The 'Michelangelo of Cheese' shares her weirdest cheese carvings

Mashable bites into a creamy, nutty, gooey, and sometimes stinky world during our fist-ever Cheese Week.

One of the greatest cheese carvers in the U.S. began her cheese journey in 1981, with an overly ambitious slideshow.

Sarah Kaufmann — who, at the time was an artist for a nonprofit marketing Wisconsin dairy  — knew that the visual aesthetics of a title slide could set the tone for her entire presentation about cheesemaking. Mimicking a woodcut, she carved the words "Art of Cheesemaking" into a 20-pound slab of Wisconsin Cheddar and used a photo of her creation to hook her audience. It worked.

Nearly 40 years, a Guinness World Record or two, and more than 2,500 carvings later, she's now a renowned cheese artist.

"Cheese found me. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t scheme it. I didn’t promote myself. Nothing. It just happened,"  Kaufmann said during a phone interview. "It just grew and it continues today."

Image: sarah kaumann photo library

While at the nonprofit, she hired cheese carvers and brainstormed ideas with them. She created a few small sculptures for deli cases at the time, but it hadn't dawned on her yet that she could be the professional behind the carving block. Fifteen years after she left, someone from the dairy group called her up and asked her to make a cheese carving.

"Two weeks after completing the job they called with another request, then another, and it wasn't long before the ripple effect kicked in," Kaufmann said.

Becoming the 'Michelangelo of Cheese'

When Kaufmann first started sculpting full-time, she wanted to be known as "3D in Cheese." 

"I wanted that to be my name. It's classy, it's clever, but every time we went somewhere I’d say, 'I’m 3D in Cheese' and they’d say, 'who?' I’d be like, 'I’m Sarah Kaufmann, and they'd ask, 'what?'" Ultimately, the dream name didn't stick, but it did lead to a modest moniker that stuck.

"Then I’d say, 'Oh I’m the cheese lady' and people would say, 'Oh, the cheese lady! The cheese lady’s here!' So I was like why fight it? Just call me. Call me anything you want, just call."

Image: Sarah Kaufmann Photo library

Much to everyone's surprise, Kaufmann didn't go to school to master the art of carving cheese. She attended a technical college to study commercial art and advertising, but no one ever taught her how to turn a blank dairy canvas into a bust of Jon Stewart. She owes that to pure, raw talent. As a child, she loved to draw, so she calls upon those skills — along with her experience in graphic art — to sketch the outlines for her sculptures.

SEE ALSO: We found the cheesiest nails on the internet (literally)

Kaufmann puts an exceptional amount of time, effort, and precision into each of her pieces, and because she performs a service so delightfully unique, she’s never really struggled to spread the word about her business. The internet and good old-fashioned word of mouth have helped her rise to cheese art fame.

One of Kaufmann’s biggest clients right now, for example, is the Fiserv Forum — a popular arena in Milwaukee that hired her after seeing her work online. She carves cheese sculptures for their big events, including NBA finals games and concerts of popular musical artists such as Pentatonix, Carrie Underwood, Ariana Grande, and John Mayer.

Kaufmann's also worked state fairs across the country, carved for Super Bowls and concerts, sculpted cheese for The Food Network and ESPN, and appeared on television shows like The Chew, Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party, and Harry Connick Jr.'s now-canceled talk show, Harry. 

She's sculpted everything from decorative centerpieces and company logos to cheese likenesses of cows, celebrity heads, and the Chicago skyline. The cheese masterpieces range from small, 2-ounce F18 aircraft jets to massive thousand-pound sculptures. In 2009, she even carved a massive 1,900-pound astronaut to celebrate the 40-year anniversary of the first moonwalk. While it was a hefty statue, it wasn't until a few years later that she'd bag a Guinness World Record. Due to logistics, the astronaut wasn't eligible for consideration at the time.

Image: sarah kaufmann photo libary

Kaufmann set the Guinness World Record for Largest Cheese Sculpture in 2011 with a 925-pound cheese rollercoaster carving at the Wisconsin State Fair. And the 3,462-pound cheddar carving she made in 2018 for a Stew Leonards's Grocery Store in Long Island is currently under review for another record. (The current record holder is a 1,524-pound cheeseburger.)

"You must apply one year ahead and have Guinness World Record approval to submit an attempt," she explained. She also noted that you have to pay to have a Guinness representative on-location as a witness.

Image: Sarah Kaufmann Photo library

Her decades of work have left such an impression on lovers of cheese and art alike that she's been dubbed "The Michelangelo of Cheese" by fans and publications like Food Republic and NPR.

