• May 16th, 2012
• Comments Off on Our Cheesy Love – Prairie Pure Cheese

In our first edition of ‘Our Cheesy Love’ we are headed out toward Rockford where they hold the keys (and cows) to some of the best tasting Butterkäse we could find, over at Prairie Pure Cheese.

Quick lesson on Butterkäse: if its over ‘buttery’ or too rich – it will be obvious. This cheese should strike a balance between it’s buttery flavor forwardness and it’s lean to actually being cheese. We’ve done extensive cheese research in finding the ‘right’ cheeses to use in our cafe and Prairie Pure Cheese makes one of the best Butterkäse cheeses around, hands down. It could just be the super happy Illinois cows that graze and strut about in Belvidere – where the two family farms are located. For a dairy cow, what could be better than being under the great midwest sun? The milk is collected and moved to a state-of-the-art facility in Monticello, Wisconsin. But, of course, they didn’t choose a place to make the cheese just because of their fancy gadgets, the facility is also deeply rooted in making artisan cheeses, and we think it shows. It shows in their rich cheddar cheese, which is not overly sharp but still bursting with flavor. It shows in their brand new tasty feta, crumbly but not dry – extremely fresh, fantastic with even just a thick slice of french bread. Their feta is unlike a lot of ‘store-bought’ feta in that it isn’t packed crushingly-tight into oversized buckets. It’s soft and mellow flavor is great with some spring jams, sprinkle some crumbles on top of roasted asparagus, layer it in a sandwich for that rich flavor that a good feta can provide.

Pick up a slab of their cheese in our cooler, a tub of the feta, or order the burger with their spectacular Butterkäse – anyway you slice it, you surely will not be disappointed.

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