Often when we think about cheese, we don’t think about where it all begins – with milk and those who produce it. Sam Wilkin explores just what it takes to make cheese’s most vital raw ingredient.
Ask any chef and they’ll tell you that a dish is only as good as its ingredients. That said, you can eat in plenty of restaurants, taste their wares and leave knowing virtually nothing about their suppliers.
The same theory can be applied to cheese. When someone tries a piece of cheese off a beautifully presented board or samples something at a deli counter, they’re not often thinking about its key raw ingredient – milk – and how its production has shaped and defined what they’re now tasting.
It takes a lot to produce milk for cheesemaking. A dairy farmer’s decisions are influenced by the land, the herd they care for and the climate in which they live. They also face the pressures of rising costs, tumbling prices and political indifference.
“We often don’t consider the milk producers when we talk about cheese,” says Michele Buster, co-founder of New York-based importer Forever Cheese. “And without the value placed on a profession that is under pressure it will inevitably fall to large industrial farms to provide our milk.”
If we don’t find ways to make the job more visible, we will have more people leaving the industry. People have to feel proud of what they do.
While she offers up harrowing political and financial context – such as the Spanish Government funding dairy herd culls to counteract climate change or the paltry €10,000 average annual turnover of an Italian shepherd – Michele Buster says her core mission is just to make people more aware of the profession.
“If we don’t find ways to make the job more visible, we will have more people leaving the industry. People have to feel proud of what they do.”
It’s a cause that has she pursued by creating Save The Shepherd, a community that celebrates those who work with animals to produce the milk for cheesemaking. You might call this article Good Cheese’s contribution to that cause.
The best place to start seems to be with what those shepherds, herdsmen and farmers are aspiring to: milk of the right quality for cheesemaking.
“Quality” is a word that can be confusing, though – as Tom Calver of Somerset cheesemaker Westcombe Dairy points out.
“‘Quality’ milk from a commodity perspective means you’re measuring fats and proteins, urea and cleanliness. So, good ‘quality’ can be really dead milk from a cheesemaking point of view”.
Within the wider dairy industry, “quality” refers to specified hygiene quality. Under EU Law, that focusses on acceptable levels of pathogens in the milk. Milk with certain pathogenic indicators is deemed unfit for human consumption. These indicators however are not necessarily indicators of pathogens alone; they can also indicate a high bacterial load, which in some cases is seen as desirable by providing a range of beneficial microorganisms that contribute to flavour and texture development in cheese.
“When you’re producing really good food, those [pathogen] metrics are not always that useful,” adds Calver.
What is required of milk for cheesemaking is clearly far from one size fits all, so “quality” is less strictly defined and more determined by suitability for the style of cheese being made.
Katy Fenwick, co-founder of the Northern Dairy Cheese School, says she defines quality as something that “gives the cheesemaker the best opportunity to make the best expression of that milk”.
As an example of this, she references an experimental Wensleydale make undertaken by a number of producers at the School, using each other’s milk. This proved revealing in the case of Stonebeck – which is a traditional style Wensleydale using raw milk from the herd of fell-grazed dairy Shorthorns. “It’s a make that perfectly suits their milk. They found it challenging to replicate Stonebeck with milk from more conventionally managed herds”.
Producing the perfect milk for cheesemaking then is a confluence of variables, a perfect balance of farming practices and cheesemaking that respects and responds to the milk. Milk that is perfect for a certain style of cheese might be unsuitable for another.
Whether the cheesemaker is a farmer producing their own milk or a producer who buys their milk in from an outside source, in both cases a farmer has made decisions around how the milk is produced.
Animal species is a key part of the puzzle. The most common milk producing species are cows, sheep, goats and buffalo but in some parts of the world the list includes camels, donkeys, reindeer and yak.
In Northern Europe the vast majority of dairy is produced by cows and, in the UK, every other piece of dairy branding features the classic black & white Holstein-Fresian cow. This cow was bred for high volume production, efficiently filling the largest number of milk bottles. Cheesemakers are not too interested in the liquid. Whey is a waste product. It is the solids that count and so a high-volume breed isn’t always the most desirable option.
