dairy – Wyedean Deli Confidential Blog

17th May 20199th January 2021

New Cheese in Town

Brooke's Wye Valley Dairy, David Broadbent Photography, Wales, Welsh, Monmouthshire, cheese, soft cheese,

Brooke's Wye Valley Dairy, David Broadbent Photography, Wales, Welsh, Monmouthshire, cheese, soft cheese, Angiddy, artisan, Jersey, cow, milk, — The Staff

When a great new cheese emerges from the green rolling valleys of Monmouthshire, we hit the road, our taste buds and then the keys to let all of you lovely people get the skinny on what’s happening.

It’s always great to hear about something new and delicious to emerge from this beautiful bit of earth that are privileged to occupy. When someone is making a new cheese, this is music to our ears and anyway, who doesn’t like British cheese? Add to that – Welsh cheeses are as good as any in the world! May we present – Angiddy. A mould ripened soft cheese; farmhouse made by the lovely family firm more famous for its award-winning artisan ice cream – Brooke’s. So, when this family decides to make cheese, expectations are high.

Hannah is the chief cheesemaker and expectations don’t come much higher than those that she heaps upon herself. Tucked away in her very own cheese cave, she crafts the silky smooth and unctuously rich milk from the farms Jersey cows with a bit of science and lots of love and care. In the serenely quiet and pristine environment fromage, she turns that milk from the rest of staff (the ladies) into a really, really tasty new Welsh cheese. It has been several months in development at the Food Centre Wales were Hannah worked hard perfecting her recipe.

All good science, in this case the magical biological reaction between milk and rennet encouraged by temperature and acidity and finally the crowning glory – mould, needs to be repeatable.

Satisfied that she had perfected her style, flavours, and texture – small scale production began in the boutique new cheese creamery a stones throw from “ice cream central” in this, the most beautiful of Wye Valley natural amphitheatres.

In 300 beautiful acres of Wales sits a natural depression above the Wye Valley. An amphitheatre of agriculture and surrounded by Forestry Commission woodland, the farm, Panta, takes its name from the Welsh for hollow. From a high point above the farm, the name couldn’t be more appropriate. The high ground slopes gently down to the Angiddy that has give its name to many an innovation. The brook slips away along the gentle contours to the industrial revolution it gave birth too, but here, in its gentler course, fed by the many springs on the flanks of the bole, it meanders unheard and unnoticed through the farm.

The gentle slopes that surround the farm on all sides are not flat enough to hold the rain and not steep enough to turbo charge it down the hill. Instead they hold it long enough to create perfect grazing fields, sheltered from the wind and kissed by the sunshine in the best of the Welsh weather. A majestic Oak beside the brook watches over river’s flow and a pastoral scene that hasn’t changed little over hundreds of years. In this domain Robert and Irene (Hannah’s parents) have kept a dairy herd since the 70’s. Today, the fields are dotted with a hundred or so chocolate brown Jersey girls. Happy to eat the lush abundant grass in the fields in which they we all born, then sit a while and ruminate on grass, the beauty of Wales, what’s tea and life in general.

All of this activity results in milk. Rich, creamy world-famous milk ideal for making cheese.

Within 24 hours, the farm milk is in the creameries for ice cream and now cheese, renewing a traditional farming cycle of old interwoven with the demands of farming in the 21^st century.

You may want to love this cheese because of your Welsh roots, Welsh pride or a wider appreciation of this outstandingly beautiful borderland. Or you want to champion great local produce from the area we live in and to show the world our producers are of the highest quality. In the end, you’ll love it for what is important beyond all else, the taste. Don’t just take our word for it (although we have brought you some pretty awesome new products over the years). In fact, the world has already said hello to the new Celtic cheese when it debuted at the World Cheese Awards (With entries from a record breaking 35 different countries judged at the 30th anniversary edition of the World Cheese Awards, which formed part of this year’s Taste of London Festive Edition,) and took a Gold medal!

