MouCo Interview: Soft & Washed in Colorado

by KIRSTIN on April 14, 2010

The original post was the the "It's not you it's Brie" blog, check it out here.

         This marks the continuation of a new “It’s Not You, it’s Brie” era, ripe with interviews of people who live, breath, swim in, or just do incredibly cool things with cheese. For the second interview in the “It’s Not You, it’s Brie” series I would like to introduce to you MouCo cheese, a cheese company in small town Colorado that focuses on making soft, buttery, and surprisingly easy-to-love mild bloomy and washed-rind cheeses.  MouCo is also at the forefront of eco-friendly business practices. And they named their milk truck Chuck. If you haven’t heard of them, check em’ out, and if you have tried them, keep supporting their creamy habits! Because they need to support ours.

MouCo is deeply rooted in Germanic tradition [the president and her father, the company's consulting cheesemaker, lived and made cheese in Germany]. Can you explain how your cheeses have been inspired by German cheesemaking and whether most of your creations are inspired by traditional cheeses from a particular region or pure imagination?

     In this day and age it is easy to get caught up in the production and physical science or any product that’s made. With cheese, there is an art side of it. You are not dealing with something that is exactly the same every day so learning the art of working with our cheese and the organisms that produce it is one of the biggest things we can learn from our family and our buddies in Germany.

You describe on your website how carefully you check to make sure that the milk you buy from small farms in Fort Collins, Colorado does not have any traces of antibiotics. Why is this so important to you? 

     This is a requirement of the health board, so obviously, that is a great reason. However, in addition, some of our consumers may have antibiotic related allergies and the reactions could be significant. Lastly, people are not cows so we don’t figure they need to take cow drugs.

Your company is at the forefront of environmentally-friendly packaging. What are the main things you do to reduce your carbon footprint, and what steps would you suggest that other cheesemakers take who are interested in doing the same?

     The wonderful thing about working on environmental efficiencies is that most of the areas where you are not environmentally friendly are costing money. E.g. We made a change to the way we handle the water used for heating and cooling the milk during the pasteurization process in January 2010 that resulted in a reduction in our water consumption of 20% and has reduced our natural gas consumption by about 25%. So back to costing money….the return on this project was 2 months…we just wish we had thought of it sooner.

So of the new things we work on now….April 1st we will start using a returnable shipping system for small internet orders. We currently have this system in place for our wholesale system; where it reduces our shipping materials by 80%!!!!! So we have great faith we can trip these cardboard boxes around the USA for a long time before they get retired and save a lot of waste from the landfill and save money to boot.

Did I mention we are so close to our milk source that we only put gas in Chuck, the milk truck, once every 2 months.

As for suggestions…don’t take anything for it’s face value, everything can be done better, think out of the box, if you read about a great efficiency that a massive company makes, make it work on the small scale…it can be done.

You also donate cheeses that are not perfectly suitable for sale to a local food bank. It seems like it is important for you to give back to the community around you. Are you involved in any other ventures that bring MouCo and the community together?

     We do have a commitment to the community around us and giving away cheese is a great way to support a lot of different causes. Many organizations, be them food support programs or not, will have silent auctions to help raise money during an event. This way we are able to help a broader range of programs within our community.

Once of the more exciting things that has happened recently is an increase in the amount of educational support. Several times in the last year we have taught children about cheese and business economics. We feel this is great way to help expose the next generation to the science and art of cheese making in addition to offering them a bit more knowledge about their food and where it comes from….and we get some really cool thank you cards.

On the back of your cheeses there are suggested dates of consumption, but not just “sell by” or “eat by” dates. They suggest when a consumer should eat the particular cheese they purchases according to their taste preferences. What has been the response to this, and does the cheesemaker like their cheeses young or ripe?

     People really love our date code system. A little story…a little cheese..where’s to go wrong. We make a cheese that ages over time and we even go the extra mile to buy a cheese wrap that allows this to happen by “breathing” Oxygen and venting CO^2. So our date code helps them decide when to eat the cheese based on their texture preference. At the bottom we have a little saying, this is our batch tracking system…the computer doesn’t care if it a big long code or a little funny story, then we post these stories on the web so people can understand our craziness.

Young or aged…hmmm, guess the general feeling around here is…for what?…a cracker, a bit more aged; a salad, a bit more young.

