Ivan Larcher

We live, We learn … About Lactics

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The herd supplying Neal’s Yard Creamery (also a herd with some Montbeliard influence) lining up to be milked.

As prospective cheesemakers working with a milk supplier usually do, Rose and I have been sending off milk samples for microbiological testing for some months now.  While we’ve had generally good results regarding absence of pathogens, I was taken aback to discover that we also seemed to have an absence of lactic acid bacteria…or certainly we had a lot less then we wanted.

‘Most milk in the UK now is not good for cheese,’ pronounced Ivan Larcher at one of my SAF courses, ‘It is dead milk.’

‘A little damning, surely,’ I thought.

Lactic, if my dictionary is to be believed, means ‘relating to or obtained from milk’. It derives from the latin ‘lactis’ genitive form of the word ‘lac’ or milk.

Doesn’t milk just HAVE lactic acid bacteria in it?

Well, apparently not always and if it does, 1 day in a bulk tank and they are not very happy bugs.

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One side of the milking parlour at Merrimoles Farm showing the stalls in which the cows stand, the pipework and the clusters below.
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For any of my non cheese industry friends reading this post. First off, well done for making it this far into a pretty cheese-geek technical post and good luck with the rest of it. This, should you be wondering, is a cluster and it goes on the cows udders.

Our milking system is like most in the UK Dairy industry.  It has a series of clusters along parallel milk pipes.  Vacuum pumps pulsate to remove the milk from the cows udders and it is piped out of the parlour, through a filter, then a plate cooler and finally into the bulk tank where it’s held at 4C until the lorry comes from Dairycrest to collect it.   They come every 2 days and collect 4 milkings.

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The Bulk Tank.

When we test, we take our samples from the outflow pipe of the bulk tank.  We also send off the milk filter from the last milking which the lab immerse in water and then test the rinsate.  We don’t know anyone else testing the milk filter so when we got our first set of results back and discovered literally millions of bacteria on it, we didn’t know whether this was normal, really bad or even really good.  We certainly knew that millions of the little critters looked pretty alarming on paper.

Our bulk tank milk samples seemed to show a happy grown of Pseudomonas (we don’t want happy Pseudomonas) and a rather less happy growth of Lactic acid bacteria.  The milk filter results seconded this.  In the autumn, we called Ivan back for advice and subsequently did a big clean through using peracetic acid.  Following that we have used a weaker peracetic acid solution for the final rinse of our pipework.

To start off 2014 in the way we intended to continue, with some more testing.  This time, we were hopeful for better results and to be a bit flirty we were going to get Andrew the kindly milker to hand milk a couple of cows for us to see how they compared for lactic acid bacteria.  These cows were a black and white cow that looks more Friesian Holstein in appearance who goes by the name of 266 and a brown and white one that looks more Montbeliard in appearance with the name 258.  266 was docile and calm when milked.  258 was disconcerted not to be in her usual clusters and stamped about a bit. We could identify the test results later because Andrew got less milk from her before asking if he could give up.  The cows that were hand milked were only given a dry wipe to their teats before milking.  Normally when they are milked into the parlour, their teats are given a wash before the pumping starts.  It has reduced the total bacterial counts of the milk right down but rather unfortunately we think it may be washing off our lactic acid bacteria.

The bulk tank contained 3 milkings at this stage.  The fourth was about to take place as we tested and Dairycrest were due that night to collect.   The milk filter was from that morning’s milking.

The samples were posted, results duly came back and we emailed Paul Thomas for advice and guidance in their interpretation.

RESULTS:

Milk:

The bulk tank results were better than we’ve had at other points in the past in terms of Pseudomonas.  Before now we have had counts of 21,000 per ml of milk.  This time we had a count of 170 per ml.  However it did show us some staph aureus too which is less than ideal.  According to our lab (Microtech Wessex) we would hope to see around 80% of the total bacterial count being lactic acid bacteria and unfortunately still on this sample it is considerably less than that.  With a total count of 53,000 total bacteria per ml of milk, this would mean we’d like to see 42,400 of these to be lactic acid bacteria.  According to the test result there are 1,200.

The hand milked samples were very different one from the other.  No 266, the black & white cow’s sample was extremely low in everything.  Almost nothing grew on the lab plates according to the lab.  Its counts are 0 in everything except yeasts.  So it has no coliforms, pseudomonas or staph aureus but unfortunately no lactic acid bacteria either.  I imagine Dairycrest would love it.  For making cheese it isn’t ideal.

No 258, the brown and white cow’s counts however were about spot on what we want.  It had a total count of 8,800 total bacteria which isn’t huge.  However, according to our ideal 80% we would be hoping to see around 7,100 lactic acid bacteria and we have 7,040.  There are 10 yeasts which is good, no Pseudomonas, no Staph aureus.

The two cows results, while interesting and raising a few interesting ideas, thoughts and questions only really give us a snapshot of the milk of 2 animals.  Importantly, though, it does show us that we have got the right balance of lactic to everything else in some of the animals in our herd.  Interestingly, Paul suggested that according to some of the papers he has read, the animals that line up to be milked first, being in general the livelier and healthier animals of the herd, often have lower somatic cell counts (an indicator of health) and as a result often have higher amounts of lactic acid bacteria.  If, as we are planning to do, we take our milk from the animals that are milked first, not only will we be using the pipelines at their cleanest but we will also be getting milk that is better suited to our cheese.  In addition, we will be taking the milk away without it being cooled.  This makes sense from an energy standpoint – why cool it to heat it back up to 38C – but also allows the lactic acid bacteria to compete with the Pseudomonas.  Cooling the milk to 4C and then storing it at that temperature for 36 hours has stopped the small numbers of lactic acid bacteria growing and reproducing but at those temperatures, the Pseudomonas can still grow.  According to survival models Paul referenced we could probably knock that 1200 per ml down to 120 just due to the storage time at cold temperatures.

Milk Filter:

The Milk filter results have always looked rather alarming to us in terms of Pseudomonas.  But corresponding with Paul Thomas meant he helped us by analysing the results so that we can compare them more easily against our milk results.

The relevant results are (per filter):

  • 1,500,000 Pseudomonas
  • 10,000,000 Enterobacteriaciae

So – big numbers.  But, as Paul said, we have to interpret them based on the amount of milk that has gone through that filter.  The most recent milk report I have from the farm dates back to December but if levels are similar to those in December’s monthly report, we are looking at 120,530 litres of milk for the month.  This means a daily total of 3,888 litres.  Each milking there’s a new milk filter so while I expect there’s a difference in quantity between morning and evening, for the sake of mathematical ease, let’s say half of that quantity is applicable to our filter tests: 1944 litres.  1944 litres works out at 1,944,000 ml which has gone through the filter.

Assuming the filter removed 50% of our bacteria, this then suggests that before filtering the total quantity of milk (all 1,944,000ml of it), it contained:

  • 3,000,000 Pseudomonas.
  • 20,000,000 Enterobacteriaciae

So per ml of milk we have

  • 1.5 Pseudomonas and
  • 10 Enterobacteriaciae.