This is a young cheese matured just long enough to form the velvety white rind. It is fresh tasting, rich from the Jersey milk, creamy and delicate. The young rind is bright white, soft and lacks the strong bitter flavour you get with some older soft cheeses. But at the same time, it has a fantastic savoury umami hint and real depth of soft earthy, mushroom flavour. All in all, it’s really subtle and sophisticated and the delicacy combined with the rich sumptuous flavour means that this cheese is a doer. Just as easy to see it simply spread over great bread as it is to see it paired with fresh figs or Conference pears at the centre of a luxury creamy ploughman’s.

When (?) we are out of the EU and have five minutes off from spending the daily NHS bonanza and being a tiny island boxing well above our trading weight, so the narrative goes, we’ll be able to do what we like and call our produce whatever we want. We’ll be able to call this Brie if we want. Never that simple. And why would we want to. Brie is named after the region in which it is made. This cheese is called Angiddy, after the tiny Welsh valley in which it is made and very soon, we think that you’ll prefer and ask for this “Angiddy” by name instead of its famous French cousin.

Angiddy is the new kid on the block and well up to the job for lovers of Welsh cheeses. With Brooke’s ice creams already gracing the shelves of Welsh branches of Waitrose, we are speculating that the farms cheese must be headed that way too.

Links www.brookesdairy.com

http://www.foodcentrewales.org.uk/

David Broadbent May 2019

13th March 201718th July 2017

Don’t Drive and Eat Ice Cream

Forest and Wye, ice cream, St Briavels, Gloucestershire, David Broadbent Photography, WyeDean Deli Confidential, food, artisan,

There is a new ice cream dream team in town. Charlotte and Marcus Adam of Forest & Wye ice cream company based in St Briavels mean business and they have the premium product to back up their ambitions.

Charlotte was, back in the day, a qualified librarian. Turns out that those librarians trained and qualified in the dark arts of book classification and stealthy movement in audibly neutral halls of knowledge and entertainment are, all of the time, hatching plots of a utopian nature. Well, they are if they are Charlotte Adams. She is one half of the new premium artisanal husband and wife ice cream dream team, behind the new Forest & Wye ice cream company.

As an enthusiastic amateur ice cream maker (and hearty consumer) the chance to visit the new Forest & Wye creamery, in the lovely village of St Briavels, was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Anyone who has ever made ice cream or gelato will know that the taste blows away any large brand offering no matter how fancy the box or slick the marketing. And that is kind of the problem. My own small versions, in varying degrees of delicious success, are doing well if they last in the freezer for more than a couple of days! But try and scale that process up for sale as a product and things begin to get tricky.

Enter then Charlotte and Marcus Adams. Well versed in this small scale purist production of, amongst other flavours – alcohol flavoured ices, for personal use only (honestly officer) who then decide to become “clean” ice cream makers, wherever possible shunning processed ingredients to deliver what is says on the tin. The clean food movement has somehow got lumbered with endorsements by “celebrities” (this apparently now passes for gainful employment) you may or may not have heard of. In addition it bears the weight of the most damaging of food marketing monikers – “trendy”. Clean Food has never meant anything other than just natural ingredients. The ethos of this embryonic company is seasonal, local, fresh, as clean as it can be. So, the logic goes, Rhubarb Crumble ice cream (and loads of other yummy non-alcoholic flavours) has only ice cream (milk, cream and eggs) and rhubarb crumble in it – easy. Anyone can pronounce all the ingredients.

But it turns out that there are many reasons to adulterate a product and one of them is to get over problems of upscaling manufacture. Want blackcurrant ice cream? Add a big shot of commercial blackcurrant syrup for instant and easy flavour enhancement. But what if you want to get really radical and just get all the flavour from real blackcurrants? I know, it’s a crazy idea isn’t it?

