Selecting Cheddar for Christmas

You'll often hear a cheesemonger talk about 'Make Date'. When a cheese is made gives us clues as to how the cheese will taste and how it will mature. The season will dictate what the animal has been eating from luscious grass and wild floral in the warmer months to silage in the winter, which affects not only flavour but also factors like the fat content of the milk and the yield - a day's batch size varies between 10 and 16 cheeses.

The temperature and humidity on the day the cheese is made will effect how long the milk takes to ripen and acidity, and how long the curd takes to coagulate. The ability to react and gently guide the cheese through the cheesemaking process is the art and skill of the Artisan Cheesemaker. After that first key day or so of cheesemaking, the cheesemakers role becomes one of steward. With hard cheeses, from make to counter, it can be months or even years and its takes real care and attention on the part of the maker. At Paxton & Whitfield, we have the incredible privilege of selecting the Cheddars that grace our counters. We visit cheesemaker's maturation rooms, real cathedrals of dairy, hidden on farms across the country. The process of 'selection' on paper seems quite simple. We taste through different batches of cheese in search of a flavour profile that we think the Paxton's customer would enjoy. The complexity comes when you have to think about how a cheese will age. We taste the cheeses with their potential in mind, combining the clues the make date brings about with the feel of the paste, the body and texture of the cheese, how the flavour is progressing in comparison to its relative age. When we find a cheese we like, we commit to buying the whole day's makes from that batch, drawing down the batches into our maturing room as and when its time for us to continue the maturation in our specialist cheese rooms in the Cotswolds. 

This week our MD James visited the legendary cheesemaker Jamie Montgomery on the family farm in Somerset. This eponymous Cheddar has been produced by 3 generations, and today is heralded as one of the greatest Cheddars in the world. Affectionately know as Montys by Mongers, it wouldn't be a Christmas counter without it. 

We have predominantly summer and autumn milk cheeses, focusing on warm, full bodied cheeses with a fruity sweetness and the savoury brothy quality that Monty is famous for. Weighing in at around 24kg a piece, each cheese has been made by hand, clothbound by hand, turned by hand and brushed by hand. And when we receive them in our Maturing Rooms and then our shops we proudly continue this manual process of caring for the cheese right up until the point we hand cut and hand wrap and then handover to you, the customer, to enjoy. 

To pre order your cheddar ahead of christmas please click here