Shop Small If there was one thing I would ask of people, besides vote (or read a book,) it would be to shop small, especially at cheese shops. We’re heading into the holiday season, when most retail makes the profit that helps them through the …
Our previous post was about the Trethowan Brother’s Gorwydd Caerphilly, so we decided it made sense for our next post to be about Pitchfork Cheddar, a West Country Farmhouse PDO Cheddar, also made by the Trethowans! When the brothers left Wales, where they had already …
I’ve always been drawn to Caerphilly. It’s a Southern Welsh cheese, and family lore says my great-grandparents on my mother’s side were Welsh coal miners before they emigrated to Pennsylvania. Beyond that though, I think Gorwydd Caerphilly maybe the prettiest cheese I’ve ever seen.
What makes Gorwydd Caerphilly so distinctive though is how easily you can see it ripen in layers. The rind develops a coat of natural molds that smell of wet stone and earth. Just beneath the rind is the creamline, where the process called proteolysis loosens proteins and fats, making it smooth and silky. It gives buttery, vegetal, and mushroomy notes.
At the center, the paste stays bright, crumbly, and clean, with high calcium lending it a chalky texture and lemony snap. Each part tastes different because microbes and enzymes work their way inward. The outside transforms and the middle stays fresh. Tasting Gorwydd Caerphilly is like eating three cheeses in one: mineral, mushroom, and milk all in balance. Here’s your cheese lesson for the day, that you can apply to any cheese. Rind, Creamline, and Paste, all on display.
Caerphilly was first made on farms and sold in local markets, often to miners who needed something sustaining and salty to take underground. Young wheels were wrapped in cabbage leaves to keep the rinds from drying and cracking, a practical solution that left the cheese faintly vegetal. As we discussed with Wensleydale, the curd retains moisture, so has a quicker aging process than what you’d find with a cheddar. The cheese arrived at market a lot sooner, which was later appealing to industrial cheesemakers.
Aritz: A wedge of Caerphilly and bread could be eaten one-handed in the dark of the pit, and its salt helped replace what they lost in sweat. This was food for survival, not luxury.
Eglantine: Oh, Aritz, you say that about every cheese! I’m never sure whether you’re trying to guilt us out of the pleasure of the cheese.
I wonder sometimes if my great-grandparents ate Caerphilly.
By the late 20th century, farmhouse Caerphilly had nearly vanished. Sound familiar? Bland factory blocks replaced gorgeous farmstead cheese, over and over again. Todd Trethowan discovered this loss first-hand while working part-time at Neal’s Yard Dairy in London. Todd later apprenticed under Chris Duckett, who at the time was the last farmhouse Caerphilly maker in Britain. Determined to keep the tradition alive, Todd began making Gorwydd Caerphilly in 1996 on his family’s farm in Ceredigion, West Wales. His brother Maugan soon joined him, and together they built the Trethowan Brothers.
As demand grew, the family farm could no longer keep up. In 2014 the brothers relocated production to Puxton Court Farm in Somerset, just five miles from Cheddar. There they built a dairy and secured milk from a single, well-managed herd. The move gave them consistency, more space, and the chance to control every step of production and maturation. They also rescued a heritage starter culture that had nearly disappeared, ensuring Gorwydd retained a distinct microbial identity. Under this new roof, they continued Gorwydd Caerphilly and launched a second raw-milk cheese, Pitchfork Cheddar, my favorite Somerset Cheddar and subject of a future post!
Eglantine: Do not forget the cows, please. The Trethowans chose Somerset because they could draw from a single herd, cows grazing deep grass and clover. Close your eyes and try to taste the clover. You can taste it in the brightness of the curd and the gentle sweetness behind the lemon snap. Healthy pastures, healthy milk, delicious cheese.
Gorwydd Caerphilly shines with cider, the classic Welsh and English companion. If you’d read any of our other posts, you know we’re big fans of dry cider. For this cheese in particular, the lively acidity and gentle tannin cut the richness and echo the apple-sharp notes in the core. Bitter ales also bring out its earthy side. On the table, pair it with pickles, mustard, or a hunk of dark bread. For a more delicate match, fresh green apples or pears highlight its clean minerality.
