The Age of Cheddar
Much like the strength of one’s coffee, choice of cheddar maturity is entirely personal. At Plaw Hatch, our cheddars range from mild, which is creamy and has a higher moisture content, scaling through medium, mature, and extra-mature all the way to vintage; drier, crystalline, and packing a real punch.
Traditional farmhouse cheeses are unique, so handmade cheddars will not have the uniformity of supermarket ones. The milk in manufactured cheeses will come from potentially thousands of cows from different farms and goes through several processes, including standardisation and pasteurisation, before becoming cheese. Our artisan cheese, however, is made from the biodynamic raw milk of just 35 fully grass-fed cows who all live, and always have lived, on the farm. The flavours vary with the seasons; rich and fresh in spring and summer, sweet and moreish in winter.
Keeping a small, closed dairy herd that is given space to experience the rhythms of a more natural life means milk production at Plaw Hatch is certainly a seasonal beast. With the spring flush comes a flurry of cheese making in the dairy. This means that at the beginning of summer there is very little mild cheddar ready, as it would have had to have been made at the end of winter, the lowest point in the year for milk production.
Recently, when fulfilling a wholesale order, the dairy team cut a wheel of young cheddar (only two months old) to see if it was ready, and they were very pleased. Our mild cheddar is often a little stronger than what many can be used to, so to offer a greater range to our customers, we will now cut our mild cheddar between 2 and 4 months old, rather 5 to 6 months. This younger cheese maintains the characteristic complex and full flavour of our small batch wheels, but is creamier and lighter than its aged counterparts.
