Montgomery's Cheddar

In August I went to visit a few of the best cheesemakers in England. For my last article in 2008, I'll take you for a visit of the farm and a tasting of the product.

Click above for a video of my tasting Montgomery's 18-month-old Cheddar (with some help from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote Lord of the Mites) or download Flash Player if needed or click for HD version.

Gourmets looking for proper cheese in England should steer clear of the tourist trap town of Cheddar and drive on South ...

... until they reach North Cadbury. Stop at Manor Farm, the home of Montgomery's Cheddar.

For James Montgomery might well make the best cheddar since King Arthur. With his neighor Keen's, his farm is the best of only 9 farmhouse cheddar makers left in Britain. All the rest is industrial crap, the sort of cheese you use to patch some holes in your tires. But Montgomery, oh, he is serious about his cheese. His family has been working this farm for the last century and all his cheese is from unpasteurized milk from the farm's own herd, which grazes over what scholars consider the most likely location for King Arthur's castle Camelot - the fort of South Cadbury.

 Interactive 360° panorama
 See the huge 1000 gallons vat where the milk is quietly simmering while the lactic ferments work their magic.

As I entered the farm, the milk was already in the vats with the two electrical stirrers slowly moving back and forth and back and forth. A deliciously sweet milk smell filled the room. I just had time to shoot a panoramic picture before the cheesemakers came back.

Pulling a drawbridge, cheesemaker Steven emptied a thousand gallons of curdled milk into the lower vat...

... while his younger colleague made sure all the curdle went down.

The lower vat slowly fills up, while the whey is filtered ...

... and drips furiously into a separate system.

After a while, the beautiful yellowish curds start to emerge ...

... as the cheesemakers quickly set out to work the curds.

The curds coagulate into a solid mass and need to be cut in slabs ...

... which are piled up to drain them of the whey.

Steven takes a sample of whey ...

... and tests its acidity.

Steven has been making cheese for 29 years, the last 14 at Montgomery's. He lives in Glastonbury, which sounds like a thrilling place, but he is not thrilled. In Glasbtonbury, every decent shop over the years has been replaced by some dress-as-Merlin or be-a-sorcerer shop where you can buy all sorts of gadgets to play Lord of the Rings. For the locals that's not so good. We get all sorts of tourists, some of them come to Glastonbury because they think the end of the world has come or that they can be witches. Many are on the dole.

Go into the shredder and leave as cheddarized curds while the second cheesemaker uses his pitchfork to toss the curds.

Steven sprinkles a copious amount of salt over the curds ...

... and the curds are tossed a final time to ensure even distribution...

... while I watch in awe those century-old gestures.

Steven shovels curds into each of the molds, which are garnished with a cloth.

The molds are covered with a plastic disc for the pressing... 

... and Steven carts them to the next room for the final stage. 

Steven turns on the hydraulic press ...

... and watches the few drops of whey remaing in the cheese ooze out, thinking about his work day about to finish.

Before leaving the workshop, the cheesemakers give the place a thourough scrub.

For cheesemaking is a craft bound to scrupulous hygiene. I never saw these guys eat anything while in the room, and every single time they left both cheesemakers and myself scrupulously washed our boots in disinfectant and our hands with a medical soap. Unlike in a restaurant, in cheesemaking sloppy hygiene is not a slow killer.

Montgomery has no website, no email and doesn't advertise. But he sells all the cheddar he makes - no problem. The farm produces 7000 24kg cheeses a year as well as 1200 2kg cheeses. He sells half his production to Neal's Yard, a fine cheese wholesaler and retailer with shops in the UK and USA. In the office, Nick the secretary showed me a big board with their list of customers. That's our rationing board - we get more orders than we have cheeses available, so unfortunately we have to limit the number of cheese wheels each customer gets. Even so more that we get tons of orders over Christmas for our small cheddars, so we have to save them during the rest of the year to have enough to go by at Christmas. They don't export themselves although Neal's Yard sends about 400 heads of cheese a year to its US shops. But with such a cheese, the world has beaten a path to their doorstep. He doesn't really sell to the supermarkets although Fortnum and Mason, the posh London department store, buys him a couple cheese wheels every month.

I ask why they don't produce more cheese then. James Montgomery answers me The real limiting factor are the number of cows we have and the size of our dairy. See, we only have one 1000-gallon vat, and it's working 7 days a week already. Even if the wizard Merlin doubled my herd overnight, you just can't put 2000 gallons of milk in a 1000 gallon vat.

But James Montgomery has some plans. Ever since I'm a kid my mom told me that you can't make proper cheese with the milk from Frisian cows. But what she really meant was that you can't make proper cheddar with this milk - and she's right. But with advice from a guy who used to work at Neal's Yard, our biggest client, we developped a washed-rind cheese based on these cows. It is very much like a raclette cheese and is great for melting. I point out that I come from raclette country - the Swiss canton of Valais - and that I'd be much interested to see his cheese. Mr Montgomery becomes a bit pale in the face, rushes out and comes back with a slice of cheese. I try it - delicious. Tastes very much like Fromage à raclette d'alpage, those cheeses made in the summer up in a chalet in the Alps from the milk of cows pasturing in high altitude meadows. Montgomery's version is made from milk of a similar caliber and with a similar recipe - no surprise that his cheese looks like a premium Swiss raclette cheese. I'd have bought it at my local cheesemonger's in Switzerland.

After a night in the hydraulic press, new cheddars are washed a few times in brine and then coated in a cloth soaked in lard. The cheeses are then left for 12 months to mature. Molds of every color cover the cloth but cannot really damage the cheese crumb unless they enlist the help of cheese mites to dig a hole.

I left James Montgomery and his friends to their beautiful West Country and returned to Switzerland with a small 2kg cheddar which they sell for Christmas. We sell those trickles at Nealzhyard for Christmas, the man at the farm office had explained.

Back home I kept the cheese for a further six month, often contemplating the beautiful patterns the molds made on the cloth. Finally, in late December I decided to have it as you saw on the video on the first page.

Ah, what a cheese! A hard cheese, no doubt, with a delicate nutty taste, worthy of serious Swiss Alpine cheeses.

Beautiful yellow crumb, probably due to the carotene in the grass on King Arthur's lawn.

If you are in town, give Montgomery's a ring to see if you can come buy and visit the farm. Perhaps they'll even sell you a bit of cheese. Don't leave without checking out King Arthur's hillfort across the road in South Cadbury. And if you're hungry, the place to go is a pub called Camelot, just down from the eponymous ruins and now owned by James Montgomery. Friendly service, decent grub, real ales and serious Somerset cider.