Meet The Woman Who Cuts The Cheese
Sarah Kaufmann is spending her week carving two sculptures out of giant blocks of cheddar for Pinecroft Harris Teeter. She’s originally from Wisconsin, which makes sense. Sarah created advertising graphics for the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin until 1996, when she quit to become a big cheese in the food sculpting world. “It grew and grew until I had to quit my real job to do my unreal job of cheese carving,” she says.
Now she spends her time doing custom art and has carved her way into big events like the Kentucky Derby. Sarah previously designed a pretty sharp Payne Stewart cheese carving in Pinehurst, so they brought her back this year to create the U.S. Open trophy and a golf cart. “Customers are just shocked at the size of the cheese,” says Sarah (it’s 640 pounds to be exact). “And they get to taste it, which is the most important part.”
As artistic mediums go, Sarah tells us that cheese is totally subtractive. “Once you take it away you can’t put it back. Its like stone.” Applying patience is the most challenging part and there are lots of little steps.
“Just like a concert, you have all these things to get ready and then you’re only on stage for like an hour,” says Sarah. As for the area, Sarah thinks Pinehurst is gouda (which also happens to be her favorite kind of cheese). “It’s beautiful, it’s lush and it’s a great place to walk,” she says. See more of her work on her website’s “Gallery of Cheese.”
