Swaledale

What is Swaledale Cheese?

Swaledale is a full fat hard cheese made in the town of Richmond in Swaledale, North Yorkshire, England. It is produced from cows' milk, Swaledale sheep's milk and goats' milk.

Local legend traces cheesemaking in the Yorkshire Dales to Cistercian monks from Normandy who settled in the area in the 11th century and passed their methods to Swaledale farmers. Farmhouses in the dale made cheese through the 18th century, selling it fresh and white or ripe and blued. Production fell away from the start of the 20th century, and by 1980 only one farm, Harkerside above Reeth, was still making it. That stopped in the early 1980s. Mrs Longstaff then gave the original recipe to David and Mandy Reed, who founded the Swaledale Cheese company in February 1987.

The cheese is handmade to a recipe known to only a few people. Milk collected from Swaledale farms is heated to 28 C (82 F) with a microbiological culture, left for two hours, then set with rennet. After an hour the curd is heated to 28 C, cut, stirred, cut again and drained. The cubes are stacked, the blocks broken up, and the curd packed into muslin-lined moulds. Pressing is light, 18 hours at 28 C with one turn after four hours. The cheese is then soaked in an 85% brine solution for 24 hours and stored in humid cellars.

Wheels are round and average 2.25 kilograms (5 lb), made with unpasteurised milk. Maturing takes three to four weeks, and a grey-blue mould grows on the rind unless the cheese is coated in natural wax. The texture is moist and medium firm. The flavour has been described as having the freshness of the misty Dales and wild bracken, with a sweet caramel undertone of ewes' milk.

All the animals graze land in Swaledale, where soil and climate support a particular mixture of herbs and grasses, and that pasture gives the milk and the cheese their character. Swaledale cheeses took three gold awards at the 2008 Great Taste Awards and three gold and two bronze medals at the 2008 World Cheese Awards.