cheeselist

[cheeselist]

Northamptonshire Blue

My 2024 cheese tasting covered delicacies from Wales, Lancashire, Switzerland, Italy, Somerset, Spain, Gloucestershire, Suffolk and Norfolk. Let's bring it back down south to a food market in East Sussex and a cheese from Northamptonshire.

St Leonards Church Market has been running for a year now, and is a brilliant place to stop off on a Saturday, browse craft stalls, fill up with pizza made on the spot by Dough-Ray-Me, chug a local black lager from Three Legs brewery, and buy a bit of whatever the Cheese on Sea stall has in that week. Just a few days before Christmas, they had a great big wheel of Northamptonshire Blue and so i bought some.

This soft blue is made by Gary Bradshaw and team in Daventry; they also make Cobbler's Nibble, amongst others, and run Hamm Tun fine foods deli. The cheese uses unpasteurised Jersey milk and is matured for 6-8 weeks.

Northamptonshire Blue won the 'Artisan Local Product of the Year' title at the 2024 Weetabix Northamptonshire Food and Drink awards. Far be it from me to argue with Kettering's big yellow cereal empire, but Weetabix is awful, and I needed to taste the blue for myself. Ignoring the unappealing grey crust, the pale paste and modest mould seams provide a creamy texture and a fruity, lemony tang with plenty of salt and umami. It's a lovely, straightforward cheese, and would be perfect in a savoury pastry or tart.

£47/kg. Cheese on Sea, St Leonards-on-Sea

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Mrs Temple's Binham Blue

A short break in delightful Norwich revealed something quite unexpected - this ancient city, full of antiques shops, restaurants, cafes and a wonderful Victorian shopping arcade - does not have a bricks and mortar cheese shop. An oversight, surely! There is a busy town square market however, with a cheese stall called The Cheeseman which is piled with good value chunks of yellow. Just make sure to plan browsing well before 4pm, when everyone suddenly shuts up shop.

Binham Blue is made by (Mrs) Catherine Temple, using veggie rennet and pasteurised milk from Holstein Friesian and Swiss Brown cows. The farm is in North Norfolk by the picturesque Wells-next-the Sea, on the Holkham Estate, and is where Mrs Temple makes a range of local namesake cheeses including Walsingham, Wells Alpine, and Wighton using renewable energy.

The cheese has a thin grey crust, and displays lines of blue mould in a light creamy paste which changes to ochre near the creamline. It's a milder blue than a cheese such as Stilton - easily eaten, smooth, salty, savoury and with rich fruity notes. It has a delightfully well-developed flavour for a budget-friendly price. It's also made yards from one of the best beaches in England, but don't tell any more people!

£25/kg, The Cheeseman Stall, Norwich

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Suffolk Gold

After chugging slowly out of Norwich and into the Norfolk countryside, the route to Holkham Beech took us through the supremely posh small town of Holt. I'd been recommended Bakers & Larners deli as a spot to buy a beach picnic, and we got lucky with finding the only available parking space in Holt just opposite this palace of lavishly packaged foodstuffs. It's not so much a deli as a large stately foodhall, and while the picnic ended up coming from a cafe nearby, I did browse the long cheese cabinet and pick an East Anglian variety - Suffolk Gold.

This golden-coloured cheese is made by Jason and Katharine Salisbury with pasteurised milk from their herd of Guernsey and Jersey cows. The semi-soft farmhouse style uses veggie rennet and is matured for around 10 weeks. It's rare that I don't like a cheese, but my piece had a rather unappealing brown-grey, damp outer crust, and a slightly sickly-sweet smell. The paste was dense and rubbery, which I never really enjoy, although it had a creamy texture on eating which was pleasant. The flavour to me was quite sour and abrasive, with hints of bitter vegetable. I've read online reviews describing it as a 'unique twang'. My reviewing notes say "possibly an example of what people who hate cheese think it all smells and tastes like - hide in a paprika-laced cauliflower cheese". So, sorry Suffolk Gold but this one is a nope from me.

