The Cheesemaker of Auld Lochnagar

This last weekend I was at the Cheese & Wine Festival on London's Southbank, giving a talk on cheese and wine matching with Rhuaridh Buchanan of Paxton & Whitfield.

One of the cheeses we tasted was a cheddar-style cheese called Auld Lochnagar and Rhuaridh had brought the impressively kilted cheesemaker, Alex Reid of Cambus O'May (above) along to his stand.

It turned out that he had been in the oil business but had decided to revive the family cheesemaking tradition with a recipe from his grandmother that hadn't been used since the 70s.

His principle cheese is an unpasteurised cheddar-style cheese called Cambus O'May which is made from the curds from an evening and morning milking in the old farmhouse style. You can just about see the variation in the colour, below.


It's clean, mellow and well-balanced - not as sharp as a cheddar but with a real depth of flavour.

The deep orange Auld Lochnagar, which is coloured with annato (see back of the main picture), is aged for longer and has more 'bite' though again not as pronounced as a mature farmhouse cheddar. It's therefore rather kinder to wine - I paired it successfully with an organic Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon from Vintage Roots - and, according to Alex, a good match for a Speyside whisky!

The creamery is based in Ballater on Royal Deeside and the cheeses are widely stocked throughout Scotland. You can also buy them online from the Virtual Farmers' Market as well as at Paxton & Whitfield.

Coolea for St Patrick's Day

Having covered Welsh cheeses a couple of weeks ago I should in fairness make mention of Irish ones which are if anything even finer.

If you're out shopping for them today you might like to look at a couple of back posts on Irish cheeses - here and here on St Gall.

Today though I wanted to flag up Coolea (pronounced Coolay), an underrated pasteurised cows' milk cheese in an underrated style, mature Gouda. Although, checking the slightly out of date website, it did win the best matured Gouda category in the World Cheese Awards. You can see it above going through the brining process.

It's not perhaps as flashy as more fashionable cheeses such as Cashel Blue and Adrahan but I've always found it deliciously rich and nutty. A great nibbling cheese.

You can buy it in London from Neal's Yard. For other stockists see their website.

Incidentally I'm going to be at the Cheese and Wine Festival in the Southbank centre square at 3pm this coming Saturday talking about cheese and wine pairing with Ruaridh Buchanan of Paxton & Whitfield with wines from organic supplier Vintage Roots both also exhibiting at the show.

Welsh cheeses for St David's Day

I meant to post this over the weekend however I'm just about still in time to pass on the info that there are some tutored tastings of Welsh cheese in the John Lewis food hall in Oxford Street later today - one at 5.15pm, one at 6.15 and one at 7.15. You're supposed to book ahead but I can't imagine they'll turn you away if there are places.

They also sent me a selection of Welsh cheeses to try and I was quite chuffed that I'd tried - and written about - all except two. They included Golden Cenarth, an award-winning washed rind cheese, Gorwydd Caerphilly, Hafod cheddar and Perl Las (above left) a salty, creamy blue cheese quite similar to Gorgonzola I only found out about recently.


The only ones I wasn't familiar with were Perl Wen (top right), a Brie-type cheese also made by Caws Cenarth and a block Pembrokeshire Extra Mature Cheddar (above, right). I'm inclined to be a bit sniffy about block cheddar but it was really quite mellow and appealing, more attractive to tell the truth than the Hafod which was tasting a bit rustic and cow-y, rather like Cantal which I've never been too keen on.

Anyway, point made. The Welsh do make some good artisanal cheeses as you'd expect given their terroir. Teifi is another one I like. And I'm sure you can find them at John Lewis over the next few days even if you miss today's sessions and tastings.

Incidentally the oatcakes, in the top pic, were rather nice too. And also Welsh but I can't tell you what they are as my husband has scoffed them and thrown away the packet.

Paški Sir: my first Croatian cheese

Having never been to Croatia I've not had an opportunity to try Croatian cheese and didn't expect to be able to buy it in the UK. Or even, to be honest, to be particularly impressed by the quality. But when Sirana Gligora, a Croatian producer offered to send me a sample, I was definitely up for it.

It's a relatively new artisanal sheeps' milk cheese called Paški Sir that comes from the island of Pag which according to the accompanying information sheet "is the most indented of the thousands of Croatian islands in the Adriatic."

You can see pictures of the leggy sheep the milk comes from on their very enterprising Facebook page here Apparently it's a unique breed which has become accustomed to the harsh conditions on the island and which grazes on the wild plants and herbs that are found there.

In taste and texture it was a bit like a cross between a Manchego and a Pecorino - moister than the former, deeper in flavour than the latter. Really delicious though I didn't go much for the accompanying fig balls (just me. My husband scrumped them). Apparently it's already picked up a number of awards including Best New Cheese at the 2010 World Cheese Awards.

It's imported by a firm called D'Issa who will have a full website up and running shortly but you can currently buy it from the shops below:

The Cheese Hamlet in Manchester
The Yellowwedge Cheese in Twickenham
The Cheese Society in Lincoln
The International Cheese Centre in London
Lairds Larder in Carlisle and Sawyers Deli in Belfast

They also have a blog which shows how the cheese is made and even a twitter stream (@PaskiSir). It's good to see an artisanal producer making such smart use of social media.

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 . . .

and another way to use Ogleshield . . .

Couldn't resist trying this at the (very clever and imaginative) London restaurant Caravan yesterday: a dish of turmeric roast cauliflower, Ogleshield cheese sauce and Parmesan crumbs - a left-field version of cauliflower cheese. The cheese sauce had an amazing gooey consistency which I suspect was achieved by simply melting the Ogleshield into cream or milk. I liked the touch of spicing up the cauliflower. It could even have done with a shade more for my taste.

I suspect you could make a regular cauli cheese with this type of sauce. A few smoky bacon cubes would be nice too although I really liked the crispy parmesan thingy on the top which was more like a cheese infused slice of bread than crumbs.

Delicious anyway . . .

My Ogleshield obsession

I've been tasting a fair few cheese burgers lately but none seems to hit the spot quite as nicely as the one they do the cult London steakhouse Hawksmoor. (Quick declaration of interest here - it also happens to be my son Will's restaurant so I'm hardly unbiased!)

Part of the reason is that it's topped with Ogleshield, an unpasteurised brine-washed, Jersey milk cows' cheese. It was originally created by visiting cheesemakers at top cheddar producer Jamie Montgomery and refined by a Neal's Yard affineur, Bill Oglethorpe, hence the name.

The great thing about it - apart from the rich, mellow taste - is that it melts brilliantly, much like raclette. Hawksmoor also uses it for their wackily named Egg HkMuffin - an artisanal riff on the McDonald's breakfast special with a homemade sausage patty (right).

There's a lovely recipe from Rose Prince for some Ogleshield pastries on the Telegraph website and I have a feeling it would make an amazing tartiflette. We're featuring it at Cheese School this weekend so I'll bring some home if there's any left over and give it a whirl.

You can read more about it on the Neal's Yard Dairy site here