The sudden sprint to create an American blue cheese started on the University of Minnesota campus with professors Willis Barnes Combs, left, and Samuel T. Coulter — shown sampling some of their handiwork. (Wide World Photos)

Blue cheese is an acquired taste, with its signature blue crumbles of mold created in European caves — most likely by accident.

For much of the blue cheese made in the United States, though, we have Minnesota to thank. If it weren’t for a University of Minnesota professor and some random geological occurrences, we would still be relying on Europe to meet our blue cheese needs.

Geological history of St. Paul’s Caves

To explain the origin of the caves, one needs to look back 450 million years to when the Ordovician sea covered much of the Midwest. The sand on the sea floor was packed down and washed clean, creating the St. Peter Sandstone that exists today.

The sea also was home to various shellfish and invertebrates. As they grew, they deposited shells and hard exteriors onto the ocean floor. This is the origin of Minnesota’s Platteville limestone, which exists just above the sandstone layer.

Millions of years later, the ice age brought massive glaciers to North America. The Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Minnesota in nearly 2 ½ miles of ice. When these glaciers started to melt, the movement from Canada scraped the more recent soils away, revealing the limestone and sandstone that existed further below. This shaped Minnesota’s current landscape.

Throughout the 1800s, people began to mine the St. Peter Sandstone to make glass, and that mining created the caves that exist today in St. Paul.

What’s so great about the caves?

When Willes Barnes Combs became a professor at the University of Minnesota in 1925, he soon discovered the existence of Minnesota’s limestone caves and realized that the conditions replicated that of the Roquefort caves in France, known for its cheeses. It was the only place in the world, other than France, where this had been found.

Ideal cheesemaking conditions were difficult to create at the time. The room had to both be cool and humid, which was hard to maintain in facilities and even harder to find in nature. In addition, limestone’s natural ability to absorb ammonia is ideal for making blue cheese. The discovery came at just the right time.

Cheesemaking begins

World War II made it challenging to import many goods, including Roquefort cheese. In addition, there was a massive dairy surplus and due to the Great Depression people wanted — even needed — to find an elevated use for it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) thought attempting to replicate this cheese would be the right solution.

Combs got to work renting a cave, securing funding from the state of Minnesota, and made 100 pounds of cheese. His first attempt fumbled as he missed one crucial detail: The cave had no door, meaning the atmosphere of the cave was open to outside influences.

He tried again, this time securing federal funding and adding a door to the mouth of the cave. Combs successfully made more than 10,000 pounds of blue cheese in 1934.

While delicious, the cheese couldn’t be classified as Roquefort because it was made with cow’s milk and not goat’s milk. The cheese was named “Minnesota Blue.”

St. Paul's Wabasha Street Caves was home to the Castle Royal nightclub in the 1930s, and became an ideal cheesemaking facility in the 1940s. (File photo)

Great success

In 1940, with French imports being completely cut off due to the war, other companies started to hop on the bandwagon of Combs’ discovery. Land O’Lakes and Kraft both rented space in a cave that was previously a speakeasy, the Castle Royal.

In January 1941, it was estimated that Minnesota produced between 2.5 million and 3 million pounds of blue cheese. The following year, the New York Times published an article stating that St. Paul wasn’t too far off from being the “blue cheese capital of the world.”

Stinky, right?

By 1949, imports of Roquefort cheese dropped to almost zero, even in a postwar world, as people began to prefer the taste of Minnesota’s cheese to that of France’s.

In the 1950s, businesses began to develop their own ripening chambers that were less expensive, leaving St. Paul’s caves empty of cheesemaking. However, some makers still use Minnesota caves for cheesemaking, including the Caves of Faribault.

Today, Minnesota continues to be known for soft cheeses that have a similar quality to European cheeses. And if it weren’t for Combs, Buffalo wings would lack a lot of joy.