Cheese with that pie? It might taste good, but it's definitely not required by law in the Dairy State.

The Wisconsin State Journal debunked the myth that Wisconsin requires apple pie to be served with cheese at restaurants in the state. The paper asked Connie Von Der Heide at the Wisconsin State Law Library whether or not state law required cheese to accompany the pie after a reader inquired about it.

"It certainly sounds plausible since after all this is the Dairy State, but the answer is no," she said. "The 1935 Laws of Wis., ch. 106 came close; it required serving a small amount of cheese and butter with meals in restaurants (effective from June 1935 to March 1937)."

What crazy food laws have you heard of? Let us know in the comments below.

A weekly look at the draft selection at beer-friendly bars across the country.

The city of Milwaukee has long been known as Beer Town USA. Considered "the beer capital of the world" at the turn of the 20th century, it was home to four of the world's largest breweries (Blatz, Miller, Pabst and Schlitz).

Nowadays less than 1 percent of Milwaukee's workforce is employed by the brewing industry, but as long as Miller stays in business, Old Milwaukee remains on store shelves and the city keeps calling their baseball team the Brewers, it will continue to earn its moniker. Like many cities, the area is seeing a boom in craft-beer culture. Smaller brewers like Lakefront and Sprecher have national followings and the city is home to a number of brewpubs.

One of Milwaukee's most highly regarded watering holes is Romans' Pub, which DRAFT and Imbibe Magazines have called among the best beer bars in the nation. Indeed, 30 selections grace today's tap list. Sounds like Wisconsinites like to stay relatively local when they booze, though: Owner Mike Romans informed us that Goose Island IPA from nearby Chicago is their most popular brew. Locals craving a beer can simply check the list: "As soon as one gets changed out, it goes up on our site."

A sampling of suds on tap is after the jump. Got a favorite microbrew? Let us know in the comments.

Scanned from Be Milwaukee's Guest, Recipes Collected and Tested by the Junior League of Milwaukee - 1959

I could scarcely be crankier at myself for muffing the opportunity to present this comb-bound recipe gem on a particularly Wisconsin-centric holiday, such as the recently passed St. Nick's Day, but hey -- any day is a great day for pork cake!

I'm a big fan of the melding of meat and sweet (mmm...bacon candy...), and surely have been known to savor a sumptuously larded crust, but I can't swear that I've ever seen a baked good quite so aggressively piggy as this. Pinwheel rolls studded with flecks of seasoned ground beef, yes, but those were generally presented as a savory, hand-wielded Wellington sort of course rather than spiced, as this seems to be, in the manner of a dessert or breakfast sweet. I'm pleading woeful ignorance about the pastries of the Badger State here, so might someone be so kind as to enlighten me -- is this a traditional Wisconsin breakfast or dessert treat, or a relic of the cookbook's era? If the former, I'm booking a trip on Midwest Airlines posthaste. If the latter -- who's up for a bake-along this weekend?

Not too long ago, I tasted a creamy mildly crunchy cow's milk cheese called Pleasant Ridge Reserve. The exquisite flavor of this cheese is due to the fact that the cow's are grazing on 300 acres of lush Wisconsin pastures from early spring through the fall. This is a crucial difference between many industrial cheeses and artisanal cheeses. Artisanal cheeses, like this one, use milk from cows grazing a natural pasture.

Pleasant Ridge Reserve's complexity of flavors makes it the perfect cheese to pair with different jams and honeys. I encourage you to taste it with mirabelle jam. You can also eat it with freshly sliced apples and pears. Like any artisanal cheese, you don't have to pair it with anything to savor its array of aromas. Nevertheless, condiments seem to highlight this cheese particularly well.

Visit Uplands Cheese Company!
Pleasant Ridge Reserve comes from a small dairy farm in Dodgeville, Wisconsin that's operated by two families: Mike and Carol Gingrich and Dan and Jeanne Patenaude. The cheese was inspired by French mountain-style cheeses, such as Comté. Besides finding this cheese in Wisconsin, you can purchase it from Saxelby Cheesemongers in NYC. It's well worth the $26 per pound from Uplands Cheese Company.

From September 5th to the 14th, people in Wisconsin are encouraged to participate in the Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge. Participating involves spending at least 10 percent of your food budget on local foods. For the challenge, "local" does not simply mean that the food has to be from the U.S. Rather, it must come from Wisconsin or within 100 miles of your home.

