Pressed, Uncooked

Cheddar and its English relations: Cheshire, Lancashire, Caerphilly, Double Gloucester, Wensleydale. Firm, dense, sliceable-to-crumbly, and aged from months to years.

“Uncooked” is relative — the curd is warmed, but nowhere near the high temperatures the alpine cheeses reach. Which means these use mesophilic cultures and can be made without the equipment or the confidence a hot cook demands.

Cheddaring is a verb

The step that defines the family, and the reason cheddar conquered the world.

After the whey is drained, the curd is cut into slabs. Those slabs are then stacked, turned, and re-stacked on one another for an hour or more while they stay warm — and while the starter keeps acidifying throughout.

Under that combination of warmth, pressure and falling pH, the texture transforms. The curd goes from a heap of grains to something layered and fibrous, closer in structure to cooked chicken breast than to any other cheese. You can peel it.

Then it’s milled — cut into pieces — and salted directly on the curd rather than brined after forming. That’s unusual, and it’s why cheddar’s salt is so evenly distributed through the paste, and why a cheddar recipe gives you salt as a percentage of curd weight while a gouda recipe sends you to a brine.

And because cheddaring is knowledge rather than geography, it travelled. As the English story argues: a cheese named after a technique escapes; a cheese named after a place stays home. Cheddar is now made everywhere, and “cheddar” is not a protected name — only West Country Farmhouse Cheddar is.

Bandaged, waxed, or in film

Three finishes, and they produce genuinely different cheeses.

Bandaged is the traditional one: wrapped in cloth, greased with lard or butter, and left to breathe for a year or more. Moisture leaves slowly, a dry natural rind forms under the cloth, and the result tastes of things the other two never will. It also loses weight, which is why industry abandoned it.

Waxed seals the wheel — no breathing, no rind development, minimal moisture loss. The forgiving home option, and what my own wax and brush are for.

Block-aged in film is what nearly all commodity cheddar now is. Cheaper, faster, loses almost nothing, and it is a different cheese — not a worse version of the same one.

Which is a fair thing to know before comparing a supermarket block unfavourably with a farmhouse wheel. They were made to different specifications.

The members

Cheddar. Somerset originally, now global. Ranges from mild rubbery blocks to crystal-studded five-year wheels — and those crystals are usually calcium lactate, not tyrosine, which is why the white specks on a cheddar are not the same phenomenon as the crunch in an aged gouda.

Cheshire. Older than cheddar in the record, crumblier, saltier, traditionally orange with annatto.

Lancashire. Two traditions — creamy and crumbly — and the crumbly one is a genuinely distinct texture achieved by blending curds of different ages.

Caerphilly. Welsh, young, moist, faintly lemony. Historically eaten by miners partly because the salty rind survived being carried down a pit.

Double Gloucester. Rounder, mellower, and the one they roll down a hill.

Wensleydale. Yorkshire, crumbly, and the family’s cautionary tale: 176 producers in 1939, nine by 1946, and all of them had given up by 1954. It came back, but not by itself.

Yarg. Cornish, wrapped in nettle leaves, which form an edible rind and — as with everything in this family — is a moisture-management trick as much as a flavour one.

Making one

Cheddar is the classic “first hard cheese” and I think that’s slightly wrong.

What it demands: a good press, patience through the cheddaring hour, accurate salting by weight, and months before you learn whether it worked.

What I’d do instead: make a gouda-style washed-curd cheese first, because it forgives more and it’s edible in six weeks. Then come to cheddar knowing what a well-knit curd feels like.

When you do: the cheddaring is the part people rush, and it can’t be rushed — the transformation needs that hour at temperature with the acid still falling. And the pressing pressure is genuinely pressure, not weight; twenty pounds on a small mould is a completely different thing from twenty pounds on a large one.

How to make one: Making cheddar & the hard pressed cheeses — cheddaring, milling, and salting the curd rather than the wheel.

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Next: cooked and pressed alpine cheeses — where the wheels get enormous and the cook gets hot.