cheese-maker
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Blog Cheese Makers
Good cheese – really good cheese – is more than just a tasty food made from milk. It is a confluence of history, provenance, and, perhaps most importantly, people. When I am helping to source and select cheeses for us to import, it is just as vital that I get to know the stories of the people behind them. To truly do this, it is vital to travel to the source to see, to speak, and to taste.
We are rarely satisfied at The Fine Cheese Co., a quality that is at the company’s core. Our founder Ann-Marie Dyas stated it plainly: “Seek out the best and, when you find it, keep looking”. This mentality keeps us from resting on our laurels, and we are constantly on the hunt and keeping our ears to the ground. Sometimes, a delicious cheese we have carried experiences change in some way, and we consider how this affects us.
In this case, we learned quite unexpectedly that the affineur in Aurillac we had worked with for years
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Blog Cheese Makers
Being a Somerset cheese company means we’re joined at the hip to our local Cheddar makers: from the mighty Montgomery’s to the wonderful Westcombe.
Because of this, getting my West Country colleagues to take on a Welsh Cheddar was on the impossible side of difficult.
But there it now rests, on our bowing spruce boards and in its rightful place: Hafod (pronounced Havod – meaning summer pasture in Welsh) - one of the finest Cheddars made in the UK.
Having adopted their cheese, I thought it was about time the sales team I and (Ollie, Gabi and Flo) paid our Welsh neighbours a visit to spend a gruelling 12 hours with Sam helping him turn his milk into Hafod. We started bright and early helping milk the cows. Although Ollie wasn’t too impressed when he got on the wrong side of one: his brand new jeans were a little muddied to say the least!
Soon after milking was finished we got hands-on in the cheese-making room helping to set the curd before a exhausting day spent -
Blog Cheese Makers
28th February 2012
Sue LockI arrived at Ram Hall just in time to pull on a very long glove and plunge my arm into the partly separated curds and whey for a gentle stir. Cheese making in Berkswell is very hands-on. Powdered lamb’s rennet is added to the warm raw milk, all of which comes from the farm’s flock of 650 Friesland and Friesland-Devon cross ewes. The milk is heated, stirred and cut before Julie and her team mould the cheese by hand into colanders, giving the cheese its characteristic shape and patterning.