£25.50/kg, Bakers & Larners, Holt

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Bibury

Walking back from Bedminster into central Bristol requires crossing a footbridge over the Severn, and then the short width of the long, thin Spike Island. A small deviation west along the bottom of the island will bring you to Spike Island Gallery, which houses the fabulous Emmeline cafe (doorstop sausage sandwiches, fresh salads and great coffee). But carry straight on instead and you'll enter a boxpark-style shopping street of restaurants and tiny cubicle businesses in the shadow of the giant M Shed museum. Here is a sweet little cheese shop, The Bristol Cheesemonger. They had various English and continental cheeses in stock and I picked the first one I hadn't heard of, Bibury.

Bibury is an Ossau-Iraty style of washed rind pasteurised sheep's milk cheese, made by David Jowett at King Stone Dairy, Chedworth, Gloucestershire. The milk is sourced from a local herd once owned by Ram Hall (who produced the famous Berkswell until 2023), and which now resides at Sheaf House Farm.

It turns out that the first Bibury cheeses were made in June 2024 and then matured for three months, so my October purchase would have been one of the first Biburys out there ready for eating. Well, it was an unusual bite. A thick, grooved rind covers a yellow, hay-coloured paste with speckles of small eyes and a rich, nutty smell. It has a really unusual flavour - vegetal, with hints of a papery undertone. A seasonal cheese such as this will change flavour profile throughout the months. Look out for 2025 Biburys from later summer!

£48/kg, The Bristol Cheesemonger

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Payoyo

This is a fairly unusual (in the UK) goats milk cheese from Andalucia, Spain. The name comes from the Payoya goat which grazes in the Sierra de Grazalema pastures. Wonderfully, it's made by a relatively young and successful dairy, Payoyo Cheese, founded in 1996 by two Spanish cheesemakers who now support a staff of 20. They produce a number of varieties, including rosemary and paprika, and one rubbed with butter.

My chunk of 'semi-curado' (semi soft) was purchased at the North Street Cheese Co, a friendly and welcoming shop in the trendy Bristol suburb of Bedminster. I didn't need much persuasion to try a few samples, and ended up with about the most expensive thing in the shop. Payoyo has, as with most goats cheese, a very pale cream colour paste, with a lightly textured crust. There's a dense, grey maturation line below, and the cheese itself is dry, yielding, and chewy. To taste, it starts out with floral, herby notes and then becomes very salty and very savoury - a farmyardy 'real' flavour which is extremely delicious. I ate mine with the crispy and creamy Miller's Damsel buttermilk crackers, which were perfect.

£71/kg, North Street Cheese Co, Bristol

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Duckett's Caerphilly

The Duckett of 'Duckett's' is Chris Duckett, who moved his cheesemaking operation to Westcombe Dairy, Somerset in the 1990s - although the family has been making Caerphilly since the 1920s. The dairy's milk is used to make their Westcombe Cheddar too, but Caerphilly takes less time to mature (2 to 3 months), and has been used by cheesemakers for decades to bring in money while cheddar batches mature. Although Chris is now retired, his brining tanks are still used to finish the rounds.

This pasteurised version of their Caerphilly has a brown, gnarly crust, and underneath is a reassuringly yellow cheese. It has a dense, chewy bite, sweet hay and fusty farmyard notes, and a lactic edge on the finish, although overall it's fairly mild and not a bit scary.

£24/kg Hauser & Wirth, Somerset

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Yarlington Blue

In October, I stopped off at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Bruton, Somerset, while en route to Bristol. In the last 10 years, Bruton has become a sort of Chelsea transplant in the soft green countryside. There's so much money swishing about - there are two boarding schools within the same village, and the associated boutique businesses and organic air for the parents. Hauser & Wirth is a Swiss art dealer and gallery with outposts in choice global locations, now including Bruton. The centuries-old farmhouse and outbuildings have been expensively converted into a modern art gallery, a guesthouse, a cafe, an elaborate bar, a bookshop and of course a farm shop. There's also a stunning garden by Piet Oudolf which, with its prairie-style matrix planting, is gorgeous even on the edge of winter.

Anyway, after admiring the giant Phyllida Barlow installations, I was farm-shop bound to buy an eccles cake, cider, and local cheeses. The first was Yarlington Blue.

This striking orange cheese is younger version of a Shropshire Blue style, made using veggie rennet by Longman's Cheese in Yeovil (and not to be confused with the washed rind Yarlington made in the Cotswolds). The 8 inch rounds of pasteurised cow's milk cheese have a natural crust and a wonderfully creamy interior. It has a savoury, yeasty flavour with big peppery notes; really delicious, with umami savouriness. Perfect to eat alongside a gooey, raisin-stuffes eccles cake.