The impetus for turning passionate hobby into a cottage industry business was supercharged by friends who tasted Charlotte’s’ home-made alcoholic ice cream. Right after they’d asked for a second helping they implored her to make a business of it and presumably therefore to ensure a continuity of supply. Let’s remember the ethos, when Forest & Wye make alcoholic ice cream, like their supreme “Baileys and Kahlua” – Baileys “flavour” just doesn’t cut it. It has to have, erm Baileys and Kahlua in it. Not as easy as you might think given the well-known anti-freeze properties of alcohol. Why stop there? Let’s go with their Vanilla and Cognac or Coffee and Whiskey and – our absolute fave Amaretto – wait for it smooth creamy taste followed by the Amaretto taste which builds toward the end – Wow! All of this raises the tantalising notion of adults only ice cream parties all purchased from licensed premises – that’s right they have real booze in them and you need a licence to sell them!

Having spent the past 15 years living in St Briavels and raising their family of 3 kids, the two thought that now was the right time to launch their dream business. It’s not been easy though, having decided to go for it, their ideas of clean ice cream with only the freshest of whole ingredients therein proved to be a challenge. Everyone they met, they bought training or equipment from, in fact everyone told them you need to make commercial ice cream with emulsifiers, stabilisers and bla, bla, bla. There was a dark and heart breaking time for Charlotte when, already having trashed several full scale batches, she thought that it might be true and that they might have to consider the worst case scenario and go with the advice. But a golden coloured revelation came to them on a quiet St Briavels night. A natural golden, sticky solution. Known of for centuries, and incidentally something that has a shelf life measured in a atomic half-lives, – honey. Together with a little natural bean flour, hey presto! They had cracked it.

ice cream, amaretto, — A very rare pre-production model complete with typo’s. Sadly now gone!

This is the first hurdle for most passions turned into businesses – where and how will you supersize your enthusiastic experimentation. With their eldest child now fourteen and the youngest pushing seven – playtime is over kids! The kids were evicted from their playroom and its transmogrification into modern creamery separated from the rest of domestic life began. Our exclusive peak into the creamery tells the story of the couples’ commitment. Fully kitted out with the latest brand new ice cream/gelato making equipment – no one could accuse them of “not going for it”, it’s organised, well laid out and tidy with a five star rating.

Telme, — Forest & Wye homemade ice cream.

Starting a new businesses can be scary. Lots of money going out and a really frightening period when no money comes in – self-employment is not for the faint hearted. But for people who know what they want and know that they want to achieve it’s the only way. What you need now are customers! Deborah Flint, founder of The Pantry village shop (now in new hands, the shop previously featured in this magazine) and big supporter of quality local producers was the first to help out. She commissioned a blind tasting competition with other brands and Forest & Wye. Topping the taste test was a breeze and they were stocked! A local brewery used Forest & Wye products at one of its events but Charlotte and Marcus are looking for more outlets. For the time being, their footprint is limited to a 30 mile radius of the Gloucestershire border but that is bound to change as tasting pioneers spread the word.

The packaging, like the ice cream, is simple, brilliant and wholesome. A plain brown fully recyclable pot with a stylish card label and you can feel good about your carbon footprint while you tuck in too. So here they are with a great creamery set-up and all the vision, passion and knowledge that you can shake a stick at. They have a fantastic premium product packed with goodness from as close to the creamery as they can possibly manage.

Over to you outlets…….

Links

Web www.forestandwye.co.uk

Facebook www.facebook.com/forestandwye

Twitter https://twitter.com/ForestWye

The Pantry www.facebook.com/thepantrystbriavels/

18th May 201518th May 2015

Sumptuous Vegetarian Kitchen’s Call to Action for Local Suppliers

Bristol-based cook Jo-Anne Lovemore of Green Tomato Kitchen creates abundant and delicious vegetarian buffet spreads for events and celebrations throughout the South-West and South Wales including the Wye Valley.

