Culver’s Curderburger Offers An Absurdist Glance Into An Untapped Meat Substitute: Cheese

Culver’s (in)famous Butterburger might be the best fast food burger out there. After all, its roots lie smack-dab in the middle of Wisconsin’s Burger Belt, a strip of burger goodness that runs between its two biggest cities, Milwaukee and Madison. The stretch of I-94 that runs between Wisconsin’s political and cultural capitals has given birth to some truly spectacular burgers. Local hits like Kopp’s, the Village Bar and Bubba’s all sit just off the well-worn interstate, but Culver’s is undoubtedly the Belt’s crowning achievement.

Bringing a buttery ‘Sconnie postcard to every town it graces, a trip to Culver’s is like a trip to the Burger Belt. Solid burgers aside, its menu offers a few tasty treats that can be tricky to come by outside of the Dairy State, including cheese curds and frozen custard. None of this is necessarily anything new. After all, Culver’s has been around for a while now, and curds and custards have been beloved treats in my neck of the woods for decades.

Culver’s made waves on social media as an April Fools joke grew wildly out of proportion. The prank? A cheeseburger with its cheese replaced by one massive fried cheese curd patty. Now, nobody loves a good cheese pull like the denizens of social media, so naturally, the “Curderburger” became a culinary white whale on social media. Like a lot of food-based social media April Fools Day jokes, the idea got so popular that Culver’s eventually turned people’s dreams into reality and served the Curderburger for one day only in October of 2021. Now, it’s back for a slightly longer period of time.

Let me retrace my steps a bit since it’s easy to forget that not everyone’s had a chance to nosh on this delicacy. Cheese curds are one of the things I took for granted growing up in Milwaukee. If you hear about cheese curds and think of those little squeaky cheese bits that top poutine, you wouldn’t be wrong. Though they aren’t technically cheese (yet), they do bear a lot of the same flavors, just with a bit more concentrated umami. They’re a necessary ingredient in poutine, but in Wisconsin, we don’t eat them with fries and gravy. We fry and serve ‘em as an upgraded accessory to a burger or a Friday fish fry during Lent or as a bar snack to throw back during a Bucks game. If you’re looking to get really fancy, you could order them with a side of ranch. Curds have certainly caught some traction outside of Wisconsin, but they’re still pretty difficult to get outside of the Midwest.

If you’ve never had one before, imagine if a mozzarella stick was cut into bite-sized pieces before it was fried. Inside, you still get a stretchy, mouth-scorching, cheesy bite, but cheese curds hit a level of richness and firmness that other cheeses just don’t. They’re kind of like a really sharp cheddar without the abrasive funk. They maintain a much stronger shape and texture than most other cheeses would in a 350-degree fryer, so they have slightly more resistance to the tooth.