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 …
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 favorites, and I hope you have the chance to try it!
Wensleydale was born in Yorkshire when French Cistercian monks arrived with their cheese-making skills. Later, when Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell oversaw the Dissolution in the 1530’s, stripping the abbeys of their land and wealth, the recipe was passed along to farmers’ wives. (I’m on my third book about Thomas Cromwell this year, so I just had to throw that in.)
By the late 20th century, traditional farmhouse Wensleydale nearly disappeared. We talked about the effects of Industrialization in our post on Kirkham’s Lancashire. Production had long moved into factories, and the old ways of making it on small farms were gone. The last creamery in Hawes was even set to close in the 1990s. What saved it, oddly enough, was Wallace and Gromit! Their love of Wensleydale in the films sent demand soaring, giving Wensleydale Creamery a lifeline and sparking interest in real Yorkshire cheese again. That surge of interest set the stage for Sam and Ben Spence at Curlew Dairy to help bring real farmhouse Wensleydale back to life.
Eglantine: I grew up in Yorkshire, so I’ll tell you straight, Wensleydale belongs to this place. For centuries in the Dales, farmers’ wives made Wensleydale, using up the surplus milk when the cows were flush in summer. The cheese is best young and fresh, often eaten with bread and ale at the table, or taken down to the markets. It was never meant to be fancy. It was everyday cheese, proper food for working people, and part of the rhythm of the farm.
That is what Curlew Dairy brought back with Yoredale. They use milk from Holstein and Ayrshire cows, well suited to cheesemaking and to the rough ground of the Dales. The herd grazes on high pastures for much of the year, feeding on grass and wildflowers that give the milk its clean, lactic character. In winter, they eat gorgeous haylage grown on the farm, giving the milk an even sweeter taste. They use the milk the same day, raw and full of its natural flora, to make Yoredale in their dairy in North Yorkshire.
Eglantine: The trick with Wensleydale is in the curd. We cut it bigger and stir it less, so it keeps hold of more whey, and we press it only lightly. That is what makes the cheese moist and crumbly instead of hard and dry. If you press it too much or cut the curd too fine, you end up with something closer to Cheddar. Done right, Wensleydale stays fresh, clean, and lactic with that touch of honey sweetness. It is honest cheese, proper to the Dales.
Aritz: Yoredale Wensleydale ages three to four months. Because the curds are large and hold more whey, the cheese cannot be kept for long aging like Cheddar or Comté. I have nothing more to add, Eglantine has done a beautiful job explaining this cheese.
This is a good moment to notice how curd size affects a cheese. Large curds hold more whey, so the cheese stays juicier and fresher, with a crumbly but moist bite. Small curds, cut fine and stirred longer, drain more thoroughly and set the stage for firm, long-aged cheeses like Cheddar, Parmigiano Reggiano, or Gouda. The make begins with the curd, and the curd decides much of the cheese. If you’re not sure what curd is, stay tuned for an explanation!
The flavor of Yoredale is a lovely balance of freshness and depth. It has a clean lactic tang, hints of grass and herbs, and a gentle sweetness. It pairs beautifully with crisp apples, ripe pears, and fresh figs. A glass of cider or a light ale will echo its bright acidity, while a floral white wine will bring out its delicate sweetness.
There are two other farmhouse Wensleydales you can find at Neal’s Yard Dairy, but Yoredale is the only one they bring over to the United States. Please comment if you’ve tried the others!
Sources:
https://www.wensleydale.co.uk/our-story-i22
https://www.curlewdairy.co.uk/p/about-us.html
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 …
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 understand….
Eglantine is a cheesemaker, cook, and baker with a keen interest in foraging and brewing. She rather fancies herself a bit of a witch. She always says, “Food’s magic!” and believes in the healing power of a warm meal made with love. Born and raised in Yorkshire, England, she will always have a soft spot for Wensleydale. Though her roots are rural, she has traveled widely and draws from many cuisines in her kitchen. Every so often, she shares stories from those adventures. While she is proud of her resilience and ingenuity in finding her way home, she’s still a little embarrassed about how she ended up trapped in a shipping container in the first place.