£24/kg Hauser & Wirth, Somerset

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Inglewhite sheeps cheese

Inglewhite is made in Lancashire by Carron Lodge, based at Park Head Farm. Two generations of farmers started diversifying into cheese with a recipe from 1900. The first style was called Carron Lodge. Now with a 3rd generation of the family involved, they make around 30 types of cheese from cow, goat, sheep and buffalo milk, and even have their own maturing caves.

Inglewhite is one of these styles - they make a goat and a buffalo version, but my piece was made from ewe's milk and vegetarian rennet. It is wax-coated with a layer that looks like the purest Christmas cake icing; it's also available longer-matured and cloth-bound. Underneath, the paste is supple and slightly rubbery in texture. This version is matured for five months, which gives a beautiful sweetness to the mild flavour, like a lovely milky pudding. It's perfect with nutty oatcakes for easy eating.

£30/kg, Truffles, Ross-on-Wye

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Y Fenni

Two cheeses now from the lovely, well-stocked Ross-on-Wye deli, Truffles. They stock continental cheeses, but also lots of English and - unsurprisingly, given the location - Welsh cheese too.

Y Fenni (pronounced 'a-venni') is the Welsh name for Abergavenny, the town from where it originated. It's made by several companies these days - Welsh cheddar is blended with beer and mustard seeds to make a creamy, crumbly, chewy cheese with a delicious tang and a background hum of mild heat. My sample also has a thin, pale wax coating, so I think it would have been made by Croome Cuisine who specialise in various flavoured cheddars. It's straight-forwardly delicious, like a mustardy cheese-on-toast without the effort of even needing to make the toast.

£20/kg, Truckles, Ross-on-Wye

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22-month Gruyère

A weekend in Switzerland allowed just enough time to visit Gruyère in the French-speaking Fribourg region. There's a wonderful, preserved late-mediaeval town up the hill, which has a museum of HR Giger's art and bar serving green Alien beer. So far, so weird. Down in the valley is the main Gruyère factory and visitor centre, which is much less creepy unless you are scared of old milk. Cheese-making had finished before lunch but there was still plenty to see, including incredible stacks in the maturing rooms, where the wheels are turned by robots.

In the shop, I found the oldest Gruyère available - 22 months. It's commonly sold from 6 months, with 9 and 12 also on offer. The difference between 6 months and 22 is a perfect illustration of the value of maturation. A 6 month cheese is mild and nutty, perfectly pleasant. By 12 months it has a more robust and astringent flavour, with notes of pineapple tang and salty toasted nuts.

By 22 months the pale yellow cheese has developed a deep ochre crust, and a very smooth, dense paste. On tasting, it provides a massive instant smack of savoury umami. It breaks down quickly into a rich, creamy cheesecake consistency with defined crunchy crystals, and then a lovely sweet finish, like hazelnut butter on toasted milk bread. There's no hint of bitterness, sourness or ammonia, it's just astonishingly delicious.

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Briscola

On the way to a hospital appointment I had about four minutes to spare en route from London Bridge station. Borough Market is NOT somewhere to pop into and expect to achieve anything in four minutes, however against all odds I came across the Drunk Cheese stall, zoned in on Briscola, bought a chunk, and was out on the street again with seconds spare.

Drunk Cheese specialise in the lovely Italian tradition of soaking cheese in wine during the maturation process. The wine used for Briscola (named after a tavern card game, and hailing from Veneto) is Raboso. During the four months of aging the small cheeses are immersed in this fruity red, alongside marc, a grape spirit made with the leftover seeds and skins from wine production. It gives this cow's milk cheese the most fantastic, dramatic, deep red rind. Inside is a pale, pliable paste with tiny eyes. There's a pungent, boozy whiff; it smells like cheese and port combined. It has a powdery bite, acidic notes to start, and then a strong red fruit flavour laced with stinging salt and pepper. It goes from sharp tang to fruit to a savoury finish in a few remarkable chews. This is a cheese to slice up and mull over with no biscuits or bread, and maybe just a crisp white wine in the other hand.

