What’s special about Cheese School

As co-founder of Cheese School I’m probably the last person who should be writing this post but I do think we’ve got something very special going and I think the key to it is the participation of cheesemakers and other artisanal producers.

At our last session two weeks ago (mea culpa - I meant to write it up before now) we had the legendary Charlie Westhead of Neal’s Yard Creamery who makes Perroche, Dorstone and Ragstone and Maughan and Kim, Todd Trethowan’s brother and sister in law who make Gorwydd Caerphilly talking about how they make and mature their cheese and how the seasons affect it.


Andy Cooper from the Bristol Beer Factory and Matt Eggens of Averys of Bristol went head to head in our ‘Beer versus Wine’ ‘smackdown’.


We copped out and told them they’d both won. Well, we want them to come back and do it again, don’t we?

Elly and Dan from the brilliant underground supper club Montpelier Basement came in and made an amazing lunch of cauliflower soup with Welsh rarebit (above) and Homewood fresh ewes cheese with blood orange and marmalade croutons (below), the recipes for which you can find on Dan’s blog Essex Eating and ellypear's posterous


We also had some delicious bread from Marks Bread, coffee from Cornwall roasters Origin Coffee and fruit from the Bristol-based Better Food Company. And food photographer Rob of Eat Pictures took some great pix which you can find on his posterous blog here. Grateful thanks to all.

So what next? Well, we’re planning a big outdoor event for the summer which we’ll tell you about as soon as we’ve fixed the date (probably July) but the really great thing is the number of producers and other good people who want to come along and do a session with us. So it’s gradually growing . . .