Birgit Halbreiter, the president of MouCo, sat on the board of directors for the New Belgian New Belgium Brewing company. How has her beer knowledge influenced the company, and do you use any particular beer to wash the rind of ColoRouge?

     Beer is a living product as well as our cheese. Both products deal with creating the right conditions for a set of organisms to …whala…make your product for you; you just have to steer a bit. Because of Birgit’s extensive background in both cheese and beer, we are able to create a system that finds the best in both worlds. When we are moving milk we do so with a gentle “beer” philosophy knowing we have the potential to damage our end product by mishandling the cheese at any stage, even when it is milk.

Really it’s all about creating those ideal conditions for a bunch of friendly organisms to make complex yet mild cheeses…even the salt bath has a few little guys hang out to help create the proper rind conditions for both the Camembert, as well as the ColoRouge.

As for the smear solution for the ColoRouge…sorry, closely guarded secret…but I can tell you it’s not beer.

Although delicious, German cheese does not yet have a stronghold in the United Sates. If readers of “It’s Not You, it’s Brie” wanted to try some of these cheeses that have at least partially inspired MouCo’s inventions, what should they be eating?

     Well, they are not all German by here we go….BergKäse, Limburger (has to be fresh, scrape it, slice it yum) Morbier, Comte, Bavaria Blü, Rochette…for starters. Sure they are not all like our cheese at all, but we can learn something about flavor and texture creation from each one.

Thank you very much MouCo!

Ingredients:

• 5 Tbs. Butter
• 1 Red Onion
• Enough Bread to diced into dice size pieces and fill your cupped 2 hands
• 2 Tbs. Flour
• 3 Garlic Cloves
• 3 Tbs. Cream (Half and Half)
• 3 Egg Yokes
• 600 ml. Water
• 500 ml. Fat Tire Beer or other low bitterness medium bodied beer.
• 1 Whole Clove
• 1 Bay Leaf
• 3 Tbs. Sugar
• Salt and Pepper
• Sprinkle of Nutmeg (Optional, we forgot it)
• Toasted Almonds (Optional)
• Sprinkle of parsley (For Color) 
• 1 MouCo ColoRouge (for Yumminess)

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Directions:

Set up a pot to warm with 3 tbs. butter on medium high heat.

Set up a skillet to warm with 2 tbs. butter on medium high heat.

Cut onion into desired size pieces, we went with a small dice, browns nicely to a lot of flavor while still maintaining some texture. Also dice garlic.

Dice Bread into Die size pieces; create enough to fill your two cupped hands.

Once the butter is browning add the onions to the pot and the bread to the pan.

Stir both frequently for 3 minutes, add Garlic to the pot and continue to stir frequently for another few minutes.

When the bread has achieved a nice color remove it from the heat.

Once onion and garlic are quite brown add 2 tbs. butter in one spot and let it melt, then add flour to this pool and stir it around to get it wet.

Toast this mixture for another 3 minutes; turning up the heat to high for the last 30 seconds.

When the flour/butter mixture, Rue, has achieved a light brown color stir it into the onions.

Then...add the beer and water. Turning up the heat at the end onions will set you up for faster boiling for the water and beer addition. You could substitute broth (50% beef, 50% chicken) for water, but we think this adds more calories than necessary, the flavor is already there from the onion and rue.

Reduce the heat to lightly boil for the next 10 minutes. 

While the soup is boiling separate 3 eggs; yolks for this recipe.

Whip the egg yolks and slowly add the sugar after about 1 minute. Once the mixture turns a pale white stop whipping and add the cream slowly while stirring lightly.

Once the egg yoke mixture is done, stop the mixing and add the cream while lightly stirring.

When then soup is done boiling, remove it from the heat and wait one minute then add the egg yoke mixture while stirring the hot soup lightly. 

Return the soup to the heat, but do not boil.

Once you have achieved the heat that you desire it's time to plate.

Plating:

Slice MouCo ColoRouge cheese into small pie slices or long strips just 1/8 inch think.

Fill a bowl with soup

Top with Bread Croutons and ColoRouge mini pie slices.

Immediately cover hot bowl of soup with a plate to arrive at table hot and melt the cheese.

Some Notes:

 You can obviously make this soup with any beer that you like. We recommend a beer that has a malty flavor or lighter flavor over a bitter beer as this will be evident in the finished soup. Hoppy might work, maybe with cumin and cilantro to work with the flower hop notes...depends on the hops...have fun.