Curiosity about food and being interested in cooking has been with me for as long as I can remember. My mother enlisted my ‘help’ in the kitchen as soon as I could stand on tiptoes on a chair and wield a wooden spoon, and as children, my brother and I were allocated a corner of our garden veg patch each year to grow whatever flowers and edibles took our fancy. If I recall correctly, my pet rabbit was the primary beneficiary of the modest yield from my carrot crop, uprooted too early, thanks to my impatience.

During my teenage years, I (mis)spent many an hour glued to TV cookery shows, which at the time were enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity. I am sure this began as a diversionary tactic from schoolwork, but soon evolved into a genuine curiosity and a desire to experiment with newly discovered ingredients and culinary techniques. I would furiously scribble down recipes while Ainsley Harriott and co rattled through them at breakneck speed on the TV screen (this was before the days of the internet!)

Aside from a string of summer and weekend jobs working in kitchens while I was a student, my career path to date has taken me far away from the culinary world, although I continued to enjoy cooking for friends and experimenting with recipes. But it was only in my 30s when I began to question how I might get more fulfillment from my work and lifestyle that I decided to follow my heart into the kitchen. Since turning vegetarian at the age of 20 my interest and awareness has grown around what and how we choose to eat impacts our health.

Food is an integral part of any event – a tangible expression of care from host to guest. So with my recently launched catering business, Green Tomato Kitchen, my aim is to create delicious, original, varied and healthy menus that guests will remember for the right reasons. When designing menus, I work closely with my clients to really understand their needs and preferences. All of the food that I prepare is vegetarian, and I love to introduce people to the abundant variety of flavours and textures found within good vegetarian cooking.

Combining the freshest ingredients to create colourful salads, mouthwatering dips, hearty bakes, savoury pastries and quiches, and gluten-free goodies is my thing. I have a soft spot for baking cakes and desserts, and no buffet spread would be complete without a tempting sweet selection to round off the meal!

Green Tomato Kitchen — Dill, feta and black olive pogača – small savoury Turkish pastries

Working from my home kitchen in the heart of Bristol, I’ll happily cater for clients with special dietary needs, or produce menus that are fully vegan, or lower in fat or sugar, for example. The central location in the south-west makes me ideally situated for one of the main strands of my business, supplying office lunches and celebratory feasts to business and private clients in the city. However, I’m not tied to the urban environment, being equally happy to offer the same high service to businesses or house parties and celebrations in the Wye Valley.

At the moment I’m looking for a good, preferably organic, dairy supplier in the region and would be very happy to hear from any Wye Valley-based dairy farms producing delicious cheeses, butter, yoghurt and other dairy delights. Please do get in touch with any suggestions. To find out more about what Green Tomato Kitchen could offer you, visit www.greentomatokitchen.co.uk. I look forward to cooking for you!

Ed says……

We first met Jo-Anne at a business event in Bristol and we were immediately impressed with her passion for what she does. We asked her to tell us her story, particularly since she is always on the lookout for the very best vegetarian produce suppliers. So come on, if you think you can supply Green Tomato Kitchen, lets get a little bit of the Forest of Dean & Wye Valley into those sumptuous GTK buffets!! All pix M Lovemore.

24th April 20156th May 2015

A new annual food and drink event for the Forest & Wye? We hope so.

Well the dust has well and truly settled on the inaugural Wye Valley & Forest of Dean Tourism Association’s new food and drink event Local Produce, See, Taste, Buy. The event, originally conceived to match producers with potential clients from within the tourism associations’ extensive and diverse membership, was quickly turned over to a public event to coincide with English and Welsh Tourism Weeks respectively. Sited in the spacious “The Venue” function room on the CSMA site at Whitemead Park, exhibitors and visitors were protected against the worst the Forest spring weather might throw at anyone. In the event it turned out to be a beautiful Forest of Dean spring morning.

As the exhibitors built their stands before public opening at 10am the sights and sounds, and most of all, smells of our fabulous local producers started to build and fill in the background hubbub.