£40/kg, Borough Market, London

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Dewlay Lancashire Creamy

A visit to Liverpool provided surprisingly few cheese-buying opportunities. The primary cheese shop is some way out of town in Woolton, so instead I headed to a recommended deli and importer of fine foods, Delifonseca, which is on the river, south of the Albert Dock area. Many of their cheeses are indeed fine foods imported from the continent, but I was able to buy a portion of Lancashire Creamy made by Dewlay (the Wigan pronunciation of du lait, apparently).

Dewlay Cheesemakers were founded in 1957 and are based in the village of Garstang, north of Preston. I visited the impressive dairy and visitor centre, powered by a wind turbine, in 2018 whilst in the Forest of Bowland, trying both the Garstang Blue and the Lancashire Crumbly at the time.

The Creamy is also a cows milk cheese, made to an unusual two-day curd recipe. A two-day curd mixes curds from consecutive days together before pressing, which results in a more mellow, buttery cheese than the simpler and cheaper one-day curds. Garstang dairy makes tonnes of the stuff, and it's packaged up in 200g pieces under the Garstang label, or to supply on to various supermarket brands including M&S and Booths. My piece was cut from the original truckle however. It's a smooth yellow block, few marks, no rind. Similar to the Crumbly version (which was so delightfully crumbly I could barely cut it), it has a soft, milky flavour with lemony tang; the Creamy also has a caramel finish which in my opinion puts it right ahead.

Delifonseca, Liverpool. £21/kg.

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Brebin Corse (Corsican Sheep's cheese)

On a recent work trip to Paris I made sure to leave a couple of hours for cheese. Try typing 'cheese shop' into a google map of Paris... quite a few turn up (of course)! There's a distinct cluster around Rue Cler, and so with no other particular pointers we headed there in the unseasonably warm October sunshine.

Rue Cler turns out to be a wonderful pedestrianised street of food businesses, spilling out into the cross-streets and cluttered with fruit stalls, bentwood bistro chairs, and ice cream fridges. There's a large cheesemonger called simply La Fromagerie, but I spied a smaller and altogether more intriguing shop around the corner - Cantin.

This looked very much the sort of place with a long heritage of small-batch cheeses, possibly all affinaged exclusively for one seller. Inside, we were the only customers, and out came Madam Cantin herself (I later learned), who watched us with amused eyes as we tried to make sense of the labels. She took over the cheese shop from her parents in 1982, and it's been at this location since 1950. Cantin specialises in Comté, Camembert, and little goats cheeses called Bouton de culotte (trouser buttons). She stocks a highly regarded 40-month matured Comté, but I wanted something I knew nothing about, and spotted a 'Brebin Corse' - Corsican sheep's milk cheese made from lait cru, or raw milk.

There was an enticing 200g-or-thereabouts piece sitting on the pile, and so for an easy life I pointed, we murmured c'est combien?, paid up and left happy, admiring the bright orange wedges of mimolette on the way out.

This wonderful cheese is known generically as a tomme Corsica - a barrel-shaped farmhouse cheese produced by numerous small holdings. It has an aged crust with mottled colouring and striped grooves, and a deep beige waxy cheese right underneath. The centre is dryer and softer to bite. Chewing it carefully reveals various interesting, subtle flavours including a hay sweetness and umami savoury notes rather than lots of salt. It should be eaten in slices as an aperitif, with a glass of red wine. Fantastique!

Cantin cheeses, €55.40/kg

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Berwick Edge

This smashing slice was picked up at Rippon Cheese on my quest to collect a January-sale Christmas tree from the nearby Argos. Never pass up the opportunity to turn any old task into a cheese shopping trip!

It’s a classic Gouda style, made by Maggie Maxwell from the unpasteurised milk of the family farm herd of 400 Ayrshire, Friesian and Normandy cows in Wooler, Northumberland. Berwick Edge was the first cheese developed by the family in the 1980s; Doddington (see previous post) is another of their successes. The Gouda influence came when a number of Dutch agricultural students visited the farm after travelling across the North Sea, and the Maxwell family then headed back over to visit them in an exchange of sorts.

The curd is cut and stirred thoroughly to produce a dry texture, before pressing into moulds for 4kg or 8kg rounds and soaking in brine. The cheese has an even, orange rind, and inside is a golden-yellow, hard cheese with a crystalline texture. To taste it has a fantastic deep flavour with umami and yeasty notes, then a salty-sweet fruity tang which fades into an acidic finish.