Which makes it all look rather a lot better.

Even if we assume the filter only removed 10% of our bacteria, this still suggests that the levels in the milk weren’t huge.  If that were the case, we’d be assuming pre filtration numbers of:

  • 15,000,000 Pseudomonas
  • 100,000,000 Enterobacteriaciae

So per ml of milk we have

  • 7.7 Pseudomonas
  • 51.2 Enterobacteriaciae

However this doesn’t take into account the fact that the filter had been in the parlour during the day and we didn’t have fully frozen ice packs in our insulated box.  The sample was 10C when it was tested and apparently we can knock at least a couple of zeros off our total counts on the filter based on the time it had rested at that temperature since milking and whilst being posted to the lab. All of a sudden, this makes our Pseudomonas and Enteros presence not alarming at all.

THOUGHTS, CONCLUSIONS:

Pseudomonas:

The reason the bulk milk samples have been high in Pseudomonas in the past is that they are able to grown at 4C whereas lactic acid bacteria aren’t.  If there aren’t that many lactic acid bacteria in the milk in the first place and even on our brown and white cow friend 258, there weren’t huge numbers then the bulk tank is the worst conditions for them to grow and the best conditions for something that is happier at cold temperatures to get a head start.  Lactic acid bacteria like a range of temperature around body temperature basically but can grow from 20C – 50C.  So the bulk tank is giving an advantage to the wrong bacteria for cheesemaking.  In other words it is entirely worth it to arrange for the pipework we are planning and have our cheesemaking milk taken off before it goes through the plate cooler, and not just because of the energy use considerations.

There is still the cluster wash and some of the pipework which remains a concern as it will reduce lactic acid bacteria and potentially if there is doubt about the cleanliness of the water, will add in pseudomonas and possibly listeria.  In order to investigate this, we need to do a further milk test or water test.  I don’t know if it’s at all possible for the cluster wash to be switched off ever?  I am imagining not but it’s worth asking.  For the cheesemaking, it’s all about balancing the lactic acid bacteria against the pathogens and spoilage bacteria and the better we preserve the lactic acid ones the less we worry about the others.

Staph aureus:

The test results on this occasion aren’t hugely helpful but they basically indicate that they are present in the bulk tank and passing through the milk filter.  Evidently they aren’t present on every cow as there were none on either hand milked cow.

Paul Thomas’s theory based on some studies he has read (but I’d have to ask him if you wanted to know which ones) is that the animals that line up to be milked first tend to be the more vigorous, healthier ones which will be less likely to have Staph. aureus infections even at a subclinical level.  The less healthy ones will lag behind.

This suggests that our idea of taking the first bit of milk that goes through the milkline is probably a good one from the point of view of getting milk that is better suited to our cheesemaking.  Interestingly the animals with lower somatic cell counts (according to Paul), also tend to be the ones with higher counts of lactic acid bacteria as well.  Again, I’d have to push him for which papers supported that theory but it seems to indicate again that we will get more suitable milk for the cheese if we take the first lot of milk rather than from later in the milking.  Which means I will be getting up bright and early to collect.

A possible thing we could investigate as well is to look into the mastitis records to see if there are any patterns.  Paul (again) has had previous experience where with his milk supplier’s animals each cow that developed mastitis got it on the same quarter for a whole 2 week period.  It turned out that there was a contaminated rubber on one of the clusters.

Lactic Acid Bacteria:

The hand milk results do show that on individual animals we have pretty much perfect milk provided we can then manage the process so that we can get hold of that.

There’s no scientific basis for this that I know of but it’s a commonly held opinion that Friesian Holsteins are not as good producers of lactic acid bacteria and other breeds like Montbeliard are better.  Interestingly our results showed the perfect milk from a brown and white cow that Andrew felt would have more influence of Montbeliard in her genetics.  I don’t know how true that is however and it’s something to try and find out more about.

By taking milk from the livelier, healthier first milkers and keeping that milk warm we’ll give the growth advantage to the lactic acid bacteria as well as the other organisms.  Conventional wisdom sounds a loud klaxon at this point and shouts

‘What about growth of pathogens??? Re-frigerate!! Re-frigerate!’

And were it in isolation with no lactic acid bacteria, they’d be right to be cautious.  But by keeping the milk warm we are giving our lactic acid bacteria an even chance to consume that lactose and reproduce.  Then, when we add our starter cultures into the mix as well it should mean that lactic acid bacteria as a proportion of the total bacteria as we start to make cheese, out competes any pathogens or spoilage organisms.

The hand milking results also reassure us that the milk when it hasn’t gone through the cluster wash system does have enough lactic acid bacteria in it to try the experiments of making our own starter cultures from the milk.  This has always been an aim of ours which we thought we would have to postpone for a year or so at best but now seems much more possible.  It is, however, a discussion for another day and will involve a lot of hand milking and some careful selecting of suitable cows.

So, at the end of a rather head-hurting few days of analysing, emailing and thinking very hard, it’s good news.  We can try out making starter – hooray!! Obviously we won’t be using it unless it passes micro testing but for a while it didn’t look like we’d be able to even try.

It’s also a new list of questions to research.  Do the brown and while more Montbeliard looking cows like 258 give us better milk for our cheese?  Do the black and white cows have less lactic acid bacteria?  Does it all relate to their Somatic cell count levels?  Does the cluster wash still remove too many lactic acid bacteria and can there be an alternative?  If we can hand milk cows to make our own starter, does that matter?  And so on and so on.  Then there’s an off the wall ideas that Paul suggested too.  There are some studies in humans indicating that before giving birth, the nipple duct microflora is influenced by apparently deliberate movement of bacteria from the gut to the mammary gland by dendritic cells.  Perhaps this happens in all mammals and may account for the transfer of lactic acid bacteria into the baby’s and calf’s stomach with colostrum?

Who knew milk could be this complicated and this fascinating?  Just as well I never wanted a quiet life.

Washed Rinds Blowing through my Mind

Somewhere into the Blue Cheese Course at the School of Artisan Food, Rose and I experienced the Neal’s Yard Dairy Dilemma and had to think long and hard over whether we were going to make a washed rind cheese.  As the answer was ‘yes’, it seemed like a rather good idea to sign up for the Washed Rind cheese course that was to be held in July.