Great names in beer Hillside Brewery www.hillsidebrewery.com and cider, Severn Cider www.severncider.com were there in strength with Paul Williamson owner and head honcho from the Hillside Brewery with a broad selection of the great beers crafted up on the hill. Also showing, and tasting for the first time, their new Anzac beer brewed especially for the Gloucester Beer Festival. Nick Bull was in charge over at Severn Cider where, even though we were working hard, we had to have a small sample of their killer Severn Cider Perry.

Alongside these headline names in the now thriving local craft drinks industry, was the very tasty Apple County Cider with their “deciderly” good Dabinett and Vilberie dry and medium brands – very easy to imagine drinking those two beauties on a warm sunny evening! We also had Ty Gwyn cider, VQ Country Wines sporting their new swanky designer labels with the same great quality fruit wines still inside and Wye Valley Brewery. Parva Farm Vineyard were there too, showing a good selection of their Welsh wine from the terroir of Tintern – some great news for Judith and Colin lately in that Marks & Spencer have taken their award winning Bacchus white wine into stock. We couldn’t resist a tasting stop at the amply stocked Chase Distillery stand either – hic!

Adding to the ambience were the great aromas of James’ Gourmet Coffee brewing constantly in the background, Rayeesa’s Kitchen homemade curry sauce bases simmering away in the tasting pot and fabulous charcuterie cooking on the hot plate from the guys over at Native Breeds. Smarts Gloucestershire Cheeses seem to be essential to any successful food and drink event and no matter how many times you’ve tasted their Gloucester’s before, resistance is futile! Celia’s Pantry was on hand to dispense Caribbean inspired tangy chutney flavours to go with it all.

For dessert there were two great ice cream makers were there Kelsmor Dairy and Hillbrooks Luxury Ice Cream with their own distinctive flavours – all of course available for tasting. The Chocolate Bar had a dazzling array of beautiful handmade chocolates to tempt the palate for that sumptuous finish.

The timing of the event is driven by the original concept to put producers and tourism association and other local buyers together before the busy Easter season and we think that that makes a lot of sense. A little later mind you and Whitemead would have been thronging with visitors to increase the footfall for the traders and give visitors a fantastic showcase of the produce and the ability to stock up the holiday larders both for their stay and to take home.

The Venue is a great place for this event although perversely Whitemead don’t actually signpost the halls location at the site entrances which makes things difficult for new conference visitors. The public parking there is also very restrictive (the design and concept of the site envisaged all of the visitor cars being spread out over the whole site outside respective holiday lodges, caravans or tents). We spoke to Mike Carter (centre manager) who had already identified this issue as a growth limiting factor for this and other conference events. He’s on the case he assures us.

Does this new event conflict with the hugely popular Forest Showcase event in the autumn fields of the Speech House Hotel www.thespeechhouse.co.uk (Peter Hands and his chef from the hotel were there and actively looking for new local suppliers – featured image)? Not according to John Theophilus of the Tourism Association. “We developed this idea primarily as a trade show for producers to meet buyers from the local economy and tourism sector – and we think that it has worked extremely well! We are delighted so many members of the public came along too as it helps to spread the word about the great work being done in our tourism sector. This incidentally adds a great deal to the local economy. It’s events such as this that make you realise how widespread the influence of a thriving tourism economy can be to the whole local economy”.

Overall we loved the concept and thought that, for a first year launch event, it was a real bonus to the local food and drink network. We would definitely have liked to have seen even more buy-in from local businesses – every tourism association member and every pub in the area were sent invitations and we think all of them should have attended!

We know only too well that profit margins for local businesses are always tight and the drive for economy in purchasing is a constant pressure on small business. Small artisan producers make up for this lack of “scale costs” with bags of flavour, localism, innovation and skill. This added value is demonstrated nowhere better than in the tourism sector because those values produce a cash sales equivalent and really register with visitors who want to buy local great produce.

If you run a business selling food and drink, why not follow the lead of the Tourism Association and look for one new local supplier today? Let us know how you get on, we’d love to tell your local collaboration story.