Cheese tasting at Waterford Food Festival

Last week I had the privilege of representing The School of Artisan Food in a series of artisan tastings at the Waterford Food Festival in Ireland.

The tastings and demonstrations were being held in the impressively equipped catering department at the Waterford Institute of Technology, and were open to chefs, catering students and the general public.

My demonstrations were on cheese tasting and traditional and contemporary cheese making in the British Isles.

I talked about the School of Artisan Food; the short courses available, the diploma course, and the Welbeck estate. I spoke of my travels to the USA, France and around England learning the craft of artisan cheese making. I explained the fundamentals of cheese making; of bacteria, yeasts and moulds, and we discussed different ways of serving cheese, compiling a cheese board and cooking with cheese.

As these topics were covered, we tasted a selection of 5 artisan cheeses I had chosen to give a representation of some of the most important cheese types. 4 of the 5 cheeses were Irish, with an English hard cheese thrown in as the 5^th cheese for interest.

We started by tasting Gortnamona – a bloomy rind goats’ milk cheese made at Cooleeney farm in County Tipperary. The batch we tasted was very young, with a firm, acidic centre, and just a little creamy breakdown beneath the white, fluffy rind.

Next was a magnificent piece of Coolea – a farmhouse Gouda style cheese from County Cork. This cheese gave me the perfect opportunity to explain the process of “washing curd” by removing whey and replacing it with water in order to quickly slow down acidification development, leaving more lactose un-converted to lactic acid. The Coolea was a younger cheese than I would usually choose, and although the gritty calcium crystals and complex layers of flavour which always draws me to this cheese had yet to develop, it was still interesting – with warm, buttery flavours, a soft, fudgy texture and a fruity, tropical aroma.

To follow the Coolea was the English cheese. I had chosen Berkswell, the hard ewes’ milk cheese from Ram Hall, near Coventry. The Berkswell was a cheese made on the 02/04/11, and was delicious, but a totally different cheese from the Berkswell I had been tasting the previous week – cheeses from the 01/04/11. This cheese was nuttier, dryer, and not as sweet. More like a Sardinian Pecorino perhaps.

Ardrahan

We then moved back to Ireland for the penultimate cheese, but continued with the ewes’ milk cheese. It was Crozier blue from Tipperary, made by the Grubb family, makers of the famous Cashel blue. The Crozier was rich and full flavoured but sweet and delicate.

Finally, we tasted one of my favourite Irish cheeses, Ardrahan - made by Mary Burns in County Cork. Ardrahan is one of the wonderful washed rind cheeses produced along the south-east coast of Ireland.

We galloped through the world of artisan cheese at top speed, covering all of the about and a little more in a 2 hour slot.