Well, now we know how we’ve spent the past 12 months. Home consumption of cheese rose 48 per cent last year, allowing cheesemakers to celebrate a record £2.7 billion of sales, according to The Grocer. That’s an awful lot of cheese sandwiches and homemade pizzas.
The bumper year has not been shared equally across the board. While the big dairies — mainly the makers of block cheddar sold in supermarkets — have done well from an army of peckish home workers denied their usual trip to Pret, artisan cheesemakers have struggled.
Almost overnight, when the hospitality sector shut down last spring, their orders dried up just at the time of year when their cheese rooms were at their fullest. Many could only watch as their gooey unpasteurised bries and washed rind goats’ cheeses went to ruin.
As so often, though, necessity has been the mother of invention and artisan cheesemakers across the country have adapted, leading to a boom of creativity and the arrival of more British cheeses than ever. The new names coming to a delicatessen near you soon include Holbrook, Heckfield, Little Lepe and the distinctly un-British sounding La Fresca Margarita, made on Feltham’s Farm in Somerset and “perfect for crumbling over tacos”.
Patrick McGuigan, a cheese expert, says that in a normal year he expects to see four or five new cheeses come to market. This year there are more than a dozen — and these are just the ones he knows of.
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“A lot of artisan cheesemakers didn’t realise how much of their cheese was going into restaurants as they just supplied wholesalers, so when those shut down it was a real problem, especially for soft cheesemakers as their cheeses have such a short shelf life.”
There was a big scramble to find new ways to market, with online sales especially taking off. They started selling directly to consumers.
The problem was not just shifting existing stock, though. If they had their own herds, the milk would keep coming, so what were they going to do with it? To keep making soft cheese seemed especially risky, so there was a switch to making more hard cheeses, which can age for 12 to 24 months. “It’s effectively a clever way of storing milk,” McGuigan says.
As cheesemakers became more connected with their customers, they realised that it made more sense to make a range of cheese styles, to offer a whole cheeseboard, so a bit further into the pandemic, makers of hard cheese started to create soft cheeses to round out
their range.
It is a tribute to the skill and knowhow of our cheesemakers that they have brought so many good new cheeses to market so quickly, McGuigan says. He picked his favourite “lockdown dozen” to showcase in a fortnight at the British Cheese Weekender, a virtual festival he launched last year.
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Producers, cheesemongers and chefs such as Simon Rogan and Tommy Banks will talk cheese, and the cheese-loving comedian Marcus Brigstocke is also on the bill, presumably to provide some cheese-based humour.
Among the Lockdown Dozen is Lypiatt, from the Old Cheese Room in Wiltshire. It looks like a fresh, zingy French goat’s cheese with its wrinkly ash rind but is made from Jersey milk so has an unexpected mouth-coating richness. McGuigan says that he has never known anything like it. “They are best known for their more meaty Baronet, which
is like reblochon, so it’s a complete departure.” They have also introduced a harder cheese called Bybrook, more like a gouda.
Claire Burt of Burt’s Cheeses is best known for her soft Burt’s Blue but has impressed McGuigan with her crumbly, clothbound, Cheshire-style Burt’s Blanc. “It’s not really long ageing, maybe just three months, but it gives her a bigger window to sell in.”
Meanwhile, Simon and Tim Jones at Lincolnshire Poacher Cheese are taking a rather longer approach. They will use some of the milk from their 230 Holstein-Friesian cows to make Poacher 50, a hard aged cheese in the style of parmesan. The milk is scalded to 50C (hence the name), which drives out more moisture to produce a harder cheese, which will age for anything from two to five years. The only problem? It will be at least another year before we can try it.
British Cheese Weekender, April 23 to 25 (britishcheeseweekender.com)
