A publication for one small subject.
cheesecurds.com exists because cheese curds — the fresh, squeaky, twelve-hour kind, not the aged or breaded kind — sit in a strange cultural gap. They're regional enough that food media outside the Upper Midwest mostly ignores them. They're niche enough that the major cheese magazines treat them as a footnote. But they're also genuinely fascinating: a product with a 24-hour quality window, a deeply regional production tradition, and a sensory experience (the squeak) that doesn't really have an analog elsewhere in food.
So we made a publication. It's not for everyone. It's for people who want serious writing about a small subject — independent reviews, field-reported dispatches from the dairy belt, recipes that have been tested, and guides that account for the things that actually matter (oil temperature, brand consistency, the difference between fresh and aged).
The people.
Three of us work on the publication regularly. Jeremy Lipzinski edits, writes the long features. Chris Sivertson covers product reviews and tasting. Iiley Thompson covers field reporting and also conducts curd reviews.
We've all been hobbiest reviewers for years. None of us came to cheese curds professionally. This was supposed to be a side project. It got out of hand.
If you've ever bought a cheese curd at a gas station in rural Wisconsin and thought "I want to know more about whoever made this," this publication is for you.
How to support us.
The publication is free to read. There's no paywall and we don't sell ads. The simplest support is to subscribe to the newsletter, which is also free and which we use as a rough proxy for "is anyone reading this?"
If you have a brand we should review, a story we should chase, or a correction to a story we already published — write to us. We read everything.