If you're not sure where to begin, the website for the challenge offers a site where you can find sources for local food. The challenge is incredibly educational. It not only offers ways to incorporate local foods into your diet, but it also explains why that's important in the first place. Buying local is a good way to support community sustainability, local farmers, and your local economy.

An article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel states that the Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge is about reducing our carbon footprint and simply eating better tasting food that's also healthier. What interests me about this challenge is that it's all inclusive. By targeting wealthy urban consumers, many local food challenges seem elitist. On the contrary, the Eat Local Wisconsin Challenge makes it seem affordable for everyone. If you know of similar challenges, let me know. I'd be curious to see how they compare.

A few years ago I helped a friend move to Milwaukee. When we arrived, she insisted that to get the true Wisconsin experience I had to have a "Leinie's." To be honest, I wasn't sure what the heck she was talking about until the cold bottle hit my hand. Though I can't say I did all that moving for a beer, having a new brew to try when I got to town certainly didn't hurt.

Wisconsin is a state that loves their beers: They have a professional baseball team called the Brewers for God's sake! But even so, locals have always seemed to take extra pride in the Leinenkugel's brand. Other locally based brands like Miller and Pabst became ubiquitous nationwide, but despite being brewed in Chippewa Falls since 1867, until only a couple years ago Leinie's was hard to find outside the Upper Midwest. Love it or hate it, Leinie's was their little regional secret.

But times are changing. According to the Business Journal of Milwaukee, Leinenkugel's (with the help of "super-brewer" MillerCoors) is in the final stages of a nationwide roll out that began with ominous sightings of Leinenkugel's Sunset Wheat in not-so-Wisconsin-ish locales like New York City in late 2006. If you haven't had the opportunity to drink a Leinie's in your town yet, don't worry: You'll probably be able to find a taste of small town Wisconsin in a local refrigerator soon. Though that's assuming that true Wisconsinites don't disown it first.

[Photo Credit: leinie.com]

Ah, the ways we can display patriotism! Waving a flag, singing "The Star Spangled Banner," and, of course constructing a sculpture of Wisconsin celebrities, such as Bucky Badger, Musky (the state fish), a dairy cow, and more out of 5,000 pounds of Wisconsin cheddar cheese.

Sarah Kaufmann has been creating large and small sculptures out of cheese since 1981. This July 4th, Sarah is hand-sculpting cheddar cheese to design a scene (with a 15-foot circumference) of popular Wisconsin icons in a "Spirit of '76"-style parade. In the past, people have crowded around Sarah as she produced her cheese masterpieces. For the next couple of days, people can once again gather to see the cheese turn into three dimensional characters. Today through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the public is invited to the Madison, WI Sam's Club to taste the cheese and purchase their own piece of the 5,000-pound cheddar.

I thought Sarah was starting a patriotic trend. Apparently, carving cheeses has been done before as a way of expressing American patriotism. In 1802, Elder John Leland presented Thomas Jefferson with a four-foot wide 15-inch thick sculpted cheese to express his political support.

And just so you know, handcrafted cheese larger than 75 pounds is considered a mammoth cheese. View Sarah's mammoth cheeses in the gallery below. What do you think? Does this cheese look good enough to eat, or is it just a waste of food?

Here's something for all of you who love all things large and beer. As fans of So Good and Fast Food Critic already know, the world's largest six pack of beer can be found in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

The statistics on this six pack are amazing: 688,200 gallons of beer, enough for 7,340,796 cans, "would provide one person a six pack per day for 3,351 years." The six pack was created by the City Brewing Company in LaCrosse.

My only question is did they drink all that beer before it went bad?

[originally via LiveMore.SeeMore.DoMore]

Growing up I ate my share of blue gelati, a sugary light-blue flavor of Italian ice. As far I can remember there was nothing great about the taste. The sole reason kids ate it was that it turned their lips, teeth and tongue an appalling blue.

It wasn't until recently that I heard of Blue Moon ice cream, a flavor that originated in Milwaukee, and was enjoyed by kids in the northern Midwest for the same staining ability that drew me and my little friends to blue gelati. But there's more to Blue Moon, which is said to have been invented in the late 1940s or 1950s. The turquoise colored confection is said to have a flavor that's been described as like the milk after a bowl of Froot Loops.

