Zoë Bakes Deep Dive: Say Cheesecake

A Q&A with Alise Sjostrom of Redhead Creamery.

I have a child who doesn’t absolutely love and live for sweets. I’ll just let that sink in. Not sure how that happened, but I am constantly on the quest to find the desserts that Henri gets excited about. Cheesecake is that one dessert he LOVES and so I, in turn, love making it for him. In fact, most of his diet consists of cheese, in all forms and types, so it stands to reason that a cake made of cheese would be his go-to.

In this episode, we visited a dairy farm, Redhead Creamery, about an hour outside of Minneapolis to see how they make cheese (little did we know they’d put us to work milking the cows, which was awesome) and pick out some of the artisan cheeses to bake with. Alise, the head cheesemaker and the namesake redhead, gave us a tour and introduced us to some sublime locally made Minnesota cheeses. Below she takes us through a deep-dive of her journey into becoming a cheesemaker and how her vision took her family farm in a new direction.