She is our window into the animal and plant worlds that shape cheesemaking and food. For example, she brings a special understanding of how feed influences milk, how different breeds of cow lend their character to cheese, and she cares deeply about the welfare of the animals themselves. She’ll also share her pairing suggestions and recipes!
She and Aritz founded Crumb & Rind to spread the word about the wonderful world of artisanal cheese. It was her idea to bring me into the fold to hopefully find a greater audience, and I am grateful for her taking a chance on me. I promise to listen and share what I learn.
Aritz Rind is a little harder to explain (pssst, he’s a cheese mite.) He is a Basque (we think) anarchist (we know), and an affineur. (An affineur is someone who tends to cheese as it ages. More on that soon.) His favorite cheese is Ossau-Iraty, washed down with an unfiltered sagardo. He lives in an aging cave, though none of us is quite sure where. He insists he has traveled widely, and scoffs at our knowing smiles when we remind him he hasn’t gone all that far.
Through the mycelium network, he can reach almost anywhere on earth, so he picks up all sorts of odd bits of knowledge. Since his diet is mostly fungus, he can be a little out there sometimes. He’s also deeply political, never missing the chance to remind us: “Every bite is a choice, and every choice is a vote.” He can be intense, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Aritz is our guide to the invisible world, where fungi and bacteria shape so much of what we eat and drink. He reveals how cheesemaking depends on things we cannot see. And he often slides into my lane to have something to say about economics, politics, and humanity along the way.
He and Eglantine first met on her travels, and she credits him with helping her get home safely. He has never mentioned it, but it’s clear he’s fond of her. As for me, he wasn’t so sure about my joining Crumb & Rind. He thinks people are too quick to fear what they don’t understand, and too eager to place themselves at the center of the universe. When I joined, I promised him I’d keep a humble, open mind.
Where I Began 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 …
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 …
In July, I got to be an aesthetic cheese judge for The Big E. As a cheese judge, I focused on the flavor, taste, and overall presentation of cheese. While I am still early in my journey to develop my palette, (we’ll talk A LOT more about that later,) I had excellent help and advice from those who were more experienced.
The Big E is short for the Eastern States Exposition, and it covers all of New England. Even Connecticut! It’s like a big state fair for all the little north eastern states. The fairgrounds in Springfield, Mass were vacant when I was there, so I could clearly see the layout. Adorably, there were buildings for each of the New England states, and it looked like there was a pretty nice beer garden. And there was even a cute little early American village. So I’m sure come September, it will be packed with food vendors, rides, farm animals, and people there to witness the spectacle. I see the Avett Brothers are playing this year. (Boo hoo for me that I”m working that night.)
Obviously, farming, and specifically dairy farming, has a long history in New England. You cannot talk about dairy in the United States without talking about Vermont. Compared to behemoth dairy states like California and Wisconsin, Vermont punches way above its weight. Interestingly, even Connecticut also has some great cheesemakers as well.
When you think about dairy, you usually think cow. Cows are not happy everywhere, specifically dairy cows. They need access to fresh water and lots of pasture. If you think about milk as a fluid that is being extracted from the cows (weird way to say it, but that IS what is happening,) dairy cows need a lot of water to just replace what they lose during milking. So it makes sense in the climate of New England, which is on the wetter side, there are a lot of happy cows.
As cheese judges, we tasted butters, yogurts, and a couple dozen categories of cheese. We had a brief training on how the grading rubric worked, and we got to it. I have to admit, at the beginning of the day I was scoffing a bit at the other judges delicately spitting out the cheeses they were sampling. By the end of the day, I was spitting the cheese out along with them. It was not easy work!
What I came away with, besides knowing I am capable of spitting cheese out, was that I can absolutely identify tastes and flavors. So I was a little shy at the beginning in expressing opinions, and I normally doubt myself a little anyway. By the end of the day, I felt a lot more comfortable and felt more keyed into putting flavors into words than I had ever been.
In the future, I hope to share that feeling with you all in our classes. Developing your palette really does just take exposure and practice!
About Crumb & Rind I’m Jennifer Tolliver, and I’m the editor of this website, and the public face of Crumb & Rind. I’m the one you’ll communicate with and see out and about. But rather than just talking about myself, I wanted to properly introduce …