Fen Farm Dairy, run by the Crickmore family in Suffolk, is a testament to this. When the farm began its cheesemaking journey with the now-famous Baron Bigod, Jonny Crickmore introduced the Montbéliarde breed of cows for their milk’s high solid content and balance of fat and protein. The herd there is a variety of pure bred Montbéliarde as well as varying degrees of Holstein x Montbéliarde mix. There are also Jersey cows within the herd that bring a much higher butterfat content that enriches the milk at times of the year when butter fats can drop.
Jonny is passionate about diversity in his herd. “It makes your herd more unique having all these shapes and sizes and colours, in fact no other dairy farm has quite got the split of breeds as we have”.
But cheese is not just about cows. The Lacaune breed of sheep is famous for its association with Roquefort. In Campania, Mozzarella is made from the milk of the Italian Mediterranean Buffalo and in Bhutan and Nepal the Arunachali Yak produces milk for the world’s hardest cheese, Chhurpi.
Increasingly we have crossed with other breeds as higher milk solids is not all we’re after.
At Norton & Yarrow, producers of Sinodun Hill, they initially favoured Anglo-Nubian Goats. “They have higher milk solids which produces more cheese per litre of milk than other breeds,” says Rachel Norton. “Increasingly we have crossed with other breeds as higher milk solids is not the only thing we’re after. We want a longer lactation period which allows us to kid less regularly.”
Rachel adds that a degree of balance is needed in the milk as well. “Too high in fat in early lactation makes it harder to drain the curds, the proportion of the solids is important, we want to moderate consistent volumes”.
In addition to getting the milk’s make-up correct, Rachel is using breeding to create a hardier, more self-sufficient herd. “We are now selecting for goats that can be milked from pasture rather than high levels of in parlour feeding. Goats than can maintain their condition, whilst producing good quality milk for cheesemaking, are unusual here in the UK”.
It is extremely unusual that a farmer producing milk for cheese will be starting from scratch, so the choice of species is often not theirs to make. The climate and landscape of the area farmed tends to define this. For instance, lush pastures in Northern Europe (in places like the South West of England or the island of Ireland) lend themselves to cows while the rugged southern Mediterranean is home to wirier, lighter footed, lower input species like goats and sheep.
Many great British cheesemakers emerged from a necessity to diversify with the dissolution of the Milk Marketing Board and the end of a guaranteed price for milk in the early 1990s. The majority of dairy farmers then were managing herds of Holstein-Fresian cows, pushing for volume to maximise their bottom line. To this day, many herds that produce cheesemaking milk are descendants from that era and the example of Fen Farm Dairy is not typical.
While not every herd has as much variety as the next, milk itself remains a changeable beast and susceptible to the seasons.
Seasonality is often perceived as an issue of availability. Mont d’Or, for example, is only available through the autumn and winter months. But this notion only really applies to the more archaic system of herds calving once a year and the lactation cycle of the animal determining availability of milk, with milk solids peaking at the start of lactation and slowly falling away before drying up completely.
Nowadays, herds tend to be split into multiple calving blocks – often a spring and an autumn block – so the loss of availability is mitigated by having two lactation cycles operating at different stages of the year.
Seasonality in sheep’s milk production is a significant issue. Sheep’s fertility cycles are controlled in part by day length, so it is much harder to get a ewe to conceive in the spring than it is in the autumn. A sheep will become more fertile as the days begin to shorten due to a rise in melatonin produced in the increasing hours of darkness. Due to this photosensitivity, most lambing happens in the spring months – with the milk coming shortly after.
