Tell us a bit about you I studied a food and nutrition degree at university and was really interested in nutrition when I was younger; I did a lot of sports and was keen on health and fitness.  During my university placement year, I spent a year at Solway Foods, who became part of Northern Foods, working in the NPD team, coming up with ideas for salads, sandwiches and sushi After my placement year, I went back to my degree with new ideas of what I might do; it is a strange th

Tell us a bit about you Mario’s father I was born in Vienna, my mother is Austrian and my father is Italian and I lived in Sardinia from the age of 6 months until I came to the UK in 2001.  I have always been involved with food since I can remember; my father is a fisherman and we used to cure meat too.  My brother is a chef and spends his time between restaurants in Switzerland and Sardinia and he also makes cheese.  Actually, cheese making became a bit of a competition betw

Steve’s Meadow Farm Raw Milk Cheese. I took Iona’s one day cheese-making course February 2013, and I have made a few batches of cheese since. I’m not going to cover all the stuff that Iona covers on her workshop – it’s a tremendously useful foundation in cheese-making and if you have an interest it’s definitely worth attending. This is a story about all the other stuff that I found out about making cheese that surrounds the workshop – and my intent is to tell you my journey,

The large vat filled, being stirred by Stu  and ripening Once the milk is pasteurised (or not as the case may be), we heat it to between 32 -33oC depending on what we are making and we add starter culture which determines the taste, texture and characteristics of the cheese we are making. The main microbiological purpose of the starter culture is to turn lactose, milk’s natural sugar in to lactic acid.  It is this that we measure during the cheese making process using an acid

Over the next few days we are going to be writing about the eleven stages to cheese making and describing how we make our cheese. First off, we are going to talk about pasteurising. To pasteurise or not to pasteurise Our little pasteuriser To begin, (subject to EHO approval) there is a choice of making pasteurised cheese or unpasteurised cheese.  There are two ways of pasteurising.  We use the HTST method which is high temperature short time where we pass milk through a serie

Danisco starter culture The best place to buy Danisco starter culture is from Orchard Valley. I like the guys at Orchard Valley as they are extremely friendly, approachable but above all, knowledgeable.  Their customer service is also good and deliveries are prompt.  Ask for Trevor, he is an absolute star and has helped me enormously. Their website is: http://www.orchard-dairy.co.uk/ and they can be contacted on: 01584 811137. #cheesemaking #Daniscostarterculture #Ribblesdale

I was reading through some old notes made by my uncle whilst clearing out a filing cabinet.  There is an interesting piece about washing curd with hot water i.e. removing some whey and adding hot water (or hot whey) to replace it and the effect this has on the texture and flavour of cheese. The aim of washing curd is to remove lactose from the curd particles, therefore reducing the amount of lactic acid that can be produced in the curd.  This is said to produce a smoother tex

People often ask me, how do you make cheese? To my mind, cheese making is about timing, temperature and acidity.  It is also 75% hygiene and 25% routine i.e. you follow the same make sheet so that the cheese does not vary much, save for changes in ambient temperature and milk season when you need to make tweaks.  There is a mixture of skill, science and intuition involved in cheese making. First, you need a good supply of milk.  We make goat, cow and sheep’s cheese.  You can