Photographed by Adam DeTour styled by Kendra Smith
For Blakesville Creamery’s head cheesemaker Veronica Pedraza, Shabby Shoe was a happy accident. “We had some extra curd from making Afterglow and we decided to treat it differently,” says Pedraza. “I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen.”
Afterglow, a lactic-set cheese washed with local ale, is one of several award-winning, small-format goat’s milk cheeses produced by Pedraza and her team at the Port Washington, Wisconsin, creamery. To make it, the curd is ladled into forms and drained for 48 hours before being unmolded and placed on racks in a drying room. For Shabby Shoe—Pedraza’s newest cheese—the same curd is drained in bags (as it is for fresh chèvre) and after 24 hours is salted and packed into molds. “That sort of treatment results in a much different texture—Shabby Shoe is a lot lighter and fluffier than small-format cheeses, which are more dense and fudgy,” she says.
As turophiles might have guessed, the name is a play on the beloved French Chabichou du Poitou: a petite, cylindrical cheese with a wrinkly rind. Shabby Shoe boasts the same rind and a similar citrusy tang but is considerably larger—each wheel weighs about two pounds. “I gave it to a couple of people because I was excited by the way it turned out, and they were like, ‘This is the cheese’,” Pedraza says.
Afterglow, a lactic-set cheese washed with local ale, is one of several award-winning, small-format goat’s milk cheeses produced by Pedraza and her team at the Port Washington, Wisconsin, creamery. To make it, the curd is ladled into forms and drained for 48 hours before being unmolded and placed on racks in a drying room. For Shabby Shoe—Pedraza’s newest cheese—the same curd is drained in bags (as it is for fresh chèvre) and after 24 hours is salted and packed into molds. “That sort of treatment results in a much different texture—Shabby Shoe is a lot lighter and fluffier than small-format cheeses, which are more dense and fudgy,” she says.
“The most interesting thing to me is that essentially it’s the same cheese, but you change two steps and it becomes something very different.”
The size of Shabby Shoe is a plus on several fronts. “We make a lot of little cheeses, which are hand-salted, washed by hand, turned by hand, wrapped by hand,” she says. “I like Shabby Shoe because it tastes really good, but I enjoy making it because it eases the pain in the creamery a little bit. It’s a smarter cheese to make.”
The wrinkly cheese with the funny name has quickly become one of Blakesville Creamery’s most popular offerings. “Shops seem to like having larger-format, soft-ripened cheese because there are not a lot of options for them,” she says. “I went from not ever considering making this cheese to making a lot of it.”
“The response has been, ‘This is the cheese you always should have made,’ which has been really nice.”
Susan Axelrod
Susan Sherrill Axelrod is a former editor of Culture. Her love affair with cheese began at age 12, when she bicycled to a gourmet shop to taste an exotic newcomer—French brie. She lives with her partner in midcoast Maine, where she enjoys a well-made cocktail, hiking with their dog, Lucy, and spending as much time as possible on the water.