The blue cheese course ended.  The first Taleggio experiment was held.  As you all know, it was not an unprecedented success.  The course was going to be very handy indeed.
The blue cheese course had taught me how to measure out DVI starters and combine different types to come up with a good mixture of lactic acid bacteria, yeasts and moulds.  During my experiments however when I had wanted to create my own bulk starter, I’d run into difficulties.   How to draw a parallel between the small wrap of white powders we’d thrown into our blue cheese and a percentage volume of a liquid starter culture.  I emailed Ivan Larcher with a request to cover cheesemaking with bulk starter somewhere on this course and was happy to notice that when I turned up on the morning of the first day, a pan on the side contained several litres of a white liquid which we subsequently added to our make.  Thank you Mr Larcher!  Taleggio experiment no 2 went considerably better as a result.
My fellow students on this course were enthusiastic amateur hoping to go professional Simon Raines and experienced cheesemakers looking to branch out: Carol Peacock from Parlour Made, Jane Bowyer from Cheesemakers ofCanterbury, Callum Clark who had travelled down from Connage Highland Dairynear Inverness for the course and finally from White Lake Cheeses, Pete, fellow cheesemaker to Roger Lakeman who I had met on the blue cheese course.  We settled in for the three days and as usual packed a lot in.
The first cheeses we made on day 1 (Ivan doesn’t teach cheese without making cheese if you recall) were a contrasting pair: a fairly industrial non artisan one Mamirolle which showed us about scalding and curd washing and Brie Noir, which is about as far away in flavour terms from a Mamirolle as it’s possible to get.  Brie Noir was intriguing.  I rather liked making a Brie recipe with its greater acidification.  I am not sure I’d want to mature it on for up to a year as the real Brie Noir but it’s intriguing none the less.

Salting Brie Noir
This accompanied the day of milk chemistry and microbiology which on the third hearing was starting to sink in and actually stay lodged in my brain.  I could see the usual signs of brain fatigue going round the group though as they tried to absorb the golden nuggets of information that Ivan gave them.  Poor Simon in particular, not yet being a cheesemaker like the others or having the benefit of doing Ivan’s course before like me, was looking terrified at times.  Unlike blue cheeses where a degree of acidification is helpful to favour the blue moulds, washed rind cheeses want to control their acidity.  Here we learned about the importance of developing a good coating of yeasts on the rind in order to begin to lower the acidity of the cheese and allow the subsequent coat of Brevibacterium linens to develop.
However the following morning we arrived bright and early to make our next lot of cheeses.  We split into 2 groups for this but as the day progressed there was a lot of crossing from group to group.  I started in the group that was planning to make a Reblochon and a Vacherin style, based loosely around Jasper Hill’s Winnimere.  The other group, using goats milk again brought from White Lake cheeses were going to make a Langres and a goats milk Raclette.

Langres in moulds
Raclette and Reblochons on racks
The Reblochon / Vacherin make needed to acidify very little, hold in a lot of moisture with quite high rennet content and predominantly use thermophilic bacteria in the make as these would stop acidifying soon, allowing the pH to stabilise at the right level so that the cheese develops the creamy, liquid in the case of Vacherin, consistency that is the hallmark of both cheeses.  For me, with my Taleggio interests, this was the group to follow.  While not my exact recipe, this was the sort of cheese I was planning to make.
Raclette of course, allowed us to try a semi hard cheese with more acidification and flavour than day 1’s Mamirolle but still playing with scalding the curd and washing it.  Langres, allowed us to try what was nearly a lactic cheese.  A true lactic cheese would have a set of over 12 hours and our Langres had acidification in the milk of around 5 hours followed by a set of a couple of hours.  We were speeding it along a little because of the time constraints of the course but while Mons Cheesemongers sell a Langres that acidifies overnight, it too is set is a comparatively short time of an hour or so.
As with blue cheese, Ivan explained, washed rind cheeses can come from pretty much any cheese family.  They can be hard (Raclette, Comte), soft with acidification (Langres, Brie Noir) or soft with low acidity (Vacherin, Reblochon).  This basically meant for very interesting three days as we got to try a very varied range of recipes.
Along the way, as is Ivan’s wont, we learned how to fix problems in the make, so that when we encounter them in the real world, we’ll know what to do.  These included looking out for over acidification in the vat and how to correct it, slow vats and the unexpected error on day 1 which was that one of my fellow students who normally make vegetarian rennet cheese, unthinkingly took out the vegetarian rennet to use on our Mamirolle make.  Ivan doesn’t knowingly teach with vegetarian rennet and this had probably not been used in a while.  The curd didn’t set.  We waited and waited, testing for flocculation time after time and to no avail.  Eventually when it looked like we were going to have a vat of acidified milk only, Ivan took a decision to add more.
‘Everyone will tell you that you must never add a second dose of rennet,’ he told us, ‘but if your milk won’t set, what are you going to do?  It may not be good cheese but it’s better than throwing the milk away.’
Luckily with a double dose the cheese set and seemed to follow its recipe pretty well after that.  I’ve tried double renneting in the past and it was a scary moment and produced a very odd grainy set as stirring in the second dose had damaged the beginnings of the set from the first dose.  It wasn’t good cheese, but as the man said, it was better than throwing the milk away.  At least it made it into some form or other.
Two rather exhilarating days of cheesemaking down and we returned for the final the morning to finish up and to learn about rind washing.  Suffice it to say there is a whole lot more to washing rinds than I had encountered before both at Neal’sYard Dairy and at Holker Farm.
At Neal’s Yard Dairy, when we started rind washing as a cheese maturing activity we began by creating a brine solution in a bowl with the washing cloth and pouring on boiling water to ensure everything was sterile.  The solution was then let down with potable cold water or left to cool of its own accord.  We washed young cheeses first and then on to the older cheeses.  After a while, the cheeses seemed too salty so we stopped using a brine solution and used plain water.  After a further while, it became a bit too much of a hassle to boil the kettle due to the amount of time the solution needed to cool and plain cold potable water was used.  I was the QA manager responsible for writing up these procedures and querying them and with that hat on, I wasn’t wholly happy about using cold water from the tap but when challenged, I couldn’t justify my hunch.  It was after all potable water.  If it was ok to drink it must be clean.  Besides we swabbed and tested any cheeses that we rind washed and the results were good.
At Holker Farm we were washing very young cheeses so we took this a stage further and made up a wash solution of Brevibacterium linens in water.  The rationale was that this would establish a culture in the rooms and sooner or later it would be in the atmosphere to the extent that we only really needed to use plain water.  After we encountered a few pseudomonas problems, we started trying a more acidic wash putting a measure of vinegar into the water and by this time not using any culture.  The vinegar did go some way to putting off the pseudomonas but didn’t entirely fix the problem.  It doesn’t help if they are in your water supply to begin with and Holker was on borehole water at the time.  The problem was intermittent despite having a UV filter. Since going onto mains water (and keeping the UV filter as belt and braces), their problem has disappeared.  However they still do use a vinegar solution.  It cuts the grease that accumulates in your wash water and with a cheese made from sheeps milk, that, at the end of season, can be over 12% fat, you notice the grease.  I suspect cows milk cheese will be a little different.
Rind washing as taught by Ivan is a different matter.  He doesn’t advocate the use of plain water as this leaches salt from your cheese.  He advocates using a brine solution made up to a specific percentage.  If you have oversalted your cheese, the excess will still leach out but if you haven’t then it will remain in the cheese and you don’t risk undersalting cheese.  He also explained a formula for calculating what to add if you want to wash the cheeses in alcohol.  As far as the hygiene goes, he advocates making up a batch of the appropriate amounts of your brine / alcohol / whatever concoction with boiled water and naturally as cleanly as possible, then storing it in a sterilised and lidded container in your cold room and decanting a small amount at a time to use on the cheeses.  Naturally your equipment (brushes or cloths and bowls) will be sterilised before use too and preferably with steam or boiling water.

