Goot Essa Cheese Giveaway (Plus: A Closer Look at Cheese Caves)
We’re doing a cheese basket giveaway for Goot Essa. You can enter to win simply by leaving a comment on this post. I’ll post the winner here Friday.
The assortment that owner John Esh and co. are giving away is called “Amish Tastes” (see below):
From the description:
This medium-bodied cheese trio features a palate-pleasing array of flavors. From our buttery Old German Weissa Kase to our rich and smoky Mountain Home Woodsmoked Cheddar and the savory-sweet Mountain Valley Sharp Cheddar, there’s something for everyone.
It includes the following, and serves 3-4:
Cheeses:
- 4 oz. Old German Weissa Cheese
- 4 oz. Mountain Home Woodsmoked Cheddar Cheese
- 4 oz. Mountain Valley Sharp Cheddar Cheese
Condiments:
- 1.5 oz. Autumn Dawn Apple Butter
- 1.5 oz. Reuben’s Stone Ground Mustard
- 1.5 oz. Sweet & Spicy Dipping Mustard
To enter for a chance to win, just leave a comment on this post. I’ll draw a random winner and announce it this Friday, so be sure to check back.
You can also subscribe in the box at the bottom of this post (free) to make sure you’re notified through our email newsletter.
John Esh on Cheese Caves & Running A Family Business
I put together a video with some excerpts from my extended conversation with John Esh.
John explains cheese caves, different types of cheeses, and the family aspect of his business – something that always seems to be important in Amish businesses.
Check out the video or read the full transcript below. You’ll also see some photos below of the cheese caves from my visit to Goot Essa.
John & Erik Talk Cheese
John Esh of Goot Essa: …So he kept asking me there in the nineties, John, how do you plan to keep your family on the farm? Because I know that you cannot compete on the same scale as a herd that’s 3,000 cows with your 70 cows.
Well, we knew we had a quality product – milk. We came up with the idea – Let’s let’s get some cheese made.
We started selling our cheeses to restaurants, to some cheese shops. And the restaurants, they were looking for some more European-style cheeses, the cheeses with a natural rind.
So we’re talking cheeses like manchego, pecorino, camembert, blue cheese, Gruyere style, the European style, in addition to the cheddars, the flavored cheddars, those types of cheeses. So that’s where we’ve now come, where we have 19 cheeses that we produce.
Cheese Caves
Erik Wesner: What is a cheese cave? What’s that for? Why is that important?
John: Basically, what we have is three different rooms in the side of a hill here close to the mountain, and we encased it in concrete. And the reason for the cave environment is the humidity needs to be about 90%. For the natural rind, the cheese rests on wooden boards.
John: The room is, like, 14 feet wide, 52 feet long is the largest room. The soft cheeses, we have in a much smaller room.
But, again, the the reason for the cave is the high humidity and the cool environment. About 52 degrees, 85% humidity, and that’s where the cheeses will rest on the wooden shelves and develop a natural rind.
After the cheese is brined, we’ll put them on the shelf, and that creates a, like, a hard skin around the outside, and that that will then become a natural rind, which protects the interior of the cheese.
John: And the reason the humidity is so critical is if it gets too dry in the cave, the rind will crack and allow unwanted molds to get inside there.
And the only cheese we want to have be moldy on the inside is the blue cheese. And that one, we probe to allow the oxygen to get inside there. And then it’s also in a separate room. That’s in a separate cave. So that’s one of the three caves.
Erik: So you’ve got to keep it pretty precise there, it sounds like. Someone keeps an eye on that, I guess.
John: Very precise. Yes. In fact, that’s Jacob’s job. He does a really good job with monitoring that humidity and the temperatures in there.
The Milk
Erik: Where does the milk come from, and what kind of milk do you guys use? It’s not all cow milk, is it?
John: That is correct. The cow milk comes from our herd here on the farm. The sheep milk comes from our daughter Sadie and her husband Sam. And then the goat milk comes from another Amish farm family, Henry and Ruta Wengerd.
It really is our mission, is to keep families on the farm. We do what we can to create a market for these farm families.
Family
Erik: And you’re also working with, at least one family member, with your daughter?
John: That is correct. And then our son John is quite involved in the business as well, including quality control and shipping. Our son Jacob is involved in order fulfillment, and then my wife, Anna Mary, makes the fudge, the apple butter.
My niece, Linda, makes the jellies. Then we also have several other children who have been involved, particularly seasonally.
Erik: Sounds like it’s pretty useful to have a big family then.
John: [laughing] Well, there are some advantages. That is correct. And we’ve been blessed. We’ve been really blessed with some really nice children.
Favorite Cheeses
John: The most popular one really is the Mountain Valley Sharp Cheddar. That’s our aged cheddar that we age for three and a half years.
Erik: I had it. I think yeah. Tasty.
John: That’s years. Three and a half years. That’s a that’s a long time. Yes. It is. And it’s you know, there’s a lot of challenges with trying to guess what you’ll need three and a half years down the road.
John: In the gift baskets, a very popular gift cheese is the Old German Weissa Kase. That means “old German white cheese”, and that’s a very popular gift cheese. It’s a nice, creamy – has a creamy mouthfeel, a bit of a tang. It’s not intimidating, and it’s not super assertive.
We do have some that are pretty intense, but the people who buy those perhaps have tasted them before, are familiar with the style and know what they’re getting.
We’re not McDonald’s in any way. This is a handmade artisanal product, so you have some variation batch to batch. But we work hard to make sure that the variation isn’t too great, because the American palate really expects that one experience will be very similar to the next.
John: About 15 years ago, we started putting these in gift assortments. So in addition to making these cheeses and selling, to restaurants and wineries, we now also do gift baskets that we ship nationwide.
We have quite a group of people who have learned to appreciate the value in having some really good cheese along with the condiments packed together in a in a gift assortment.
But here at the shop, we do quite a bit of tastings as well, where people come and they taste the samples and then make their selections, for whatever gifts they want.
But online, we also have a lot of descriptors. So the people who choose to buy online, they can they can see the descriptors quite easily of what to expect from this cheese.
Browse Goot Essa cheese assortments here.
Update: Find the Goot Essa contest winner & more here
For more, see:
Wunderful
Yummy, yummy and YUMMY !