where our cows often graze.The depth of the shape of this cheese results in a light, citrus flavour, despite the fact that it is made from the very same recipe as our earthier, mushroomy Bath Soft Cheese. A quirk of cheesemaking that most cheese enthusiasts will enjoy testing out!
Making Cheese
Do you want to know how we make our award-winning organic cheeses? Or are you thinking about making cheese at home for yourself?
But if you really can’t wait, we’ve put together a short guide that covers the basics of cheesemaking – for whatever cheese it is that you want to make.
We gently pasteurise our milk by heating it and holding it at 63°C for 30 minutes. This approach means that the milk is guaranteed to be free of any nasties when we start cheesemaking – not that we’d expect there to be any! We’d recommend that novice cheesemakers use pasteurised milk too, particularly if you’re interested in making soft cheese. However, raw milk is an option if you are confident of the source.
Much of the milk you can find in a supermarket will have been flash pasteurised, which can damage it as far as cheesemaking is concerned (it is heated to 72°C for a minimum of 15 seconds – but frequently to a higher temperature and for more time). However, you should be able to buy good quality milk at your local farm shop, farmers’ market or even from
Again, depending on what cheese is being made, ripening cultures may also be added to the milk at around this stage. There are many combinations of cultures to choose from but, for example, if you want to produce a white rind such as is found on a Brie, Camembert or our own Bath Soft Cheese, you would add
Traditionally, rennet is extracted from the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf (the enzyme in the rennet that acts on the casein helps the calf digest milk). However, today there are vegetarian options such as microbial rennet or plant extracts from cardoons or thistles. Opinions differ over whether the type of rennet affects the overall taste of the cheese but we use animal rennet in our Bath Soft Cheese, Kelston Park and Bath Blue but we use a microbial rennet for Wyfe of Bath – so it is entirely suitable for vegetarians.
The smaller the pieces of curd, the more whey is released and – by and large – the firmer and drier the eventual cheese will be. So our