The view from the Hattan Family farm.  Up on the higher slopes of the dales, traditional Wensleydale country.

The bulk of this was written a couple of years ago and revisited recently.  I made cheese with the Hattans when I was working for the Courtyard Dairy in 2015/2016.

Andrew Hattan and his wife Sally, farm up at Low Riggs in the high dales above Middlemoor near Nidderdale.  Their farm is up at the top of the Dales and literally off the beaten track.  The tarmac road ends at Middlemoor where there’s a car park where Andrew or Sally will meet you to take you the rest of the way in their 4×4.  The track consists of concrete slabs, fording the odd stream, dirt tracks and winding past other farms, now deserted, but formerly working farms which used to produce Wensleydale cheese.

Andrew and Sally are part of an EU scheme restoring the area to its former fertility as it had been over grazed by sheep farmers in the past 20 years.  They have a grant for re-planting their pastures with herbs and flowers that would naturally have grown at that altitude.  They farm sheep which makes sense as they are hardier than cows but part of their grant means they have to also farm cows.  The only cows which really can produce milk from that sort of pasture, which while rich in herbs, flowers and interesting plants is low in rich, leafy grass, are Northern Dairy Shorthorns, the traditional breed of that area and of the Lake District and Lancashire.

From a retailer’s perspective, their cheese has the potential to be a marketing dream.  The closest to alpine pasture that the UK can find, a rare breed of cow that produces the milk, not to mention that their plan is to make an unpasteurised cheese, ultimately using starters manufactured from their milk and allowing it to blue naturally rather than introducing mould cultures.  It all adds to something you desperately want to sell.

To their credit, the Hattans are taking this slowly.  They can make the farm work financially with their sheep farming,  although they are becoming less and less satisfied with it.  They have yet to get approval from their EHO.  But they have begun to make the odd batch of an old fashioned Wensleydale recipe cheese and thanks to Sally’s experience in the NHS equipping her to interview people in a sensitive way, they have managed to catalogue some fascinating interviews with local ladies, now in their 90s, who made Wensleydale back in the pre 2nd world war days when cheese was still made on the farm.

Until they are ready to get the Environmental Health involved, they make cheese in a utility room off their kitchen.  The plan is to convert that room and a couple of rooms that adjoin it to cheesemaking space within the house.  They have a couple of catering bain-maries which stand in place of steam jacketed vats, currently and use an old cheese press that Andy Swinscoe loaned them.  For the moment, the curd is broken by hand rather than with a curd mill.

Andy and I spent a day with Andrew, Sally and their kids to make cheese, last August.  They had kept the milk from a couple of days milking to make their cheese.  Their neighbour currently milks their cows.  His farm is a bit further down the valley and actually has a milking parlour where their farm has been extensively grazed for sheep.  They put 4 cows through his parlour and save up 2 days milking to make cheese.  It makes a couple of cheeses a batch.  We are not yet talking about serious production but given time, we could be talking about something interesting.  We had met them previously at Graham Kirkham’s where they were asking him about farming, milking and feed.  This time we were coming to help them with a cheese make and suggest ways they could improve consistency and tailor it to the more open textured cheese they hope to make.

They heat the milk in the bain marie and add starter cultures.   When we visited them, they were using DVI cultures which are easy to use and get started with but in the following months, they began to experiment with cultures from Barbers.  They tried MT36 which is beloved by Joe Schneider for his Stichelton, Martin Gott for St James, Todd & Maugan Trethowan for Gorwydd Caerphilly, Sam Holden for Hafod and also Charlie Westhead for his Finn cheese and is known to produce a great depth of buttery flavour in different types of cheese.  However their preference initially was a different Barbers’ starter, recommended for creamy Lancashire production, ML69, whose flavours they felt better suited the sort of cheese they wanted to make.  After acidifying, adding rennet and cutting the curd to 1cm cube, the curd is stirred gently while heating slightly and then whey is run off.  The curd is then allowed to rest, cut into blocks and stacked on top of each other to further assist drainage.  The drained curd at a set acidity is then broken up (currently by hand into walnut size) and salted before being packed into a mould and put into the victorian cheese press that Andy leant them.  It stays there overnight before being removed from its mould, turned and transferred to their maturing room.  And from there it’s a anyone’s guess including their own.  Currently their cheeses have been a bit too dry textured and therefore close textured to allow blue to develop.  As they change starters and therefore the acid profile changes, the texture of a cheese will also change.  While it may may not have worked as of August 2016, things are changing.

