Stilton Cheese (2)

The former dairy at Long Clawson.

Interviewer: Could you, if you don’t mind, describe the cheese process, the cheese making process, briefly?

Jean Morris: Yes, yes, you start off with clean milk collected by the tankers from the farms in the area. Although, if we are short of milk it does come from other areas of the country; providing it’s sweet and clean we can deal with it. We pasteurise all milk, we add our starter…

Interviewer: Excuse me, but could you exactly really explain what you mean by pasteurise?

Jean Morris: Yes, it’s a light heat treatment, it’s not so severe as UHT or sterilised milk, but it does kill the bad bacteria, also it kills the good bacteria so that is why we have to use a starter or lactic culture to give us our acidity that we need. There is only one dairy in fact that uses raw milk, and that is at Colston Bassett. Yes, providing they get good clean milk they’ll make the very best cheese, if they get bad milk at worst the cheese will fall off the shelves it can be that bad. Pasteurising makes a more uniform type of cheese. So that after adding our starter we add our rennet, mix it very thoroughly, top stir the milk until it shows signs of setting, leave it for about an hour and a half and by that time the curd has formed sufficiently firm enough to be cut with these American curd knives. Quite long, about two to three foot in length, very sharp, we don’t want it to bruise the curd, cut it into cubes, we say about an inch cube. We don’t heat those cubes as they do in Cheddar and Cheshire cheese because we don’t want to drive out the moisture, we’re not aiming for a hard cheese, we want a softer type of cheese. So we just let the cube settle towards the bottom of the vat for about an hour and half. After that time we let the whey run from the vat. Still today this whey goes out by tanker to pig farmers. In my grandfather’s time he would have had, he would have at least made quite a lot of cheese, so he would have had a lot of whey to dispose of, he must have had a few pigs, 20, 30, 40, 50 pigs, and he was one of the first to open a pork shop in Melton Mowbray, and I don’t have to remind you do I that Melton is famous for its Stilton cheese and Melton Mowbray pork pies. Still today they say that it’s the flavour of the whey fed pigs that gives the best flavour to pork pies.

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