Seasonality in milk is also a result of feeding patterns through the farming year. Depending on the time of year or the geography of a farm, animals will be fed on a variety of different things. It makes sense for dairy farmers in a climate that supports rich pastures to put their herd outside during spring and summer months. The weather is (generally) clement and the ground not so wet that the herd will churn it into a quagmire. The herd can graze on natural pasture or be put out onto fields that have been deliberately planted with a diverse range of grasses, herbs and legumes.
The biodiversity of the pasture, whether it be naturally occurring like Alpine Meadows or a planted herbal ley, contributes to the health of the soil, the animal and ultimately the complexity of flavour in the milk.
Animals on fresh summer pasture produce milk with a lower fat percentage by volume. This milk lends itself better to fast draining, hard, longer aging cheeses such as West Country Farmhouse Cheddar or Comté. The diversity of fresh feed is often reflected in a range of complex flavours which develop as the cheese ages.
As winter approaches, the herd move indoors and onto feed with densely packed nutrition, such as haylage, silage, dry hay or mixed ration feeds. The fat content goes up by volume and the cheesemaker will face a curd that drains less readily than that of summer milk cheeses. At this point they will either adapt the make or change to a different style of cheese. The oozing silky Mont d’Or is the classic example.
We see that the protein doesn’t change much in volume but the fat increases by more than a third when mushroom season really hits.
Other systems see a different solids trend. Tim Starnberg of Hol Ysteri in Norway farms goats. He and his herd follow the snowline up and down the mountains as the seasons come and go. The effect on the milk is profound.
As the goats leave behind winter’s barn-fed silage and head up the mountain, their diet changes.
“They do not eat much grass,” says Tim. “They will eat juniper, silver willow, heather, reindeer lichen, blueberries, black crowberry and mushrooms. We see that the protein doesn’t change much in volume but the fat increases by a third and even more when mushroom season really hits”.
To adapt to this, Tim says they cut this fattier, more obstructive curd smaller and stir it for longer to make sure that whey drains away as it should.
Before the milk makes it into the cheesemaker’s vat, there are a number of key decisions to be made in the milking parlour. As soon as milk leaves the sterile confines of an animal and hits the outside air, it is inoculated with the microbiome native to that environment. This is a critical moment in production.
Some farmers wash the udder with soapy water, others use a sterilising spray to clean any trace of bacteria from the teat and some a simple scrub of wood wool, allowing some of the microbiota to enter the milk bringing with it the diversity of the soil and of the feed itself. Raw milk production leans heavily on the naturally occurring microbiome in the environment, the variations of bacteria within the milk bringing a natural variation in the cheese.
The question here is whether the cheesemaker leans into these variations, producing cheese that, batch to batch, can vary greatly, or whether they seek to control the variation by adapting the make.
One of the ways a milk producer can do that is to pasteurise, heating the milk to 72 °C for 15 seconds. The process was invented to destroy dangerous pathogens in the milk, but it does of course destroy much of the other native bacteria as well. Pasteurisation in effect flattens the curve and produces a primary ingredient that is more predictable by being relatively inert.
The cheesemaker can then introduce specifically chosen bacterial strains to achieve the desired cheese make. Many of the classic Protected Designation of Origin cheeses do not allow for pasteurisation, but for those not under these restrictions it can be a useful tool to manage both the safety and the predictability of the milk.
A small number of cheesemakers in the UK aspire to raw milk cheesemaking seeing it as the purest, traditional approach.
Andy Swinscoe of retailer The Courtyard Dairy champions raw milk cheese, saying: “There isn’t a clearer expression of terroir. If you want to make something truly unique to your place it has to be raw milk”.
“But don’t get me wrong, it is incredibly difficult and challenging to do, and definitely not for everyone. I have the utmost respect for anyone who puts their head above the parapet and commits to making safe raw milk cheese”.
Given the myriad decisions to be made throughout their processes, it would be a hard thing to argue against Michele Buster’s desire to bring milk producers more into the spotlight. She even thinks they should be winning accolades alongside the cheeses and cheesemakers.
“They should be recognised, they should be winning awards”.
This article first appeared in Good Cheese Magazine 2024-2025
