Quicke's Slow Food Cheddar

Many people in France and Switzerland assume that there is no cheese worth of the name made in England. That is very unfair, as the English make dozens of extraordinary cheeses, some of which like Cheddar or Stilton with thousand-year-old traditions. But let's face it - most of the cheddar produced nowadays is of the rubber tyre sort. There are only nine dairies in England who still make cheddar by hand using proper milk. How do you make traditional cheddar? where are these dairies and what do they look like? How good is the cheese? To find out, follow me on my visit of two traditional cheddar-making dairies in the South West of England. First stop is Quicke's farm - the largest of the nine.

This article contains seven 360° panoramas: Washing the vats, Cheddaring, Milling, Milling 2, Maturing, Maturing 2, Maturing 3 - just click on the picture when it says «panorama» or open them right now.

If you're serious about cheddar, don't bother with the tourist traps at Cheddar in Somerset. The scenic gorge is designed to suck tourist up, empty their pockets and spit them back on the pavement a mile down the road. There is just nothing for the foodie there. Aim for Newton St Cyres in Devon and go visit Quicke's. Only nine dairies make farmhouse cheddar nowadays in England, and Quicke's is the biggest. You could be forgiven for thinking this is an industrial operation given the brand new stainless-steel equipment and large buildings. But most of the work is done by hand. It is traditional cheddar on a large scale. This results in a superior product much comparable to my beloved swiss fromage d'alpage.

Stewart Dowle, 30 years on the job at Quicke's, took me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the farm and dairy.

All of Quicke's cheese is made from the farm's own 300-cows-strong herd, which grazes in neighboring fields where Mary Quicke's family has been farming for 450 years.

Let's move inside and see what's cooking.

The milk is pumped from the cows' tits into a tank, then into this pasteurising machine where it is heated at 73°C/163°F for 17 seconds to reduce the number of potentially dangerous micro-organisms. They also do an upasteurised cheddar on the farm but most milk goes through pasteurization.

A yogurt-like starter culture is then added. This gets mixed with the pasteurised milk and left for 15 minutes at 31°C/89°F. The bacteria in the starter start multiplying and converting the milk's natural sugar into lactic acid. During the whole cheesemaking process, the concentration of lactic acid will be measured. As soon as it is acid enough, the cheesemaker goes to the next stage, never before.

Rennet is added and the milk is left to curdle for 50 minutes, breaking it into the liquid whey and hard witish chunks of curdle. The curds are broken down into pea-sized pieces by giant blades that turn slowly across each of the four thousand-gallon vats. Hot steam circulates in a double wall all around the vat to increase the temperature to 41°C/103°F to boost bacterial activity and cook the curds for 60 minutes, then the curds are stirred for another 60 minutes. If you do the math, from time the milk goes into the vat to the start of the cheese making itself (here below), that's 4:15 hours.

Our first 360° panorama shows the 1000-gallon-vats just emptied of their of curdled milk being washed with a fireman-sized hose.

The curdled milk is emptied on a sister vat on the lower ground floor of the workshop...

... where it will slowly drain off to try and get the cheese out of the whey.

As the whey makes way for the curds, they are pushed aside by the dairy workers under the expert direction of Malcolm Mitchell's, the head cheesemaker.

Jo didn't like to have his picture taken but had much fun sticking his tongue out for my pictures!

Shovelling cheddar curds is hard work. Most of the guys on Malcolm's crew were formerly with Her Majesty's armed forces, some of them submariners, as you may have guessed from the tattoed arms. Hard-working people. Whether they are quicke-tempered, I can't say, but they certainly are passionate about the cheese.

Cheddaring (360° panorama) is one of the key operations that give the cheese its structure. The curds are sliced, then those slices are piled up to drain even more of the remaining liquid. After a little while, the curds develop a unique strand-filled flesh much like chicken breasts or mozzarella. POn the pictures you see a vat of regular cheddar and another of Double Gloucester, a cheese with natural yellow-coloring.

During the cheddaring the whey continues to drain through a filter and into a pipe system. I'll show you what happens to it in another article.

The large slices of still coarse curds are first separated to let the whey trickle down, then after a few minutes turned upside down for further draining.

Finally the now much thinner and harder slices are piled up by threes, then by five...

...until you can pull a piece of curds like you would a strand of chicken breast flesh.

Now the solids curd slabs must be milled into hazelnut-sized pieces to get the proper texture for the finished cheese. You could wonder about the whys of such a mysterious process, but all you need to do is consider the extraordinary diversity of cheeses all produced from the same ingredients - milk, rennet and salt. Tiny changes of temperature and manipulation of curds results in great differences in appearance and taste.

