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Guggisberg Sugarcreek Team Emmental Wheel Wins U.S. Cheese Championship

 

By Lorrie Baumann

 

IMG950609Cecylia Szewczyk is popping her buttons after the Emmental cheese made by her Sugarcreek team at Guggisberg Cheese was named the winner of the United States Championship Cheese Contest. The 200-pound wheel was chosen from among 1,894 entries in the contest, and it’s a cheese destined to lead Guggisberg Cheese’s product line in a direction that appeals to changing American tastes.

Of course, winning awards is nothing new for Guggisberg, which makes highly esteemed American Swiss-style cheeses that win championships almost routinely, but this award recognizes Guggisberg’s ability to turn its expertise toward traditional Swiss cheese styles with their robust flavors that were once considered too strong for American tastes. But as Americans have become more adventurous eaters, they’re demanding bolder flavors, and Emmental is back in favor. “In Switzerland, they are using different culture combinations that are able to break down the fat in cheese as it ages, and this produces the strongest notes that appreciated there. Here in the U.S. there is a tendency to use milder culture combinations that do not break down the fat , but more and more, Americans prefer pronounced flavors, and we would like to go in this direction,” Szewczyk explains.

Szewczyk led the team that developed the new cheese. Like the championship Emmental, she’s new to Guggisberg, although she’s been making cheese since 2006, when she was received her master’s degree in food biotechnology from the Polish university where she’d studied the food technology and food biotechnology. During the graduation ceremony in which she received her degree, she was approached by a Dutch company that was producing cultures for cheeses and offered a job immediately. She spent the next six years working in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany and the Netherlands. Then the company sent her to Wisconsin to introduce its ingredients to the U.S. market. Two years later, the company’s management decided to change direction and scale back its efforts in the U.S. market.

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342-MMS-1426812044-attachment1-PART951426811913581The winning Emmental was aged for just three months with a special cheese coating that allowed the cheese to breathe and release gases and moisture that naturally form within the cheese as it ages instead of the plastic wrapping that’s commonly used in the U.S. “There is a tremendous difference if you let cheese age the natural way, if there are no plastic bags to create a barrier,” Szewczyk says.

“The flavor that we managed to develop there was really outstanding. We were so happy,” she says. “We thought we wouldn’t stand a chance against other Emmentals because of the short aging. In only three months, we were able to develop the flavor. Considering the fact that this was one of the first trials, I’ll say we were very lucky.”