Yoredale from Curlew Dairy in the Yorkshire Dales, is real farmhouse Wensleydale, brought back from extinction. For many people, Wensleydale means the industrial blocks in the supermarket, studded with cranberries at Christmas. Yoredale shows what the cheese was meant to be. It’s one of my …
Kirkham’s Lancashire is an English Territorial, one of the Crumblies, and one of my favorites. It’s buttery, tangy, and as one of my colleagues said, “fluffy.” However, when people see Kirkham’s Lancashire on the counter, they figure it’s another cheddar. With this post, we’re hoping …
Often I hear, “Oh, I just like boring cheese like cheddar” or if I suggest a cheddar to try, they look disappointed. But it’s a fantastic cheese! Cheddar is the cheese most of us know by name, but very few of us truly know. When we say “cheddar,” we might mean anything from a clothbound wheel aged in a stone cellar to a shrink-wrapped orange slice from the supermarket. At its core, though, cheddar is not a flavor, it is a method for making cheese! (In another post, we’ll talk about capital “C” Cheddar from the West Country of England, but for now we’re just talking about lower case “c” cheddar. It’ll make sense soon, I promise!
Cheese begins as milk, warmed and inoculated with cultures. For cheddar, mesophilic cultures are used, and they like it warm, but not hot. These microbes feast on lactose, producing lactic acid, and begin the transformation from milk into curds and whey. It’s the same as when lemon lands in milky tea: acid makes the proteins pull together.
Eglantine: Aye, this is where it all begins. Some makers use a packet of cultures, others save a ladle of whey from yesterday’s batch, like a sourdough starter. And if the milk’s raw, it’s already carrying a good share of its own microbes from the farm. That’s why each cheddar tastes a bit different, even when the recipe’s the same. You can’t pull the curd away from the land it comes from.
Rennet comes next, helping the casein proteins bond into a springy mass. After resting, the curd is cut into small pieces to let the whey escape. The finer the cut, the drier and firmer the final cheese. Cheddar curds are stirred and gently heated, removing even more moisture. The less water and lactose left behind, the safer the cheese will be to age. Microbes love damp, sugary environments, and cheddar’s healthy future depends on denying bad microbes a place to grow.
Aritz: This is control. By chasing out moisture, they shut the door on spoilage and give power to the microbes they want.
And then comes cheddaring! The curds are cut into slabs, stacked, cut apart, and stacked again. Over and over, the cheesemaker lifts, flips, and presses the warm curd. Each repetition drives out more whey and reshapes the proteins, giving the curd its distinctive layered texture. It’s heavy, physical work, more like kneading bread or stretching mozzarella than anything else in cheesemaking. When the curd is ready, it is milled into small pieces and salted by hand.
Eglantine: When you’re stacking and turning those slabs, you can feel the curd firming under your hands. It’s hard work, but that’s where cheddar gets its backbone. By the time it’s milled and salted, it’s ready to stand up to pressing and months in the cave.
Aritz: Don’t forget the labor. Microbes do the heavy lifting, but for the humans, cheddaring is back-breaking work. Industrial block cheddar is cheap because machines do the lifting and stacking. In farmhouse dairies, it’s still people’s bodies doing it. If you value the cheese, you value their work.
Salted curds are then pressed into hoops, where they knit into solid wheels under heavy weight. Once out of their molds, the cheeses are ready for aging. Cheddar can be aged months, sometimes years.
What we’re used to, even in the US and UK (the cheddar nations) are the block cheddars. Instead of being aged in caves, with natural or clothbound rinds, they are vacuum sealed. They retain a bit more moisture and do not develop the earthy flavors of a cheddar that has aged in a cave. Some of them are quite good, and there are artisanal choices. If you are able, I encourage you to try the less industrial versions.
Cheddaring transforms a simple curd into something sturdy, complex, and built to last. It is a style of making that spread from Somerset across the world, but always tied to the unique act of stacking slabs of curd, again and again, until the milk becomes something greater.
Do not be afraid! When I’m on the cheese counter at Formaggio Kitchen, helping a customer put together a board, I always ask if there are any cheeses to avoid. The second most common answer is “Blue cheese!” (The most common is “Nope!”). I understand …
It is time to more fully introduce our founders, Eglantine Crumb and Artiz Rind. As I mentioned in a previous post, there’s a bit of hesitation here. I’ve got two reasons. One is respect for their privacy. Two is that I’m not sure people will …
This post about Boxcarr Handmade Cheese and their Rocket’s Robiola will be a bit longer and sentimental compared to our other posts. I wrote this post without help from Eglantine or Aritz, since it is where my cheese journey truly began. I was a fan of cheese before, of course. Someone gave me The Oxford Companion to Cheese for Christmas. And when my daughters were young I would treat myself to little offcuts from the Whole Foods cheese counter. I loved everything I brought home, but I didn’t think too much about it. It was not until Boxcarr that I began to understand cheese. (This post will be updated with better cheese pics soon!)
