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Added link in original post above to FXcuisine.com's latest article on London UK's Neal's Yard Dairy, cult British Cheesemonger with 57 types of British Cheese.

Beautiful pictures, especially of Stichelton.

Link to Neal's Yard Dairy's website.

Nice links Giovanni thanks!

Quote from: Wayne Harris on December 21, 2008, 03:28:18 AM
"They wake up at 4 to milk the cows and send them grazing, then do the cheese, then move the cows and milk them again. Sunrise to sundown, 7 days a week."

I would give up my day job in a flash to take on this life.

Well I went back to that high pasture this year to film them, and they are still hiring! But it is a hard life and the accommodation looks more like some 1960s hippies squat than anything else. There were a few German twenty something this year.

Thank you for these nice comments about my website. I am now making a video version for TV, on Swiss themes only, including various visits to high pasture cheesemakers.

We also filmed a couple days the making of Schabziger, a very, very old type of cheese that is also one of the world's strongest. They curdle skimmed milk and then leave it for 6 weeks of butyric fermentation, then later mix it with blue fenugreek powder. Took me a whole week to shake the smell off my clothes and hair. Lovely people, we even drove up the Alp to see old fashioned Ziger-making (from whole milk, not ricotta Ziger from whey).

The other thing I have not found in this excellent forum is a discussion of high pasture milk, this is absolutely essential to understanding how the world's best cheeses are created. Every day the milk is different because of what mix of wild plants the cows ate. The secondary metabolites are present in much higher concentration at higher altitudes and they have a direct effect on the cheese taste. I found some articles about this in French scientific publications, but it is common knowledge among cheesemakers in the Alps and I encourage anybody making his own cheese to try and get milk from cows that eat fresh wild plants rather than industrial food or dried hay.

FXcuisine, good points and you are right I haven't seen that discussion. I guess basically because it's a luxury I don't have access to as I'm in suburban Houston and no raw milk of any kind.

Never heard of Schabziger, curdling skimmed milk sounds very much like a lactic acid type cheese. Had to look butyric fermentation up, another definition was of it in rancid butter, lovely, NOT! No wonder it is very very strong.

Schabziger has been made in exactly the same way since the 15th century. An absolute must-taste for serious cheeseheads. I posted http://fxcuisine.com/default.asp?Display=179 an article about Schabziger pasta. You only use minute amounts to spice up your pasta. They curdle the skimmed milk using whey from the day before, but this is not where the taste comes from. It is exported in America and you might find some to try!

This stuff sounds incredibly strong. It must be very overpowering if it can bring you out of a coma ... 

Oh yes, all those butyric fermented cheeses can barely be eaten, they are used more like hot peppers, to spice up food!