Blue Cheeses

Sheep’s milk can make wonderful blue cheese - noble Roquefort for one. There’s a real affinity between its richness and the metallic twang of the added veining. Capric acid levels in ewe's milk are somewhere between the low of cow and the high of goat meaning there is a hint of that farmyard sweatiness but nothing overwhelming. The milk for Devon’s glorious Beenleigh Blue doesn't have to travel far either: it comes from Tom and Helen Garland's local flock. Like all the best blues, the quality and taste of the paste is just as wonderful as the blue-green veins running through it - a tasty, umami backdrop that lets the inoculated moulds shine. Its sister cheeses, Harbourne Blue (made with goat's milk) and Devon Blue (cow's milk) are superb, too. But to my palate, its the balance of the rich ewe and continental-influenced style that makes Beenleigh so special. 

The cheese is made near Totnes, Devon - by Ticklemore Cheese - to a recipe not unlike its more famous French blue cousin. But in place of Roquefort’s clean sharpness it has a crumbly sweetness: it’s friendlier, less weepy, less palate-puckeringly sharp. The saltiness here is more a rock minerality than a briny spume; the cutting, almost vinegar tang replaced by a softer ripe-lemon sunshine. And as the cheese ages, its sweet youth broadens out into deeper, creamier complexity.

It’s a world-class blue, thoroughly British but with a whiff of French chic. It calls for a lighter fortified wine but nothing with the sweet pruney depths of port or even a Vin Doux Naturel. A five-year-old Verdelho Madeira would hit the mark.

This cheese hails not from the Cornwall of sea-carved coves and vertiginous coastal paths but rather from the wilder, bleaker moors of the interior. Not the land of cream teas and Tintagel tea towels but of stark rocky bluffs, of moaning winds, of Jamaica Inn.

And there is indeed something untamed about Cornish Blue, the Millennial brainchild of the Cornish Cheese Co. It’s designed specifically to be eaten young, or so the producers say, and sees only 8-14 weeks of maturation before it hits your cheese plate. Sweet, not salty umami like Stilton, they state. Well, yes. To a degree.

It’s a young blue by most standards and so you can still get the sweet milky hum in its dense, fudgy interior. But sitting behind that is a rather complex blue tang that doffs its hat to Stichelton’s bitter, rustic, farmyardy qualities. Here, however, the crumbly cream of the paste wraps around the metallic blue notes to soften them and deliver them on the palate in a softer fashion. But there’s a definite ammonia hum to its natural rind which the exterior portion of paste inevitably picks up adding complexity and another menu of flavours.

There’s a super-long finish, too: an interplay of sweet, umami and funky blue notes – like clouds across Bodmin Moor revealing now shafts of sunlight, now a darker countenance. In the sample I tried (admittedly a supermarket offering) they didn’t marry quite as well as I had hoped. I am going to order some directly as I suspect it should be rather more successful. It was crowned World Champion at the 2010 World Cheese Awards after all, which is quite a feat for such a recently developed cheese. And with the right balance between elemental power and more domesticated hygge it would, I think, be a winner indeed.

coming soon ...