Winnimeres & Bries Noirs being washed
Returning however to the concept of rind washing with an alcohol solution, I had always considered washing cheeses in alcohol to be a bit of an affectation in the past.  My ideas began to change when I started selling cheese with Mons Cheesemongers and tasted some cheeses where the alcohol wash is done very well, for instance on their Tomme de l’Ariege or on their Langres (made by the Schertenleib family near Saulxures in Champagne Ardenne).  This made me think a little more about what the wash added to the flavour of the cheese.  It does also act as an extra bit of food safety due to the preservation qualities of the alcohol but of course you have to be careful that you use the right sort of alcohol and that you don’t use it too strong.  Sweet wines and spirits of course have too much sugar and you run the risk of having strange and unwelcome fermentations on the rind as these sugars provide food for other organisms rather than the nice Brevibacterium linens that you want to encourage.  Too much alcohol and you sterilise the rind and ‘burn’ it.  On the course, we used a dark beer from the Welbeck Brewery (conveniently located just over the cart track from the school) on our Vacherin / Winnimeres and a dilution of whisky on our Brie Noirs.  We were also given the calculation of how much of the given alcohol to use in order not to have the solution over strong.  Actually with something like a dry cider or a beer, we could use it neat although in the interests of salting, we mixed it with brine, but the whisky most definitely needed diluting.

Washing solution close up
 I am not yet sure that washing with alcohol is something for me to do necessarily.  Cheeses like Langres or Tomme de l’Ariege have developed that way because locally they make Marc de Champagne or other wines.  I don’t know well enough what local microbreweries there are in Oxfordshire or if there is an Orkney whisky distillery which would tie in nicely with Rose’s family connections.  Besides the cheese underneath the wash needs to measure up before I think about doing anything flirty with an alcohol wash.  But I am thinking about it; really quite seriously too.
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Glaucum? Expansum? Penicillium? Gliocladium? Let’s call the whole thing off!

I last wrote about the blue cheese course I attended at the School of Artisan Food.  It was hugely informative and I learned a lot.  One of the things that impressed me was that not all types of Penicillium roqueforti in blue cheeses are the same and not all blue cheeses even contain Penicillium roqueforti.  Some use a mould I’d never heard of – Penicillium glaucum.

If google images is to be believed this is P roqueforti under a microscope
And this is Penicillium glaucum / expansum (read on for nomenclature explanation)
As I always do, I posted the link on Facebook and then sat back a little surprised as the Facebook comment thread lengthened.  Penicillium glaucum is best known as the Gorgonzola mould but also, according to Ivan Larcher, very suitable for use in goats cheese and naturally occurring on rinds of Loire cheeses like Valancay.  Was this the same as was sourced from Coquardand used at Sleight Farm?  No, that’s Penicillium album, but it looks similar.  Is Penicillium glaucum also in Stilton (it’s sometimes referred to in textbooks as Roqueforti (Glaucum)).  Are Penicillium album and glaucum the same?
This was above my knowledge level, but when something’s a bit out of my league, I like to catch up and understand.  Luckily for me, Paul Thomas of ThimbleCheesemakers and a biochemist to boot, is very generous with his explanations and very good at explaining things so that the idiot (that would be me) can follow.
I will basically copy and paste what he emailed me because he says it better than I can.
 ‘As a quick background to microbiological classification, historically scientists would have peered down the microscope to attempt to assemble a vast number of species into some kind of order.
This creates some problems.  Some microbes have stages in their life cycle during which they may behave in different ways (which may lead to the identification of two species that are actually one).  There may be an element of variation within a species (that may or may not deserve subsequent separation into two species).  And, given the vast diversity of species it is possible to incorrectly identify a species of assign it to the wrong group.  If incorrectly assigned would it then perhaps lead to incorrect assumptions about the characteristics specific to the group and increase the likelihood of further errors in classification of other species?
The introduction of molecular biology techniques such as DNA sequencing makes it easier to classify species now according to genomic similarity.
So, Penicillium is a Genus (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) and roqueforti, camemberti, album or glaucum are all species names.
P. glaucum is more commonly called P. expansum outside of cheese circles and is sometimes used to describe the light green mould found in Gorgonzola. I believe that David Jowett* was referencing Walker-Tisdale & Woodnut when he said that stilton had been described as being veined with “P. roqueforti (P.glaucum)”.  I’ve never seen it available as a culture – or at least not described as such.  I suppose it is possible that some of the milder P. roqueforti cultures may turn out to be glaucum – or it may turn out that what is often attributed to P. glaucum in Gorgonzola production is actually a low-pigment, low-methyl ketone (the group of compounds which cause the distinctive ‘blue cheese’ taste) form of P. roqueforti.  The cultures almost certainly predate any interest in sequencing them.
P. expansum/ glaucum is associated principally with decay in apples. Citrus Green Mould (P. digitatum) is very closely related to P.expansum.
P. album is now called Gliocladium album (it has been reclassified into another genus). This is the one we would commonly associate with the greyish appearance of the rind of a Loire goats cheese. Coquard sell a product described as P.album that produces a rind with an appearance compatible with that of a Loire goats cheese but, of course, it may be possible that natural mould growth in either the surface ripened goats cheese or a farmhouse gorgonzola may actually consist of several Penicillium (and Gliocladium) species.
While use of pasteurisation dramatically reduces the bacterial diversity of the finished cheese, it has less of an impact upon moulds.  Moulds present in very low numbers in the raw milk and are simply a representation of the moulds present environmentally and therefore continuously inoculated into the milk/curd/cheese. With Lyburn’s Stoney Cross, I saw considerable rind diversity (including some Sporendonema) despite the pasteurisation of the milk.
On a related subject, as I know you are keen to express the natural microflora of the milk, it may prove to be impossible to influence one Penicillium over another as the species present similar requirements with regard to temperature, pH and moisture.  Darker, more methyl ketone-producing strains seem to tend to dominate in natural blueing – either because they are more dominant and outcompete the milder strains or because they are simply more noticeable.  Termignon is a case worth studying in this instance and, I imagine, similar to the pre-industrial two-curd Gorgonzola.’
Back to my take on the situation.
At the end of the day, to my mind, there are a couple of key areas that confuse the cheesey mouldy world that Paul addressed.  Re-classification and new technologies that post date the accumulated knowledge of even pretty technical cheesemakers confuse us with new names that may or may not correlate with what has been written in the past and our sources for information may or may not be up to date with the latest nomenclature.  However also there is the environmental factor.  What we believe to be in the cheese be it Gorgonzola, Persille de Beaujolais, Fourme d’Ambert may be a glorious mixture of what you put into the milk and what the environment favours.  What you buy from Coquard in terms of a rind culture to allow it to resemble a Loire cheese, may actually not be present when your cheese is finally mature as your own environment’s influences take effect.
Back to that eternal balancing act that the cheesemaker somehow has to manage.  Cheese is an expression of your milk, your environment and your skills.  And thank God for that!
*David Jowett had started the Facebook comment thread and contributed a lot of the conversation that followed.  Thank you for keeping me on my toes.
 
