Last week, a colleague from Germany came to visit. Last year we worked together on a large biodynamic farm near Hamburg. He is a professional cheesemaker and came to help me in my current job making cheese at a young cheese business in Somerset.
The Somerset region is well-known for its long history of cheddar cheeses and so we set out to visit one of the more interesting farmhouse cheddar makers, Westcombe dairy.
The reason we visited this particular dairy is because they are also suppliers of freeze dried food cultures from Chr. Hansen, a global bioscience company, cultures that my current employer uses for his cheese making.
Interestingly enough, when I asked the owner of Westcombe, whether he used these cultures to inoculate his cheddar and other cheeses, he told me no, instead, they use a very old local -mother- culture, indigenous to the land. I was excited, a very animated discussion followed about the beauty of milk and the land in Somerset.
The cheddars are handmade from raw milk, using beautiful presses, wrapped in cheesecloth and ripened in a cellar that is cut out into the hill. Incredible sight, smell, and taste.
The cheese slabs, prepared earlier in the day are cut and put in a sort overhead shredder, the bits of cheese are salted and raked, put in the moulds to pre-press, then in a horizontal, sideway press.
Much of farmhouse cheesemaking is ‘hand made’
The cheeses ripen….
Sense-ible Bag Lady 