Hoop Cheese

What is Hoop Cheese?

Hoop cheese was a common cheese in the Southern United States from the early to mid 1900s. It was also made commercially further north. In the 1910s it was mass-produced in Otsego County, New York, and shipped with farmer cheese to New York on the New York Central Railroad, packed in cans and boxes in 100-pound increments. The trade continued through the 1920s.

The cheese takes its name from the hoop, a ring of wood used to press curds. The curds sit on cheesecloth inside the hoop, the whey drains out through the cloth, and what stays behind is the cheese. It is pressed into rounds, then wrapped in cheesecloth or parchment paper or sealed in wax. Some modern rounds carry a coating of red wax. Unlike farmer cheese, which is made with milk, cream and salt, hoop cheese uses milk alone.

The name covers two rather different cheeses. One is hard and similar to cheddar. The other is crumbly, closer to dry-curd cottage cheese. The pressed version has a firm but not hard consistency and a creamy texture, and has been described as a truly low-fat product.

Finding it takes some work. The process resists automation and the cheese does not keep long, so it is scarce in much of the country. In the South it still turns up at roadside stands, small restaurants, grocers, farmers markets and independent gas stations. General stores once cut it to order with a hoop cheese cutter, a turntable with a suspended blade patented in 1905.

There is no official standard for it. The American Dairy Association has no criteria defining what counts as hoop cheese, though a 1915 Department Reports of the State of New York entry called it a type of pot cheese.