PS.  A side issue.  
 
Penicillium expansum (you know, the one I used to call glaucum) when found in apples can cause an unpleasant mycotoxin: Patulin which causes gene mutation and therefore is considered to be a potential carcinogen (although that is not yet proven).  Before you panic and decide never to eat blue cheese again, read on.
 
About 10 years ago, I needed to write something for Neal’s Yard Dairy to help their shop staff explain  to worried customers that mould wasn’t poisonous (it isn’t).  At the time the leading authority on the subject was the late Tony Williams of Williams & Neaves Microbiologists.  
 
Tony explained to me that the moulds that you find in cheese, while they might produce toxins in other media, tend not to produce it in cheese.  Although there isn’t much research done, he had heard a theory that suggested the lactic acid bacteria in cheese might even consume the toxin themselves as the cheeses matured. While this is a pleasing idea, it wasn’t one he could prove, nor did he.  However he did state that to date it had been found that for reasons of pH and Water activity (Aw) that are found in cheese, it did not provide the right conditions for its moulds to produce mycotoxins.  
 
In other words, the blue mould in your Gorgonzola and Stilton and any other cheese where P expansum grows, are fine.  But give the mouldy apples a miss.
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All you ever wanted to know about Blue Cheese but were afraid to ask?

Or perhaps more than you realised there was to know about Blue Cheese and had no idea of how much to ask.