The last I heard from the Hattans, with the help of the Specialist Cheesemaking community and no doubt Neal’s Yard Dairy as well as the Courtyard Dairy, they are in production and selling cheese at their farm Open Day.  Andrew had spoken at the Science of Artisan Cheese Conference in 2018 on milk production and I’m sure he was a fascinating speaker.  The years have moved on since I made cheese with them but I hope to be buying their cheese soon.  The ones I have seen do not as yet appear to be blue.  It may happen, it may not.  I think ultimately the milk and the make dictate your cheese whatever you wanted it to be initially.

 

 

Back in January, just as one job was finishing, luckily, I received a message from Julie Cheyney who was looking for someone to help her with her cheesemaking. Would I be interested?

Um yes. I would be honoured.

I know how much Julie’s cheese is a labour of love and to be asked to help was a big deal.

St Jude and St Cera are lovely cheeses. Julie has been making cheese at Fen Farm Dairy for a couple of years now and although the St Marcellin-style lactic cheese was always good before, since moving to Suffolk the cheese has had an extra edge.

Part of the equation is the milk. Jonny Crickmore, whose herd provides the milk for St Jude and St Cera, is also a cheesemaker as I’m sure you all know. He makes the renowned Baron Bigod – in my opinion, the only Brie style cheese being made in the UK that comes close to a French one in terms of depth of flavour. True it is still on the learning curve as the cheesemakers are developing a working knowledge of their cheese comparable to that which has been passed down by French Brie makers from generation to generation but each year the cheese gets better and better and finally this year it was sold into shops in Paris.

However St Jude is not just down to the milk. Julie is an exacting cheesemaker. If the curd hit its ladling pH of 4.6 at midnight or one o’clock in the morning, then that’s when she would ladle it. If the cheeses needed to drain by moving from one room to another repeatedly over several days after moulding in order for a good geotrichum rind to grow, she would be in the dairy several times a day to put a heater on, put a fan on, look at the cheeses and see what they needed. To replicate that was always going to be a tall order. Especially as trial makes in February proved conclusively that midnight ladling followed by a 4 am start in for the milk for the next day’s make does not suit my metabolism one little bit. I got ill and then made Julie ill. Not good.

However in the form of Thierry the Normandy cheese consultant a shorter recipe was devised. Initially, from the beginning of this year, Julie experienced draining problems in the curd which were giving her mucor on the rind instead of geotrichum and blue, yellow, grey spots plus bitter flavours on the bad batches. Thierry suggested an extra step before ladling to help the cheese drain in the vat – cutting a cross a couple of hours after renneting. To begin with this seemed to help but come July we were getting odd split curd in the vat even with the cross cutting and began to wonder if in fact this was weakening the curd. Experiments with not cutting the cross however didn’t bear this out. On the other hand, Thierry came back for another visit and decided that we needed more active starters. It had been taking a couple of hours to cool the milk from cow temperature to 27C using a flag (which looks a bit like a radiator & you can run either hot or cold water through it). Our cold water wasn’t the coldest and hence it took a long time to cool the milk. The starters therefore weren’t able to get going quickly and the natural flora of the milk which may or may not have been what we wanted, were flourishing instead. Thierry looked at Julie’s starters and her method of preparation and suggested adding them directly without incubating overnight. True enough they did work much faster that way. Turns out that a DVI starter has bacteria but also cryogenic particles to preserve the freezing process and if you incubate it overnight those particles inhibit the bacteria. I never knew that! It would appear the only starters that benefit from culturing overnight are bulk starters or levain grains for a bulk starter. Well you learn something new every day.

 

So we set off adding our DVI starters to the milk without cooling and then cooled it at renneting. Initially we had some issues that suggested possible phage so we used some rocket fuel starters, which we have ultimately given up on. For a lactic cheese an 8 hour make is way too short and indeed the cheeses dried to pebbles during maturation because they had very much overacidified. However with a new batch of starters along the lines of her old ones and from the same supplier, we have returned to a better timing of the make and flavours much more like the old St Jude.

The interesting thing has been that longer makes still disintegrate more and drain less well as a result despite not having the overacidification problem. This lead Julie to question further and see if in fact phage was not the overriding issue. Luckily for her the Science of Artisan Cheese Conference was coming up and therefore if she got all her photos and data in a row she would be able to consult Ivan Larcher who after several years setting up his own dairy on a family farm was making some tentative forays back into the consulting arena. Ivan asked questions about titratable acidity of milk and whey, milk tests for fat and protein and suggested we investigate the casein content in the milk. More on that when the results come in.

Clare and Tom Noblet contacted Andy at The Courtyard Dairy just before Christmas to see if he might be interested in buying some of their cheese.  They farm a beautiful area overlooking Farleton Fells and have a herd of about 80 Friesian Holstein cows, around 200 Rough Fell sheep and a few pigs and hens.