And the name? Berwick Edge is a nearby strip of hills used during WW2 by RAF pilots to guide them to the local air base.

Rippon Cheese, Pimlico, £42.50/kg

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Cáis Dubh

In May 2023 a lovely day was spent at Melton Mowbray artisan cheese fair. At least 40 cheesemakers had stalls full of yellow goodness, from the big names (Kirkhams, Long Clawson), and locals including Colston Bassett, Stichelton Dairy and Cropwell Bishop, to the rising stars of Alsop & Walker, High Weald Dairy and many more. Many samples were eaten, washed down with cider, before I spent my cash at one particular stand - the Fermoy Natural Cheese Company.

Cais Dubh, Irish for 'Black Cheese', is one of two fabulous cheeses I chose from the Fermoy display (see adjacent post for the other). This is a gouda-style cheese studded with fenugreek seeds. It has a black, dense, waxy rind and a delightful sprinkling of eyes within the pale, thick paste. It's strong, rich and savoury with the distinction of the comforting fruity mustiness of fenugreek in the foreground. It won gold at the Irish cheese awards in 2021 in the 'flavour added' category. I'm not usually such a fan of cheeses with additional flavours (in particular fruit - bleugh!), but this combination works wonderfully to make a cheese full of punch.

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St Gall

This is the second cheese I picked which is made made by Frank and Gudrun Shinnick of Fermoy Natural Cheese Company in Co. Cork in the south of Ireland. The small farm is organic and has a closed herd of Friesian cows. The name St Gall comes from St Gallen monastery in Appenzell, Switzerland. Gudrun is German, and all of their small-batch cheeses are based on German or Swiss styles. The 'natural' of their company name comes from the bacterias used as starters which are all cultivated from the same milk, not bought in.

St Gall is a brine-washed, raw cow's milk cheese, formed into foot-wide rounds and matured for at least three months. Cut it open and a springy, creamy yellow interior full of little eyes is revealed. It's exceedingly rich, salty and savoury but still fairly gentle on the palette. This cheese melts well and would be totally gorgeous in a raclette-style dish or extravagant toasted cheese sandwiches.

... Talking of which, while at the cheese fair I also found time to stuff a cheese and onion jam toasty of heavenly crispiness into my gob, courtesy of the Big Melt stand. Thank you Melton, we'll be back!

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Extra Old Gouda

The Henri Willig shop on Haringpakkers Steeg in central Amsterdam is a tourist mecca - full of Brits eating the samples and sniffing the wedges. The brand, now with multiple shops in several European countries, has been around for at least 40 years. Henri and his wife Riet took over the family farm in the mid-70s and turned to cheesemaking not long after. They now have two factories in The Netherlands and collect milk from around 40 farms, many of which are organic. The range also includes goat and sheep’s milk, as well as flavoured goudas (pesto, cumin, chilli, truffle and more). Those are never quite my thing, but they all look great in the clean and spacious shops.

Once the curds are washed (focusing sweetness), drained and pressed, the gouda wheels are brined in a salt bath before moving to maturing rooms for anything up to, or even sometimes over, a year. The Extra Oud piece I chose is HW’s oldest offering, matured for over 12 months. It’s made using organic cow’s milk and, like all of their cheeses, microbial (vegetarian) rennet. It’s extremely smooth and firm - none of the cliché eyes - with a neat, shiny rind. The interior is a lovely amber colour and satisfyingly chewy and dense to eat. There’s an instant salted buterscotch sweetness on the palate, which develops into a rich, malty blast of umami. Highly delicious - chunk it up and eat with a good shot of aged geniver from the liquor store opposite on Nieuwendijk. 

Yes... it’s a real place. If you want to visit the mothership, a short train ride from Amsterdam heading south west will bring you to the spiritual home of one of the world’s oldest and most popular cheeses. Gouda city had a mediaeval monopoly on the selling of farmhouse cheeses within the province of Holland, and has hosted cheese markets since the late 1200s. It also has a Gouda Cheese Experience, a building painted yellow... and with cheesy holes.

Extra Oud Gouda, €13.95 (about £12.30) for 300g