In late 2019, while still running our farm, I saw a post on Instagram that Boxcarr Handmade Cheese was hiring. Since I already loved their Winsome and Cottonbell, I applied for the dishwashing job. I thought it would be a fun off-farm role. Soon I was also washing cheeses in the aging rooms, and eventually I stepped into a cheesemaker’s role. I first learned robiola. To be honest, before Boxcarr I had never even heard of robiola, so it was also the first cheese I researched in earnest.
During training, Sam showed me the magic and reverence I now try to bring to the cheese counter and classroom. When four of us gathered around the vat to quickly cut the Redbud curd into tiny bits, it felt like tending a witches’ cauldron. It never felt mundane. It always felt like magic. When training me to cut the robiola curd, Sam told me that monks would bless cheese as they made it. She suggested that it would not hurt to say, or even just think, a few words of gratitude for the animals and farmers who brought us the milk. That sense of gratitude has stayed with me. It is essential to the enjoyment of life and entirely appropriate when speaking of cheese.
The Genke siblings founded Boxcarr together with their families. Sam was a respected cheesemaker long before starting Boxcarr. Her brother Austin, a chef and graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. His wife Dani, who runs the goat farm and serves as creative director, rounded out the team. How all three of them manage to be so talented I do not know.
Beyond their skill, they also have tremendous hearts. During Covid they shifted their production and donated farmers’ cheese to food pantries and schools. If you were an out-of-work service worker, you could stop by and pick up a box of beautiful cheese, often with a few vegetables from local farms tucked in. I often think of them when I think about why it matters so much to support local farmers and artisanal food producers.
Robiola itself is one of Italy’s oldest cheeses, stretching back to Roman times. The name most likely comes from the town of Robbio in Lombardy, though today robiola is most closely tied to Piedmont and Lombardy. These were places of small, mixed farms. Families kept a cow or two, some sheep, maybe a goat, and cheeses were often made from whatever milk was on hand, resulting in mixed-milk wheels.
Unlike the long-aged cheeses of northern Europe, robiolas do not take long to mature. Their small format made them easy to sell at local markets, and their delicate rinds and creamy interiors suited the rhythms of farm life. Some were wrapped in cabbage leaves, others bloomed with a fine white mold, and some developed the wrinkly geotrichum coat that we still see today. Robiola was a true farmstead cheese, shaped by necessity, place, and tradition.
American cheesemakers are not bound by the same naming rules and traditions as their European counterparts. Because North America did not have its own indigenous dairy culture, most artisan cheeses here borrow Old World styles. For example, the bloomy-rinded triple crèmes of Normandy inspired Cowgirl Creamery’s Mt Tam, and the ash-ripened goat cheeses of the Loire Valley inspired Humboldt Fog from Cypress Grove. They have become distinct in their own right. Similarly, most of Boxcarr’s cheeses draw on Italian inspiration.
Boxcarr Handmade Cheese and their Rocket’s Robiola nods to that heritage, including the Genkes’ own Italian roots, but it also stands apart as an American original. When I was judging at the Big E, one of my fellow judges said Rocket’s Robiola was his favorite American Original. The cheesemaker gently cuts and jiggles, never stirs the curd. This cow’s milk cheese develops a wrinkly, ashed geotrichum rind. The ash is not traditional for a robiola, but since it slightly lowers the surface pH, it encourages that beautiful rind to flourish. Very clever! It also looks striking on a cheese board. Despite being an all-cow cheese, Sam named the cheese after one of her first goats, Rocket.
And now, a whole post without a word about flavor or pairings! It’s definitely not an afterthought, I just had to get all my feelings out!
Rocket’s Robiola has a supple, luscious paste with flavors that begin lactic and yogurty, then deepen into earthy, mushroomy, and slightly tangy notes as it ripens. The rind adds a faint nuttiness and a gentle contrast to the cream beneath.
For pairings, try:
It’s our first cheese post! Here we go! Appleby’s Cheshire comes from Hawkstone Abbey Farm in Shropshire, England. The Appleby family founded the farm in 1952, and now Paul Appleby and his wife Sarah carry on the work, with help from their five children. They …