Back in April this year, I got a call from Lee Anna Rennie at the School of Artisan Food.
‘Hello!’ came the cheery greeting over the phone, ‘I think I have something that might interest you…’
She proceded to explain that the School and Ivan Larcherwere extending his Professional Lactic and Blue Cheese courses and that he had suggested that she give me a call since we were planning to make a blue cheese.  The course was going to be epic, she enthused, basic cheesemaking knowhow, lots of practical and a month’s maturation time so we could finish off by troubleshooting and looking at how to mature blue cheeses.
This happened to fall into my lap at a very opportune moment.  Before Christmas I had been in touch with Jasper Hill Farms in Vermont in the hopes of going on one of their internship programmes.  Constant Bliss is my very favourite Chaource style cheese (better than the original – sorry the French nation) and I also wanted to practice making blues as well in the form of their Bayley Hazen Blue.  I emailed Mateo who I had known from the NYD days and who I’d visited many years ago with Randolph Hodgson way back before their ambitious cellars had been built or indeed their current micro lab.  Mateo put me in touch with Emily in their HR department and we exchanged emails and talked about what sort of internship would suit.  It looked good for the prospect of a couple of months making cheese, maturing cheese and a little bit on quality systems and the farm for good measure.  Unfortunately then their audit from the government intervened.  According to Andy Kehler who I had a brief chance to chat to in Italy during Cheese, their whole system had to be turned upside down at huge expense and significant amounts of work had to be done and backdated which must have been hugely frustrating for them as it seemed like it was an amazing system in the first place.  An email from Emily let me know that they had managed to sort out a system for interns who wanted to apply from within the US but were stuck for people coming in from another country and she couldn’t really guarantee when they might be able to come up with something.  This had been a concern for me because although I had already made lactic cheese and felt reasonably confident going into lactic cheesemaking, I hadn’t made a blue cheese before and wanted to be better prepared.  Jasper Hill had been going to be my opportunity to get some practice in and since it fell through, I’d been racking my brains trying to think of another alternative.  Here it was.
The course fell into three parts: introduction in April, practical in May, troubleshooting in early June.
We all showed up in April, met in the kitchen at the School of Artisan food, poured ourselves a coffee and introduced ourselves.  My fellow students included: Rich Hodgsonfrom the Isle of Wight Cheese Company, Roger Longman from White Lake Cheeses, Afke Baukje Haanstra who was over on an almost last minute impulse from Holland, Fergus Ledingham from Thornby Moor Dairy and finally Gareth Derrick, retiring from the armed forces and about to begin a life of cheese (he has since started up Erme River Dairy).
Our first, three day, section covered the basics, but when I say basics, that gives the idea that it’s quite simple.  There was so much more information than that.  I’d heard Ivan teach about milk before when I did a cheesemaking workshop at Will and Caroline Atkinson’s farm and so all the topics weren’t entirely new to me, but I still left at the end of the theory day with a slight headache.  We covered the production of milk including how the udder is structured, how a milkline works and what happens in the udder during lactation;  a basic milk chemistry including a really useful conclusions that you can draw by taking pH and titratable acidity readings on your milk over time that I’ve described on a previous post , milk’s chemical composition breaking down its fats and protein components including handy tips for milk storage so as to preserve the fats and the structure of the casein micelle, lactose, milk’s mineral content (including calcium) and enzymes.
We spent quite some time on different starter cultures both those that develop lactic acidity and the yeasts and ripening cultures that are also added to the milk, or naturally present in raw milk.  Then covered various different ways of coagulating milk from the lactic set, animal rennet, vegetable rennets, thistle extract.
However, to say this makes it sound like it’s a very dry and theoretical course.  It isn’t.
‘I can only teach cheese,’ Ivan said when we entered the School of Artisan Food teaching dairy, ‘By making cheese.  So we’re going to make cheese.’
As a demonstration we made a fairly industrial recipe Camberzola / Blue Brie style to show the industrial modern soft cheese techniques and a hard cheese technique blue cheese like Bleu de Gex.  I have to be honest, the Blue Brie technique didn’t engage me that much because even though I would like to make a Gorgonzola, my plan has always been to make something a little more flavourful.  The trick with a cheese like that however is how to maintain the white rind with the blue interior.  It’s a skill, although to be honest not one that I’m interested in perfecting because I want a nice washed rind style outer on my cheese.  The Bleu de Gex was interesting however and both recipes taught us a few fundamentals to prepare us for next time.  Firstly, adding yeasts in our starter cultures to create gas holes in the paste so the cheese has an open texture through which the blue can travel.  Secondly the level of acidity that you want to reach for a blue cheese.  This obviously alters from recipe to recipe, however Penicillium roqueforti can tolerate acidity.  It’s one of the few moulds that can grow in very acid conditions.  If you think about it, the only mould you get growing on a lemon is blue mould.  So to advantage this mould rather than something else, you cultivate a certain amount of acidity.
Cheeses made and salted, lessons learned, we departed and returned again a month later for the practical.
This time, although we did more theory of course,  we made 4 different contrasting types of cheese: a Fourme d’Ambert (with Guernsey milk, thanks to Roger), a Gorgonzola Cremoso style (with added cream which allowed us to learn to use the Pearson square technique which can be used for calculating how much cream to add or how much skimmed milk to add if you want to standardise to a certain fat percentage), a goats milk Stilton style (or basically a slow acid development milled blue cheese based around lactic technology which by the way is what Stilton is – but also so is Bleu de Termignon, Blu del Moncenisio (in its really traditional form) and to some extent also Castelmagno) that last one was also thanks to Roger for supplying the goats milk.
Cheeses made, we had to decide on the recipe we would use for our next cheese.  To this end we learned how to re-create a recipe from the end point or ‘reverse engineering’ as it was not entirely romantically called.  Basically you start with the sort of cheese you want – soft or hard and you move back.  If it’s a hard cheese, you need a quite soft set that therefore has a long flocculation time and a relatively short hardening time.  If it’s a soft cheese, you need quite a firm set that has a short flocculation time with a long hardening time.  This is a bit counter intuitive I realise but the set locks the moisture in and a hard cheese wants to lose its moisture while retaining its milk solids in the form of protein and fats.  For blue cheeses, you need to consider how your blueing will present in the final cheese.  If you want marbling then the cheese needs to be milled.  If you want pockets of blue then you add yeasts to the milk with the lactic starters and create an open texture but don’t mill it.
We made a soft blue cheese (well we only had a month to assess it in and for it to have any semblance of how it might develop we couldn’t really choose a hard cheese – in a way more’s the pity) and called it Blue Wednesday.  Ivan has worked with Ruaridh Stone on his recipe for Blue Monday (when he worked with Alex James) and Blue Murder (when they parted ways – hmmm amicable break up do you think??).
Our final cheese finished, we set off again for our final break and then returned a month later for a final couple of days to taste, assess and finish off.  Along our way, despite making lots of cheese, we had also covered the business of what moulds to choose.  Did you know there are hundreds of varieties of Penicillium roqueforti a cheesemaker can choose?  The best varieties are sold in France which is unfortunate for the English cheesemaker because, for starters if you don’t speak French you’re in a bit of trouble, but also you have to get it delivered over from France which is a bit less reliable as far as courier companies go.  I’ve worked on the other side of couriering, trying to send things from England to France, and I know it’s fraught with difficulties and delays and lost parcels.  However a lot of the problems I’ve encountered were sending things to addresses in Europe which may or may not have been correct (you never realise how little the average person knows about their own postal address until you have to run it through a courier’s consignment system – myself included).  If you double check your English address (and you can do this on Royal Mail’s website) then there’s no reason that your parcel should get lost.  So just the general logistics difficulties then!  Ivan, as you would expect, gave us some good leads for interesting moulds, cultures and starters.  The key, however, should you be interested is that liquid mould cultures work best.  Also that Pencillium roqueforti may not necessarily be your best bet in blue cheese making.  Some Gorgonzola makers, rather than using roqueforti which can be too strong and break down the proteins and fats too quickly, use Penicillium glaucum which is a blue mould that is also used in goats cheeses, particularly cheeses like Valencay.  In fact, Mons Cheesemongerssell a cheese called Persille de Beaujolais which is a Fourme d’Ambert recipe but made using Penicillium glaucum they have procured from some friends in Italy who make Gorgonzola.  The technology is spreading.  It gives lighter, less alcoholic and more mushroomy flavours and, having sold the odd piece or two, I can tell you, it goes down well with the nervous blue cheese buyer as well as actually being rather damn lovely too.
So June beckoned and we tasted the cheeses we’d made last month.  We cut the cheeses open and tasted them.  The Bleu de Gex from our first visit was generally considered really rather good.  I took some home and we ate them at home for quite some time.  I can concur, it was really good.  The Blue Bries had unfortunately suffered in maturation and dried out.  They became bullets.  The Gorgonzola had too much cream added (we used 7% but you would usually use 6% or less) and this inhibited the blue.  It was also undersalted and had the danger of going soapy.  The Fourme d’Ambert with Guernsey milk seemed good so far.  The goats milk Stilton or rather Stichelton as we never pasteurised it (Ivan doesn’t teach courses with pasteurised milk) were over-acidified (which we had known at the time) and the wrong blue had been used (we also knew this at the time too – it was a spot the mistake test).  For goats milk a less lipolytic blue should have been used.  The School of Artisan Food only had Penicillium roqueforti and at that a fairly standard strain.  Ideally we would perhaps have used Penicillium glaucum or at least a less lipolytic strain of roqueforti.
The Guernsey Fourme
Our Bleu de Gex – not even blueing I think you could say but it tasted good.
Gorgonzola with added cream – enough to inhibit the blueing perhaps??
Blue Wednesday!
The goats milk Stichelton.  Well marbled as you can see.  Bit too marbled if truth be told.
Assessing all those cheeses did give valuable information.  Could we have pierced the cheeses more to allow better blueing (we pierced by hand of course because we hadn’t made very many cheeses), what was the effect of the fat content of the milk, the effect of salting and how much you really do need when you add blue mould into the mix.
And should I forget, we also got to visit Sticheltonproduction where Joe Schneider and his team,, particularly Ross were really helpful with their information and even allowed us to try ladling some curd.  It is tough work believe you me.  I am no stranger to lifting heavy things or working hard but the strain of lifting a full ladle of curd gives you arm-ache that lasts for weeks.  I know, I had it.
Another peculiarity is that, of course, you have to use a particular side of the body to ladle.  This could lead to an overdeveloped arm.
‘So how do you keep both arms equal.’ Someone asked Ross as we observed them ladling.
‘I try to vary it,’ he replied, ‘but I can’t vouch for what Joe does to keep his left arm in training…’
And on that note, I will leave you to ruminate on blue cheese.
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The Taleggio Experiment

