Cheddar cheese is named after a small village
in the West Country in England.
We are here to watch the traditional method
of making it, and find out why cheesemakers restarted
the centuries-old tradition of storing it in caves.
The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company
is the only dairy in this village,
so we're about to see the real deal.
About 333,000 tons of cheddar
are produced in the UK per year.
To get the official Protected Designation of Origin label
West Country Farmhouse Cheddar,
the cheese has to be made in one of the four counties:
Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset.
The cheese must be made from milk
from grazing herds no more than 30 miles from the farm.
It has to be made from a traditional recipe.
The curds need to be turned by hand.
And it must be aged to a minimum of nine months.
The earliest record of cheddar anywhere
is at Cheddar, in Somerset, in 1170.
The land around this village has been
at the heart of English cheesemaking since the 15th century.
Today, as many Cheddar producers
have upscaled and required more land,
there is only one traditional cheesemaker
left in the village.
The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company
produces 60 tons of cheese each year.
John Spencer: Well, certainly down here,
you have the Somerset Levels,
and then you have the top of the Cheddar Gorge,
and each year you would get
a lot of water coming down from the Gorge,
bringing a lot of silt,
which really made the pastures verdant
and very, very nutritious.
Ju: In the morning, 2,000 liters of milk
is delivered from a farm four miles away.
It takes around 10 liters of milk
to make 1 kilogram of cheddar.
The milk is agitated, which mixes the fat
evenly through the milk.
Some farmhouse producers use pasteurized milk,
but here it's raw milk.
John: We use it unpasteurized.
We need to know that the quality of the milk
and the safety is fine.
The farm that we get it from
has Holstein Friesians, British Friesians.
Ju: A vegetarian replacement for rennet is then added,
which sets the milk into a junket.
This is cut to form curds and whey.
The curds and whey are heated to about 40 degrees Celsius
to make the curds solid.
This influences the moisture level
In the finished product.
Cheeses like Gorgonzola and mozzarella
have a lot of moisture in them, so they go off very quickly,
whereas Parmesan has little moisture,
so lasts for a long time.
Cheddar is somewhere in the middle, around 40%.
The starter cultures develop and multiply.
The whey is drained away.
Next, the all-important cheddaring process,
where the curds, now having the texture of chicken breast,
are turned and cut.
John: What cheddaring does is it squeezes the curd
and forces more whey out of it,
and gradually it'll get drier and drier,
and the texture changes very quickly.
Ju: The curd is salted by hand to preserve it
and is milled into small chips.
It's pressed into a 25-kilogram mold
and left overnight.
In the morning, it's dipped in hot water
to smooth the edge of the cheese
and remove the imprint of the cloth.
It's then treated with a vegetarian-based substance.
The use of cheesecloth is a vital way
of allowing the cheese to gradually dry and develop a rind.
The only thing that identifies it
is a tag that states the date of production
and the weight of the cheese.
The mellow, mature, and vintage cheddars
are all stored on site, where they are turned,
and the free mold is vacuumed away.
The cave-matured variety is carried
into the famous Gough's Cave in the Mendip Hills.
The constant temperature and humidity, nearly 98%,
provide perfect conditions in which to mature
cloth-bound cheese.
The moisture content is a critical component,
and it ensures the cultures and enzymes
move on more quickly, producing a more complex flavor.
It takes on the natural yeasts and mold
from the atmosphere in the cave,
leading to an earthy flavor.
The cheese's strength is defined by the length of the aging.
For mellow cheddar, it's four to six months;
mature, 10 to 12 months;
and vintage, 20 to 24 months.
Cave-matured should have less of a bite at 12 months old.
We tried some out to see if there's a taste difference
between the maturations.
So, the first one I'm gonna have a little bite of
is the cave-matured cheddar.
It's really creamy.
of quite a medium to mild cheddar.
You can tell the difference of the rinds here,
so I've got the cave-aged one, which has sort of like
that really damp, quite dark color in the rind of it,
and then I've got the vintage one,
which is just a little bit lighter.
OK, now to try some of this.
Wow, the flavor of that is incredible.
It has such a kick to it and such a bite.
Immediately, when you cut into vintage cheddar,
you want there to be almost a flakiness to it,
and that's exactly what this has got.
The company is the first one in recent memory
to reintroduce cheddar cheese
back into a natural cave environment to mature.
The PDO label was set up to protect the industry
from non-genuine products.
So, why did the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company opt out of it?
John: Some years ago we had PDO status for our cheese,
but we deliberately opted out of it.
So, with a PDO, you can make it from pasteurized milk;
we make all ours from unpasteurized.
With a PDO, you can mature it in plastic;
we mature ours in cloth.
We are still doing the things
that would enable us to qualify for PDO.
What we've just done is go on a little bit further,
quite a lot further.