The folks at Chicago's Edgar A. Weber & Co., which now owns the formula, say the beguiling Blue Moon has a "cherry, citrusy, fruity-type flavor." Fans have tried to guess the ingredients and many have posted recipes on the web calling for such things as pineapple and curaçao. Weber & Co. won't reveal the secret ingredient, but says that a colorless version is used in medicines and beverages to mask bitter flavors.

Regardless of what the recipe for Blue Moon is, one thing remains true: it's only available in the northern Midwest. This coupled with childhood nostalgia has made the bizarre flavor a hot item for online ice cream stores, which charge upwards of $10 a pint.

Uh oh. Maybe it's not just a tv commercial. It looks like all the cows have fled Wisconsin and made it to the sunny fields of California.

Although Wisconsin is known as this country's Dairy State, California beat it out for milk production more than 10 years ago. Now, Wisconsin faces the possibility of another humiliating defeat, as California catches up to it in cheese production. While Wisconsin made 2.4 billion pounds of cheese last year, California was close behind with 2.14 billion pounds. Will California beat Wisconsin?

According to dairy economists, the answer is yes. Even Wisconsinites have sadly accepted the impending defeat. John T. Umhoefer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, said that California "won't roar by us, but they will pass us."

We hear a lot about road food, traveling the country in search of good eats, but since we can't eat all the time, foodies might have to get a fix at a different sort of roadside stop. These food-related stops along the highway don't have the same pull as, perhaps, a diner that serves fantastic pancakes or perfect falling-off-the-bone ribs in special sauce, but they often have a lot of history - interesting and just plain weird - attached to them. CNN's picks for roadside food stops include the Mustard Museum, a collection of nearly 5,000 types and bottles of mustard in Wisconsin, Lenny the Chocolate Moose, a life-sized 1,700-lb moose, and the Corn Palace in South Dakota. Travelers can also visit the Salt Museum in upstate New York to view the remains of a salt processing plant and hamburger lovers can pay tribute to their favorite food with a pilgrimage to the Home of the Hamburger the birthplace of the food, also in Wisconsin.

We also like the Museum of Burnt Foods, the Pez Museum and, to include one that actually has some appeal beyond pure weirdness, the Sake Museum.

A factory worker in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was trapped waist-deep in a vat of 110° dark chocolate for over two hours yesterday, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Darmin Garcia, 21, was apparently trying to free up some chocolate stuck in a vat when he accidentally slid in and got his pants stuck in a roller. Co-workers attempted to thin the viscous chocolate with cocoa butter and firefighters eventually plucked Garcia out after removing chocolate from the vat, allowing him to get out of his stuck pants. "It was in my hair, in my ears, my mouth, everywhere," Garcia told the MJS.

Cream cheese was developed in America in 1872. It is unusual, different from other cheeses, not because of its smooth creamy texture, but because of how it is made. While many cheeses are thickened with an enzyme in rennet, cream cheese is thickened with the addition of an acid.

That may sound like a reasonably simple process, but the truth is the cream cheese is hard to make. And when things go wrong and the cheese comes out smelling like "dirty socks, cardboard, or Robitussin," companies have to call in the experts. Enter the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Dairy Research (UWCDR), where scientists do research to unlock the secrets of cream cheese and help manufacturers solve any problems that come up.

Thanks to the blogosphere I learn something new every day. Today's fun fact: The District of Columbia, has overtaken the state of Wisconsin as the top brandy consumer per capita.

Pardon my ingorance, but I had no idea Wisconsites were so fond of the nectarlike distilled wine. Apparently it's been a staple of Friday night fish fries in the wintry state for years. Though I can see the need to sip such a warming libation on a cold Wisconsin evening, I can't imagine how brandy grew to become so popular there. Some theorize that a large number of German-Americans were exposed to brandy when they attended the 1893 World's Fair in Cincinnati.

As for brandy's popularity in D.C., who can say? I always thought the U.S. capital was more of a bastion of Scotch and bourbon.

[via: DCist]

An Emmenthaler from Von Muehlenen Cheese in Dudingen, Switzerland, took the title of world champion in the 2006 Biennial World Championship Cheese Contest, held this week in Madison, Wisconsin. Runners up included two Goudas from The Netherlands. This is the first time in the contest's 49 years that a Swiss cheese has taken first place, according to a recent story in The Capital Times. A U.S. cheese maker hasn't taken top honors in the contest since 1988.