The decision to rent the School of Artisan Food was made, a recipe was researched, whilst attending a course there, I was able to work out what equipment we’d need and finally our dates rolled around.  Rose purchased containers, filled them with milk and sent them off with a refrigerated courier.  I drove myself off to the School of Artisan Food and got ready to receive milk.
I spent a day sanitising equipment and writing up a HACCP plan for our trial production and the following day was in bright and early for the milk to arrive.
Taleggio is an interesting make from my point of view, in that it uses thermophilic bacteria as a starter culture and yet doesn’t use the temperatures at which thermophilic bacteria tend to work best.  Like all washed rinds, the curd doesn’t want to acidify very much and it wants to retain a calcium rich, pliant structure.  The thermophilic bacteria therefore are used precisely because they will start working but as the temperature of the make cools off when the cheeses are in their moulds, they will stop going, the acidity will level out and won’t develop further.  This in theory and coupled with curd washing, should mean that the cheeses remain pliant with their moisture locked within the curd structure and soften when ripe to a gloriously oozing texture.  That is the theory anyway.
Taleggio photo courtesy of the thefiftybest.com
Within this, of course, there are many parameters to play with.  So many, in fact, that I wish we were in full production right now in some ways so I could be happily making cheese day after day, tinkering with a whole multitude of variables.  Would a degree or 2 more or less in terms of temperature affect the rennet set and the texture as the cheese matures?  How would the flavour and acidity be affected if I remove a bit less whey at curd washing?  What if I add in more starter cultures at stirring?  What if I stir for longer?  That’s not even getting started on how much starter we need to use to work with our milk and how much rennet will get me a 15 minute flocculation and 45 minute hardening time (which, I believe, is what I’m aiming for).
First challenge and challenge not yet overcome at that, is the quantity of starter.  There are no hard and fast rules for this of course because the amount of starter you use is entirely related to the numbers of lactic acid bacteria in your milk.  Thinking back to my Holker Farm days and remembering the drainage battles we had balancing acidity and calcium, I figured that if I wanted to have a slow acid development, even though I was using thermophilic bacteria this time rather than mesophilic ones, I should be using pretty small quantities of starter.  In retrospect, I’m not sure that was the case, but you live and learn.  I remembered that when I left Holker, we were using tiny quantities of bulk starter, having been advised to drop to around 0.025% and before that had been using still pretty tiny quantities at 0.05%.  I decided to start at the higher of these values, having made up a yoghurt culture in skimmed milk the night before and incubated it overnight.  Yoghurt cultures, for those who didn’t realise, are thermophilic bacteria.
Now, at this stage, the benefit of recording values of acidity began to hit home.  In all my time at Holker, we never recorded a pH.  The pH meter had broken before I arrived and they are very expensive bits of kit to replace.  We took titratable acidity of course but the TA of our starter cultures which I took every so often, are hard to correlate with that of this yoghurt because of the buffering factor.  Our starters at Holker were made up in sheeps milk, which is high in protein – it can be up to 3 times that of cows milk.  My yoghurt cultures were made up in UHT skimmed cows milk.  As you all no doubt remember from the pH and Titratable acidity post last autumn, protein captures Hydroxl ions (OH-) when you add the alkaline solution looking for a pink colour produced by its reaction with the indicator, phenolphthalein.  This distorts the correlation between acid and pH because it is non-uniform.  The more protein the milk has, the more Hydroxyl ions it can capture and the more Sodium Hydroxide needs to be added before a reaction with the indicator will register.  In other words the TA value will be higher in sheeps milk than in cows milk just down to the protein.  In fact, at Holker when we began making cows milk and sheeps milk cheese side by side, we noticed a huge difference when recording the TA at 24hours (or thereabouts) between the two.  Our sheeps milk St James regularly recorded 80-90 ’D while the cows milk Brother Davids struggled to reach 40’D.  You would think that the majority of the protein in the sheeps milk had been locked up in the curd by then but just as the milk is higher in protein, so is the whey and so the titratable acidities ended up being quite dramatically different.
Anyway, returning to the matter in hand and hope I didn’t lose too many non techno cheese geeks along the way.  There was no point, to my mind, trying to correlate vaguely remembered TA values of starter culture with a yoghurt I had just made as I didn’t have any of those values recorded for reference.  So I took a pH reading of the starter and was conscious it was more acidic than my notes from Ivan Larcher’s course suggested was ideal (pH 5 – to make sure you catch the bacteria while they are multiplying happily and before the lactic acid they have produced can denature them and kill them off), but otherwise didn’t have much to relate it to.
On the first trial, 0.05% in quantity was added to 50 litres milk, the milk was heated to 34’C, rennet added at the appropriate pH change and I filled my pot of water to look out for flocculation times.  The flocculation happened right on time, the hardening more or less followed the pattern it was supposed to.  I pre-cut, then cut to hazelnut size (more or less – it’s a bit hard to use a cutting harp designed for a big vat in a 50 litre tub), let if settle, took off the 25% whey, added back the appropriate quantity of water at 32C, added some starter back in for flavour and stirred.  The recipe was one I’d found online and frankly has already been adapted.  At the time, I queried curd washing with Ivan Larcher and he replied
‘Good luck settling the pH at 5.2 without it.’
Later on, I asked for clarification on quantities and adjusting those parameters only to be told that it’s an industrial technique and he didn’t recommend me doing it.  I have therefore stopped.
However I was doing so on this trial make, and at every stage, I was recording pH on the spreadsheet Ivan had emailed me after our Blue Cheese course so that it would track the pH curve.  Unfortunately my pH curve didn’t curve.  It was more of a wobbly straight line.   Short of leaving the whole thing for 24 hours to acidify on its own, there wasn’t much I could do but proceed, pre-draining the curd on a mat and then filling the moulds with the drained curd pieces and turning, turning, turning throughout the afternoon.
All looking quite convincing so far – unfortunately it’s all in the maturation.
They looked pretty convincingly like cheeses.  They were draining.  But who knows what was going on below the surface without much acidification.  The problem is, all sorts of other bacteria could be enjoying the quantities of lactose and developing to undesirable results.  Unfortunately despite doubling the starter cultures the following day, the same acidification pattern followed.  Evidently at Holker Farm the starter culture had very minimal effect and acidification was largely governed by the lactic acid bacteria naturally present in the sheep and cows milk.  Further unfortunately, I already knew from a lactofermentation we had done a week or so earlier when Rose drove up (bringing a bottle of milk with her) to SAF to meet Ivan and me after one of the days of the course had finished, that we didn’t have a lot of strong lactic acid bacteria in our milk at the moment and that other things tended to become dominant.  To say I was nervous of the test results we would get from milk and curd samples would be an understatement.
I left SAF; the samples headed to the lab; we waited for the results.  As I had feared, without enough lactic acid bacteria from the starter or naturally present in the milk itself, enteros and pseudomonas had had a field day.  Staph. aureus hadn’t done so badly either.
Not quite what I was hoping for but still looking relatively like cheeses
After a couple of weeks, I drove to SAF to collect the unfortunate cheeses.  I did not have high hopes to be honest, particularly as one of them had pancaked overnight and collapsed – a bit of a surprise for me and also for Lee Anna.
However, I had known, that I had more cheese than I was expecting, which I suspected meant they were too moist.  This raises the likelihood of crazy things happening during maturation.  What I didn’t know however until I began to think and mull it over was that those rather too healthy pseudomonas might also have played a part in this too.  Pseudomonas, as I had discovered thanks to the very knowledgeable Paul Thomas, are caseolytic (they eat casein).  Could that mean that they might increase the speed and amount of protein breakdown in our cheeses?  One quick email and a reply later and yes, by no means the only factor but, if there were large numbers of pseudomonas, then there was much more chance of pancaked gooey cheeses that fall apart.
All in all, I wasn’t sure what I would find at SAF but although one batch had fallen to pieces, the other did seem to be holding some shape and smelled convincingly washed rind.  Not the best behaved of washed rind, I’ll admit, but I’ve smelled worse in my time.  We tasted one of them and to my surprise there wasn’t a strongly bitter flavour that I was expecting due to the pseudomonas, in fact the predominant flavours were beery, yeasty and fruity with a hint of meaty and savoury in the background and perhaps just a touch of the bitterness on the rind but certainly not overpowering.
Now let’s be clear, it’s not the flavour profile I want but then again, the recipe didn’t work, so for it to have turned out to be not only edible but while a bit raucous, actually not too bad, was a definite bonus.  That said, a valuable lesson was learned for Cheese Trial no 2: use a hell of a lot more starter!
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Choosing a Cheese: The Neal’s Yard Dairy Dilemma

When I left Neal’s Yard Dairy, I had a vague idea of learning how to make a traditional dales type of cheese like Cheshire (the house cheese where I grew up) or Lancashire (the fabled house cheese of my dad’s childhood).  I also had a pipe dream of my own orchard and market garden and a yoghurt making facility where I made yoghurts and fruit coulis to be sold together using  rare and interesting varieties of cherries, pears, apricots, strawberries, rhubarb or whatever other fruit took my fancy.  A visit to Caroline Atkinson at Hill FarmDairy to make Stawley, reminded me how much I enjoy the pace of a lactic cheese make.  Nine months at Holker Farm Dairy getting my head around drainage of a washed rind cheese made me wonder if I really did want to put that all to one side and make something entirely different in future.  Equally, memories of the sticky, greasy, gloopy and slimey business that is rind washing cheeses did put me off the idea of making a washed rind of my own.