The slabs of curds are fed one by one into a close cousin of the wood chipper, a small machine that can be moved all across the vats.

Malcolm and his crew are busy shovelling the milled curds with their tridents ...

...while another sprinkles salt over the curds. You just can't add salt before the curds are drained as it would kill any bacterial action and stop the acidity from increasing. The salt drains a little more whey out of the already rather dry curds bits.

More salt - 2.5 pounds for 1000 gallons of milk ...

... and then some serious shovelling by Jo Alport and Malcolm Mitchell.

Metallic cheddar forms have been cleaned and lined with fine cheese cloth.

Filling the forms seems like good fun after all the hard work - one man with a shovel, the other pushes the curds in ...

... while the third man ties the cheesecloth on top.

The forms are stacked on top of each other, then squeezed by a giant piston to get dense cheeses and drain off whatever whey was left.

The cheeses are then dipped in hot brine the next day, then covered in lard. Out of 1000 gallons they make about 17 cheeses of 50 pounds each approximately. Each batch bears the production date and a unique color. Two cheeses out of each batch will be tasted at regular intervals to check quality.

Click on the pictures above for three 360° panoramas of the various maturing vaults at Quicke's. There is a rather unique ambience and delicate cheese smell in this temperature controlled rooms - 10°C maximum and 90% relative humidity all year round. Cheeses are stacked up on wooden shelves and left for 12 months or more. Traditional cheddar is not the business to make a quicke buck, as you must work with the quantity of milk your cows are willing to produce and then wait a full year before you can sell.

As the cheese ages, the flavor inside develops and becomes more complex, much like a wine. Cheese really is a noble product where you can taste and infinity of differences in the hands that worked its curds, in the milk he was born from and what the cows have grazed. Unfortunately, a cheese rind is an ideal place for spores, mushrooms and yeasts of all kinds to breed. As the cheese ages, you can see colored spots develop around a single airborne spore that landed there.

The lard offers good protection against yeasts and mushrooms and can be washed. This is not much of a problem.

At the end of the day, English cheesemakers have only two ennemies. The EU bureaucrat, and the cheese mite, and they now have joined forces to drive cheesemakers crazy.

Cheese mites are universally despised by cheesemakers. Since the EU banned a certain chemical that was used to stem the number of mites, cheesmakers are reduced to spray a little ozone over their cheeses. Others rub the cheese rind by hand to obliterate any microscopic holes the mites could use to get in. This doesn't work so well and the mites flourish. There is just no quicke fix. Now the mites even have time to ponder deep philosophical issues:

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter;
The Orthodox said that it came from the air,
And the Heretics said from the platter.
They argued it long and they argued it strong,
And I hear they are arguing now;
But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,
Not one of them thought of a cow.
(Arthur Conan Doyle)

Here are the remains of a cheese mite banquet, with the rind eaten away one inch thick. You can cut off the damaged rind, but the mites let in air that helps all sorts of unsavory microorganism develop. You won't ever see it in the fine cheeses sold by Quicke's farm, but much goes to waste.

A gentleman showed me an example of a much damaged rind with a hole inside. All of this needs to be carved out before it reaches the shelves. I asked what they do with the damaged cheese Aye, we sell it to a guy. What he does with it is ... umentionable.

More cutting and sorting...

... then the cheese is packed and sent off to the clients. Quicke's sells a third of the 500 tons of cheese it makes every year abroad, a third to British supermarkets (Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose, Asda) and the rest to independent cheesemongers through a couple wholesalers.

I tasted all of the cheeses made at Quicke's and warmly recommend their Mature, Extra Mature and Vintage Cheddars, all excellent. They also do a very nice smoked Cheddar and one mixed with herbs. I don't mean to cut Mary to the quick, but I really did not like her raw milk 10-month-old Cheddar - too acidic. But it might turn out to be a great cheese in a year's time - who knows? Now don't take my word for it, Quicke's has a large cupboard filled with all sorts of serious cheese awards.

Quicke's farm is located in gorgeous Devon countryside. The buildings bear no relation to Tchernobyl besides their looks.

The church in next-door village Crediton was the seat of the first Christian bishop in England and is one of the highlight of Devon.

Quicke's
www.quickes.co.uk
Newton St Cyres, Devon
EX5 5AY, England
+44 (0) 1392 851222
Farm and cheese shop (Monday to Saturday, 9AM to 5PM)

The Beer Engine
www.thebeerengine.co.uk
Newton St Cyres, Exeter, EX5 5AX
4 minutes from Quicke's, this is the place to stop for lunch, with friendly staff and decent grub. They even brew their own beer in the back.

Neal's Yard
www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk
Cheesemonger with shops in Britain and the US that stocks Quicke's cheddars as well as many other fine British cheeses.