They share the farm with Max and Jenny Burrow, the farm owners who were looking to gradually retire.  Tom and Clare are incrementally buying animals, replacing infrastructure and buying into the farm which they both acknowledge has been a lifeline as, with a young family and very little capital behind them, they couldn’t buy a farm for themselves and yet, as Clare told us on our recent visit, all Tom has ever wanted to do is milk cows.

In common with most dairy farmers, though, Tom finds himself incredibly frustrated with the price he receives for his milk.  He cares passionately that the cows should be healthy, happy and well looked after.  It’s the essential cornerstone of production for him.  And yet, the buyers in their area for drinking milk can only offer him a price at which he’s losing money.  It’s infuriating, saps motivation and is frankly unfair.

With the idea of adding value to their milk, Tom built a dairy, just to the side of their milking parlour for Clare to begin making cheese.  They took themselves on a course locally and acquired a recipe for a homestead style cheese which isn’t unlike a young cheddar.  At Andy’s suggestion, they also looked into a Dales style cheese like a traditional, pre-war Wensleydale.  While a mere half an hour from Settle, near Carnforth, they fall into Cumbria rather than Yorkshire but it’s a style of cheese that is well suited to the remoter, hillside areas.  Besides, while in London, the most popular cheeses on the counter are cheddars, once you get up north, we love our crumbly cheeses.  Andy’s current best seller by a country mile is Graham Kirkham’s Lancashire.  Yes, you did read that right.  The best seller in a Yorkshire cheese shop is Lancashire.  Richard the Third Wensleydale, Anster (made by Jane Stewart in Fife), Gorwydd Caerphilly and Appleby’s Cheshire also make up the selection of crumbly cheeses on offer on the tiny counter of the Courtyard Dairy and sales are brisk.

When we visited Whin Yeats farm in November, they had a few very early batches of cheese that were about 4 weeks old. They wanted feedback but also, hopefully, a sale.  One thing I’ve learned though, is that your first couple of batches of cheese aren’t usually suitable for sale and not surprisingly the same was true of theirs.  We felt they needed to add more salt before the flavours were balanced.  However it was encouraging that, even in the absence of salt, we couldn’t identify problem flavours.  We could have noticed gassing or fermented flavours indicating spoilage bacteria in the milk which, without inhibition from the salt, had the potential to go crazy.  It was a promising sign for the quality of their milk that these were absent.

While Andy didn’t buy cheese on that visit, he did scan and email as much technical information about farmhouse Wensleydale as he could find for them along with a couple telephone number and email addresses of people they might ask for help.  They had already had a very useful conversation with Graham Kirkham as the cheeses are similar in style.  Over December and Christmas they were able to get their cheese to a few markets and when we came back for a return visit in mid January to make cheese with Clare, their confidence was much higher, having not only made some sales but having received some complimentary feedback too.

The milk is fed down from the milking parlour to Clare’s vat where a steam jacket heats it to the appropriate temperature for adding starter.  There is a ripening period and rennet is then added.  Once set, the curd is cut and then stirred, at first by hand and eventually. when it is all cut down to the appropriate size. using a paddle.  Whey is drained off and the curd is moved by hand, in blocks, from one side of the vat to the other until it has drained and compressed itself enough to be moulded.  Clare then salts the curd in the vat and breaks it by hand into the moulds.  Filling the moulds, as it is done by hand, takes some time and as we filled moulds, a zen like quiet having descended on the three of us, Clare ventured that she would quite like a curd mill.  If they can get their hands on something manual, it will definitely speed this stage along and will help with even salt distribution as well.

When we tasted their later batches of cheese, the salt levels had definitely improved but we still felt they could take a bit more salt to balance things out.  I remember the first time I made cheese being slightly surprised at just how much salt was used and wondering if it was really neccessary but since then I’m convinced.  Salt plays a vital role in stabilising and balancing the flavours, largely by controlling the bacterial and mould activity and acting as one of the preserving factors in cheese.  Finally the moulds are put into their cheese press and the pressure applied gently.  Clare will adjust this throughout the afternoon but as with Graham Kirkham’s Lancashires, she doesn’t want too much pressure too early on.

As a mum of four with animals to look after as well, the Wensleydale recipe suits the rhythm of her day and the potential for an unpasteurised, crumbly Wensleydale style being sold in both Lancashire and Yorkshire is great once they get over the early stages and get into their rhythm.  Given the quality of their milk, it seems likely that they are 95% of the way there with just a few tweaks here and there to help Clare iron out a few inconsistencies from batch to batch.  Their cheese is already available from the farm and hopefully it won’t be long before they are reaching a wider audience.  Keep your eyes peeled for Fellstone cheese.