Leelanau Cheese Co.’s owners John and Anne Hoyt have seen a large increase in the interest for their artistian cheese, aged raclette, since winning the “best of show” last summer in the 24th annual American Cheese Society’s competition. Among the 1,200 entries for the title, were 200 producers ranging from farmstead operators to multimillion-dollar companies — including Cabot Creamery.
John, 49, the native Detroiter who went to Europe in search of his calling, and Anne, 46, the French shepherd he fell in love with, still make cheese together the way they always have, turning milk into something marvelous.
“We couldn’t find any investors, so we decided to do it very small,” Anne recalled. With $5,000 of their own money, a secondhand cheese-making kettle, a friend’s abandoned gas station in Omena, and their own sweat equity, they began making raclette in 1995.
“It was really the beginning of the artisanal cheese making,” she said. “In Omena, in the beginning, people would come to us and ask if we had any orange cheese. People had no idea. They just thought cheese should be orange.”
Raclette isn’t. It’s ivory to pale golden in color with a smooth, semi-hard consistency. Younger raclette, aged 3 to 5 months, has more moisture, a milder flavor and a distinctive aroma when melted. Aged raclette — the Hoyts’ best-of-show winner — is aged 8 months or more, which gives it a more pronounced aroma and a wonderfully deep, nutty, mouth-filling flavor.
Leelanau Cheese’s winning aged raclette, says Grotenstein of the ACS competition committee, was “perfectly executed, perfectly balanced. It’s got great flavor, devoid of harshness … just a very, very definitive raclette.”
Anne says she and John didn’t dare dream of winning best in show, even after being first runner-up to Cabot’s best of show in 2006. “We didn’t think it could get any better,” she says.
It wasn’t even a close call. David Grotenstein, chairman of the ACS judging and competition committee, remembers it as “kind of a runaway winner.”