"It’s something that happened one day and I went, 'Oh, that’s clever. Michelangelo, I like that,'" she said. 

A wonderfully weird career path

Kaufmann may spend her days sculpting like Michelangelo, but the Wisconsin native likely encounters many more laughs and eyebrow-raising requests than the Italian Renaissance sculptor did when working with marble.

"Yesterday I got an email from somebody [who said,] 'We need a foot carved.' So they shipped me the cheese overnight and it's sitting right downstairs," she said. 

Image: Sarah Kaufmann Photo library

"I did carve a baby," Kaufmann went on, recalling one of her most bizarre sculptures to date. "I got a call from someone who saw me online and their work buddy had a baby named Colby. They had me carve this baby out of Colby cheese and it was the size of a newborn baby, with his little arms and legs, and I shipped it in a box that was lined with blue so it looked like it was in a little crib."

Though she's had many on-camera appearances, one of her favorites is probably also her strangest. In 2017, she appeared on the YouTube show Good Mythical Morning to recreate the face-melting Nazi death scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was the first time Kaufmann had ever melted one of her sculptures, and after turning up the heat, she and the hosts dipped some tortilla chips in the melted cheese and enjoyed a nice little snack.

Kaufmann likes to carve with cheddar not only because it's delicious, but because it's very dense and holds up well in the face of her wire-loop ceramic tools and drawing knives. If you see her near a hunk of fresh cheese she'll likely be wearing her signature cow print carving attire or cheese hat, and she's so dedicated to her craft that, yes, she has fallen asleep on a block mid-carve.

"My longest sculptures that I work on are for the Indiana State Fair," Kaufmann said, explaining that she works the fair 12 days a year. She has a team of three to four helpers now, but it still takes them a combined 350 hours of hands-on carving to complete the job. "That doesn’t even count the layout and the pattern working. I spend many, many hours working on the actual drawing of [the sculpture] and what it’s going to look like, and all these little details."

It's hard work, but an undeniable perk of the job is that sculptors always have a snack within reach. The carvings themselves sometimes look too good to eat, but the scraps? Those are fair game. 

"After years and years of this, I forget it’s cheese, but purposefully, when I’m working at the big fairs for instance, I’ll take apples and grapes or something and a box of crackers in because sometimes I’ll work all night long," she said. "All of a sudden at 3:00 in the morning I’ll be like, 'I’m kind of getting hungry, what can I eat? Oh, I know, cheese.'" 

"You know, I’ll never be a starving artist," she chuckled.

So you want be a cheese sculptor?

If you're reading about Kaufmann's cheesy career, thinking that this may be your calling, she has some advice.

First, wait awhile before you throw yourself head-first into the craft. 

"I don’t recommend this if you’re out of college and you want to do art. I recommend it as a secondary career because it’s very important to work in the real world," she said. "I worked in commercial art for years and this cheese carving stuff was just a teeny, teeny part of my job."

"It’s a great second job," Kaufmann added, stressing the importance of interacting with people and having valuable career experiences before developing a strong dedication to cheese art.

Image: Sarah Kaufmann Photo library

It's also crucial to have patience and learn to "be happy with yourself."

Though it's extremely gratifying to see the joy your sculptures bring to others, they're not always going to know who's behind the masterpiece.

"You just have to have an inner satisfaction. It’s not about me ... it's about the client," she said. "Especially with cheese being perishable — it’s not even like a painting in a museum. I take a picture of it but it’s more like a wedding cake — how hard people work and then BANG it’s gone. But that’s maybe why they're a little bit more intriguing."

The search for apprentices

Kaufmann is currently prepping to carve at the upcoming Indiana, UP Michigan, and New York state fairs. She's submitted sketches to all three event boards already. She plans to sculpt three 640-pound blocks at the Indiana fair in the beginning of August.

A long-term goal of hers, however, is to find and train a few apprentices that can carry on the craft when she's ready to put down her tools.

"Well, I plan on doing this until I drop dead," Kaufmann said, "but I will probably slow down a little at some point and do fewer, more select jobs."

Image: Sarah Kaufmann Library

"For the bigger jobs, I’ll definitely get helpers. Ideally if I’m traveling I'll have one or two good artists I feel confident I can count on," she went on. "That would be really brilliant."

"As for the future of cheese carving, I know there’s always going to be cheese. There’s always going to be promotion ... so if someone is interested I’m inviting you," Kaufmann said. "If you are a reliable sculptor or two-dimensional-type sculptor and somehow we can figure out how to get you carving cheese, it's wonderful." 

"If you feel the call to carve cheese give me a call."

WATCH: Vegan or dairy: Can we tell the difference between these cheese products?