When I first got in touch with Rose, they had made a Chaource on a very much ‘in the kitchen’ basis which tasted really pretty darn good.   I was very keen to make a lactic cows milk cheese and to be honest this did encourage me to keep the email correspondence going in those early stages.  The fact that she also was interested in making yoghurt (albeit for a frozen yoghurt range primarily) was an added bonus.  Should it ever be even a remote possibility, Oxfordshire is a considerably better place climate-wise to try and plant the odd fruit tree than Cumbria.
I did my market research too – by which I mean I got in touch with Jason Hinds and Bronwen Percival at Neal’s Yard and asked them what they suggested would be a good choice for a dairy that was just setting out.
‘Bloomy rind soft cheese and continental style blue’ came the reply.
‘Does a lactic cheese qualify as bloomy rind?’
‘Yup’
Emboldened, Rose and I set about our sales projections and planning with a soft lactic cheese in mind and to then bring on a gorgonzola style blue a year or so later into production.
‘What about doing a washed rind though?’ she asked.
‘Well I have made one before,’ I said, reluctant to abandon all that I’d learnt in Cumbria for projects new, ‘I could probably be up for doing one again if we could have a bit of help on the rind washing.’
We tentatively pencilled it in for year 5.
‘I’d quite like to do a hard cheese too’ Rose ventured.
‘I think we’d need to think about that further down the line when we’ve got more money.  It will probably need more equipment than our soft cheeses…. but we could definitely have a go.’
So we were decided.  Year 1 would be a delicate little lactic cheese, year 2 would see the launch of our blue and we would then let those establish themselves for a few years before embarking on anything new but a washed rind and a hard cheese were a possibility.  The Cheshire / Lancashire or Cotherstone type of cheese was still in with a chance.
Why so many cheeses?  Wouldn’t it be better to just do one cheese and do it right?
It’s a very valid and good point, but I think if we don’t take the possibility of maintaining the quality of all of our cheeses lightly and are always trying to improve, then we can manage it.  It also appeals to my nature to have a variety of work to do and have the challenge of doing it all well.  It’s not the easy path.  There are risks that we’ll take our eyes off one of the cheeses and mess it up.  There are plenty of examples of cheesemakers who make a large variety of cheeses and make a range of decent but not amazing cheeses.  There are also compelling examples of people who sensibly limit their product range to only one cheese and just make it good: Kirkham’s Lancashire, Stichelton to name but two.  However being nothing if not fussy about what I make and obstinate to boot, I believe I have the tenacity, doggedness and pig-headedness to make it work.  Although not commonly seen as such, I think, in this instance, these will be positive character attributes.
So, all set, we begin finding our site, getting our plans together and preparing for our planning application and build.  We call in Ivan Larcher and he designs us a beautiful layout in which we can make a lactic cheese and a blue cheese with a little yoghurt room off the side for playing around with yoghurt making and lactofermentations.  It’s all good.
But time moves on and while we are battling the planning process and pursuing the all important question of where our dairy should be (it’s going to be a permanent structure so we’d better get this vital point right), the industry waits for no man or woman. Julie Cheyney is making a lovely lactic cows cheese, St Jude.  David Jowett is alternating his mountain cheese makes with Alscot, his lactic cheese.  Jason also knows of a couple in Suffolk experimenting with a Brie.
So, one day, after heading in to meet Bronwen and ask if they might be prepared to mature on some of our lactic cheese trials that we hope to make later this year before the dairy is built, I get home to discover 2 missed calls from one Mr Jason Hinds.  I call back.
‘Anne,’ he says without preamble, ‘ I’m about to throw you a curveball, but you know me and curveballs, so I’ll carry on…’
‘Go on, I’m listening.’
‘What we really need right now isn’t a white rinded cheese.  We could really do with a washed rind.’
Gulp.
He carried on, explaining what they felt they needed on their counter and I mentally reversed our white rind lactic cheese to year 5 and brought forward the washed rind to year 1 to see how I felt about that.  Although I’d been entirely decided about the lactic cheese, I found that I actually didn’t feel particularly upset about switching things around and we ended the conversation by agreeing that I’d talk to Rose and we’d both consider the matter further.
Meanwhile I had a Blue Cheese course to go on at the School of Artisan Food where I’d have chance to talk to Ivan Larcher about the idea so I emailed him to ask how it might affect our dairy plan and to warn him I’d be asking him about it when I saw him.
‘What do you want to do?’ Ivan asked, getting to the point with clear sighted accuracy and without beating about the bush, ‘Make a cheese you want to make or sell to Neal’s Yard?’
A good question.
I examined my motives and in doing so, I realised that, having spent 16 years at Neal’s Yard, I did want them to sell my cheese.  In part, I wanted the friends I have there to be excited about what I’m making, but also I know from working at Holker with Martin that if anyone can be relied upon to push you, always ask for the cheese to be better and make sure you aren’t resting on your laurels, it’s Neal’s Yard Dairy.  I want someone to be a pain in the arse and insist that I make them better cheese.
That said, I want to make what I want to make.  So in answer to Ivan’s question, I want to do both.  I want to make what I want to make and I want to sell to them.
In terms of a washed rind cheese, I want to look to Italy for inspiration, just as I did with our blue cheese.  Italy is my second home.  I’ve spent about a tenth of my life there over the years and in many ways I’ve grown up there.  It doesn’t matter which city I arrive in or whether I’ve been there before or not, I am at home.  While France boasts wonderful washed rind cheeses (and I’ve been helping out with Mons at Borough Market recently so I’ve been getting to know some of them in much more detail), I don’t have the connection with France that I do with Italy.  So if we’re talking washed rind, then I want to make something based on Taleggio with its sweet, milky, honeyed, savoury flavour profile and its silky texture.
In terms of lactic cheese, well we’ll see, in Year 5, if they are interested.  They can plan and look for gaps in their range as any efficient shop or affineur would but that’s not the only thing that makes your product choice for you.  Sometimes you just respond to a cheese that’s damn good.  In other words, if I make it delicious enough, they will buy it.  I do like a challenge.
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