Better Than 'State Fair' Curds preserve a chunk of Wisconsin heritage, but can these frozen, beer-battered curds live up to the name?

MERRILL - Naming cheese curds Better Than "State Fair" Curds will generate a vat of "I'll be the judge of that" thoughts. Especially considering that the beer-battered curds are frozen before being deep-fried.

That's a double dip of milk-curdling gall for some folks in America's Dairyland.

Owner Bill Dinges knows the name is attention-grabbing. That's why he chose it. He's even been challenged to a curd-off blind taste test over the name.

"It's just a name," he told the would-be challenger.

He smiles after recounting the phone call while standing in the Better Than "State Fair" Curds production area. What used to be the banquet hall of his family's restaurant (Ed & Sharon's Restaurant, Catering and Food Truck) is now home to a liquid nitrogen-fueled freeze tunnel that locks in the squeak of the pre-battered curds.

It's also preserving the past.

The batter is his dad's recipe. The curds are a faithful re-creation of the curds once made by Bletsoe Cheese, a popular Central Wisconsin cheesemaker that closed in 2019.

Cheese curds started at Ed & Sharon's Restaurant for staff only

Dinges, a second-generation owner of the restaurant and catering business, said his dad bought a "couple pounds” of fresh cheese curds “on certain Fridays” from Bletsoe Cheese to make for his staff after work.

“Employees would wait after the kitchen was cleaned to get the cheese curds,” Dinges said.

The light beer-flavor batter complementing the salty, mild cheese at the center is a powerful draw.

Dinges said his dad’s batter and Bletsoe’s curds went together like peanut butter and jelly.

There’s little doubt the curds would have been big sellers in those days. But Ed didn't put cheese curds on the menu for a reason.

“It was a pain in the ass to make the batter,” said Bill.

More than a decade after Ed unexpectedly died in 2003, the general public got a taste of those curds.

Established in 2014, Better Than “State Fair” Curds was Dinges' solution to making the curds easier for kitchen staff while preserving the quality.

Bill was working for a phone company at the time of his dad’s passing. He got back into the family business, helping his mother, Sharon, run the bar, restaurant and banquet hall.

General public gets first taste of Better Than 'State Fair' Curds

About 10 years ago, Bill built a food trailer to expand business. The next year his wife suggested serving cheese curds.

Taking a “let's try it and see what happens” attitude, Bill installed a vent in the food trailer (potatoes were served mashed, not fried, with hot beef), and used his dad’s beer batter recipe and a 1984-era electric fryer to make those deep-fried curds.

Thanks to his wife’s suggestion and his dad’s recipe, Bill had a problem.

The deep-fried curds were a hit.

Preparing deep-fried curds to order is not an easy task. Mixing fresh batter, fishing curds out of the batter, dropping each curd in the fryer and tending them to prevent clumping comes with a high cost of attention and effort during meal service chaos.

“If this starts growing, I got to figure out a way" to meet demand, Bill said. "I'm not a cook. I'm not a chef. I'm not a business owner. I'm a problem solver. People come to me 'hey, I'm hungry' and solve the problem."

The cheese curds that sold themselves

About five years ago, he began freezing the battered curds.

Once he was satisfied that the frozen curds weren’t distinguishable from fresh, Bill loaded a cooler with the curds and ice packs and hit the road looking for hoods on the roofs of bars and restaurants. He’d hand a pack of the curds and his contact info to any place with a deep fryer.

When he took his white bus on scouting trips, he’d fire up a Presto table-top frier to make the curds in the bus to hand out as samples.

The low-pressure “call me if you're interested” approach worked. The curds sold themselves.

Bill got calls for his curds.

Better Than 'State Fair' Curds is a bold name choice

Bill wanted a catchier name than Ed & Sharon’s curds.

Credit for the name goes to a friend who was giving Bill feedback about a batch of freshly fried curds.

“These are better than the fair,” he told Bill.

Bill replied, “You’re a genius ... that’s my name.”

While demand for the frozen curds rose, banquet hall business dwindled. They were more often catering events at barns than hosting events, Bill said.

The banquet hall was converted into the production facility.

They were pouring batter into an evaporator (a square metal pan used in the maple syrup-making process), placing curds on large wire racks, submerging them in the batter, storing the curd-covered racks in the freezer for 2 hours, chipping curds free from the racks then bagging them. All by hand.

A 3,000-pound batch took 20 hours to complete. Sleep and breaks came in 2-hour intervals while the curds chilled.

A better way to make frozen cheese curds

Before making a six-figure commitment to a liquid nitrogen freeze tunnel, Bill said they traveled to Chicago to do a test run on the system.

Though the deep fryer provided by the company was by Bill's estimation "around when Jesus was making chicken," they were satisfied with the results of the freeze. Curds get dipped in batter and moved through a chamber cooled by liquid nitrogen to minus-135 F before being bagged. No chipping required.

A team of 11 finishes a batch of curds in four hours, he said.

A month before Bill had the freeze tunnel installed in February 2019, Bletsoe Cheese announced it was closing.

Bill said he had a feeling Bletsoe might be closing before he officially got the news. He had tried curds from about 15 other cheesemakers, but none worked as well with the batter. Bill said he started asking Bletsoe owners how they made their curds. How much salt they used. Questions like that.

He asked another cheesemaker if they would make curds following the recipe if he bought a vat of curds.

For that size order, Bill said "they said they would paint them green if I wanted."

To make sure the curds passed the taste test, Bill would make a batch and tell a customer at Ed & Sharon's that he'd made them by mistake. Would they like them, no charge?

He'd circle back and ask how the curds were. Did they notice a difference?

Nope, they didn't notice anything different.

Cheese curds from Bletsoe never passed through the freeze tunnel, he said.

However, when the curds arrive on production days, they're still warm. They make the batter just hours before curds tumble into the mixture.

Dinges said freezing the curds before deep-frying acts like "Armor All," preventing the batter from absorbing as much grease as the fresh-fried versions.

Though that might be an unintended benefit, the deep-fried curds squeak with Wisconsin heritage and flavor. Which is tough to beat.

Contact Daniel Higgins dphiggin@gannett.com. Follow @HigginsEats on Twitter and Instagram and like on Facebook.

This article originally appeared on Wausau Daily Herald: Better Than "State Fair" Curds are beer-battered, frozen and squeaky