.

It was the first cheese Andy made at Uplands and allowed them to pursue a second soft cheese.

[Capri] So, this is a soft cheese.

What's going on here?

This is called Rush Creek Reserve, named after the local creek that starts up here on our farm.

And it is in almost every way opposite of this cheese.

This we make in the fall and age it only for two months.

So, it's a soft cheese like a Brie or camembert, something we would find more frequently.

But why is it wrapped in this wood?

The cheese is so soft, that without that kind of girdle, it would puddle out.

And hundreds of years ago when this style of cheese was developed in Eastern France, where you have farming and logging, so big 90-foot-tall spruce trees, so when they made a soft cheese and needed something to girdle it, they used whatever was readily available.

Whatever was around.

Adapting with what they have in their surroundings.

We've heard that story time and again.

So, we take it as a sacred tradition.

So, it's important to let this cheese warm up so it softens, and you serve by peeling off the top rine.

The bark around the outside creates almost like its own fondue bowl.

I love it.

-Fold it back.

-Oh, wow!

How would you serve this type of cheese?

Exactly like this.

At the center of your holiday cheese plate.

You've given me ideas.

Help yourself.

Okay.

I'm going to get in here.

And it is incredibly soft and creamy.

Cheers.

All right.

First one of the season.

I'm so excited.

Thank you, I'm honored.

Oh, wow.

You're right about the opposite nature of this.

This is very strong.

It has a ton of character.

Yes.

Thank you for sharing.

This is a cheese that you can get outside of Wisconsin, right?

Yes.

I mean, it's a fairly limited quantity, but it goes out coast to coast, and so, specialty food shops all over the country will carry it.

Thank you, Andy.

Spending all this time with cheesemakers begged a question, "Where do Wisconsin dairy farmers go to eat on their night off?"

The answer once again has to do with German ancestry and one very religiously upheld Friday night tradition.

It wouldn't be a Friday night in Wisconsin without a fish fry.

And Kegel's Inn of West Allis has been battering and frying them for five generations.

Joining me at the century-old institution is Wisconsin Food Historian Kyle Cherik.

So, I mean, for me it's just perfunctory to hold the menu, Like, we know what we're ordering.

I mean, obviously.

When in Rome, right?

When it's Friday.

On a Friday at Kegel's.

There you go, two.

Oh, man thanks.

So, this is a classic Brandy Old Fashioned sweet.

Like peas and carrots, french fries and Old fashions.

Exactly.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

To Fish Friday.

What makes this such a Friday night tradition?

The Germans.

In the 1860's, there were more Germans in Milwaukee than anywhere else in the world save for Germany.

Here we are the biggest cache of fresh water in the world, right?

And the bounty that came from them.

And we'll get into Kegel's history in a second, but the fish fry is really-- So, prohibition hits.

You have all these tied houses meaning Miller, Pabst, Schultz, Blatz, they literally own the property and only their beer is poured there.

-Right?

-Right.

And then really with the fish fry, once prohibition hit, well, how do you get customers in on a Friday?

They're Catholic.

They're not supposed to eat flesh meats.

Right.

You have an inexpensive fish meal that the whole family can come.

And if you serve a small beer on the side because the fish is a little salty... Well, so be it.

I mean, yeah, it's just, you know.

You're really just there for the fish.

Your throat is dry.

Your throat is dry.

[Capri] So, what do we have here?

We've got a lot going on.

[Kyle] You've got cod.

Yeah, and you got walleye.

Yeah.

Applesauce, potato pancakes and then a great slaw.

But here the potato pancakes are like-- I mean, they're like-- I'm going to get in there first then.

It's so buttery but crunchy at the same time.

You could roll that way.

Definitely.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

So, I grew up going to just like a massive community fish fry at the Knights of Columbus in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Those fish fries helped all of their civic causes.

It helped build the building that we have the fish fry in.

And that's, I mean, not only just because it's a staple on Friday evenings because of the Catholic part, but I think also because it is something that communities could come together at a very economic fashion.

Yeah, yeah.

Raise money for whatever kind of needs they may have.

Now, I want to go back into this fish because this fish deserves attention.

And it is so flaky, and it is tender, and I can see why the settlers came and tried to ship it all around the world.

Julian and Stephanie Kegel, fifth generation proprietors of Kegel's Inn, bread a variety of fish by hand using bread crumbs made from scratch in a 60-year-old grinder.

They hand-batter the fish and deep fry quickly in canola oil.

Many of the recipes are family heirlooms dating back to the mid 1920's.

The fact that these traditions have gone on now for centuries.

[Kyle] Wisconsin is such a dynamic state because it's kind of kept itself an amber in a certain way.

[Capri] Right.

[Kyle] And I mean that with all love because it's like-- [Capri] And I couldn't agree more.

Because you could be your own ecosystem.

[Kyle] Yeah.

Exactly.

Eating well in the conviviality of the table is something that's inherent to a Wisconsinite that it's kind of sometimes hard to describe to other people because we're like, well, this is what we do.

I have lived it.

I am so excited that I've had a chance to share in it because it is so evident when you're here for five seconds you can tell that the community of Wisconsin, the makers here, the owners here, they are invested in their community.

They really see food and drink, the beer, the cheese, the fish as a way to bring people together, to carry on those traditions and now that continues on.

Yeah.

And defines who Wisconsinites are.

It's a feeling that sneaks up on you around every corner here.

Reflected through the stained glass of a century old fish fry institution or echoed over the hills of backroads and lush pasture.

You'll find it bubbling in a fondue pot and steaming off the mash of a spontaneously fermented ale.

It's what the ancestors of the locals may have called Gemutlichkeit.

With no literal translation, it's often described as a feeling of warmth.

It transcends the physical into something life-affirming.

But why take my word for it, when you can come see it for yourself.

America The Bountiful is waiting for you and me.

For more information visit Americathebountifulshow.com.

[announcer] America's farmers have nourished us for generations, but today they face unprecedented challenges.

American Farmland Trust works with farmers to help save the land that sustains us.

Together we can work to keep America bountiful.