I’m an aged cheddar aficionado (specializing in Wisconsin cheddars), and Tillamook has never disappointed me. It’s never really knocked my socks off either, but it’s a rare cheese that does that.
IMHO, 5 years isn’t quite enough time to bring out the full potential in a cheddar. Sadly, the prices rise rather sharply (pun intended) beyond that age. Even so, investing in a nice 7 year old has its rewards.
I have found the best products from the smaller manufacturers. Once an operation gets real huge, consistently turning out a uniform product becomes more important; this has its plusses and minuses. You alway know what you’ll get, but you’re never surprised by what you get. The smaller, artisanal operations I tend to buy from have more variability, and while that may produce some mediocrity at times, it’s also produced some truly memorable tastes.
Six Flags would be Gurnee, and that would be way north of Chicago, not west. But that would be on the road to the cheese castle. It’s more like an hour to an hour fifteen from Alsip, but otherwise your description sounds right.
Oh, and while I haven’t been there since they redid it and moved it a bit (it now looks like a Cheddar Disneyland), they definitely did have up to 10-year aged cheddar last time I was there maybe a decade ago.
Thanks for weighing in. I think you’re saying that the Tillamook 5 year is good but not superlative. It’s good to know that Tillamook 5 year is on the right track. I’ll try to find a 7 year to compare and may start in on the artisanal players.
I need to go back to Beechers and check out what they have. Not only their own but also smaller makers in the area.
If you like the crunchy salt crystals in your cheddar, I can’t recommend Ford Farm’s Coastal Cheddar enough. Only aged 15 months or so, but salty, cheddary deliciousness.
It seems to me that cows produce milk that is pretty much the same. therefore, when debating the merits of geography, what would make Tillamook (Oregon) cheese different from Wisconsin or Vermont? The bacteria that transforms the curds into cheese is the same strain (or is it)? I find all high end cheddars to be good-I cannot really tell them apart. Also, in orange colored cheddars, the traditional dye used was marigold flower petals-do most cheesemakers now huse synthetic dye?
Well, what cows eat affects how their milk tastes, smells and looks. Dyeing cheese orange began because the cheese of the better makers was orange from high levels of carotene in the cow’s feed.
It’s not normally colored with a synthetic dye, it’s colored with annatto.
My wife is a lifelong Wisconsinite, and we went ahead and got a Costco membership primarily for the Tillamook, if that tells you anything.
It’s head and shoulders above any cheddars we find in even the better supermarkets, but we don’t know of any specialty cheese shops in our area of Wisconsin, so I’m not sure how Tillamook compares with its ostensible peers.
Really? Even here in Upper Michigan grocery stores we get decently-good aged Wisconsin Cheddar (Laack’s, Arthur Bay) that I prefer over Tillamook (which we also get in most grocery stores.) And those two are really the tip of the iceberg; I think they’re good, but the stuff I buy in the small stores in Wisconsin are better.
Yes, really, and I’m jealous. We don’t get Tillamook anywhere here outside of Costco, and my wife says she doesn’t recognize those two cheeses you mention.
Tillamook is a very good cheese for a very good price. The flavor of it serves well across all kinds of recipes, whereas some of the other cheddars we’ve tried, while tasty, are not as universally appropriate.
I do wish that there were some specialty shops close to me, or even better selections at the supermarkets, and I’m now wondering why there aren’t - we are close to the MN border and you’d think there’d be tons of options. Maybe there are some and we just haven’t asked the right people.