by Austin Coe Butler
Lincolnshire Poacher represents everything I love most about the contemporary cheese world. Grounded in tradition, but with an exciting, contemporary twist, Poacher blends two discrete and storied styles–Alpine, like Comté and Gruyère, and West Country Cheddar–into a surprising original. The name Lincolnshire Poacher refers to an English folk song called “The Lincolnshire Poacher,” which sings of the joys of poaching and cheekily evading the magistrates, gamekeepers, and wardens of the world. It is the unofficial anthem of Lincolnshire County, and there’s something renegade and revelrous in this cheese as well. It’s a cheddar but shirks the regulatory trappings of a West Country Cheddar to take its place as a contradictory “new traditional” cheese.
Brothers Simon and Tim Jones are “cheese farmers,” in the parlance of Bronwen and Francis Percival, cheesemakers who keep and tend to the animals whose milk the cheese from, or, as Simon Jones says simply, “We grow the grass, milk the cows, and make the cheese.” Like so many great cheeses, it begins with the land. Made at Ulceby Grange Farm, in Alford, Lincolnshire, the farm had been in the family since 1917, but it wasn’t until the 90s that Simon Jones began to make cheese from the dairy cows his father cared for. Geologically, Lincolnshire County has not been ripe for dairying. The loamy and clay soils make it difficult to grow pasture and graze cows. However, the Ulceby Grange Farm sits atop the Lincolnshire Wolds, a range of low, open hills or “wolds,” that is fortuitously composed of limestone and chalk, revealing a rich, red soil that is perfect for growing lush pasture and grazing dairy cows. Their herd of Holstein-Friesian and Ayrshire cows dine on spring grass and sweet clover, then, in the autumn and winter, a silage of spring beans, winter wheat, grass, and maize all grown on the farm, which allows them to produce rich, fatty, and sweet milk.
This milk is then set into curd and cooked, cut, and stirred at a higher temperature and to a finer texture than a traditional English cheese—a distinctly Alpine technique. The curd is then cheddared, milled, and hand-salted before being pressed for 36 hours. The truckles of Poacher are then aged on wooden slats, and once a month they are turned by the Jones’s cheese turning robot, Florence. Like an Alpine, this cheese develops a natural rind that is ruddy and speckled like granite.
All of these steps have a big impact on flavor. Cooking curd at a higher temperature and finer texture expels a lot of whey, resulting in a drier cheese that benefits from a long maturation. Truckles of Poacher are aged for a minimum of twelve months, and can go up to three years, which your standard regulation West Country Cheddar couldn’t stand. The result is a paste that is dense yet open, delightfully craggy–like a Cheddar you can see the individual curds, but like Comté of Gruyère those curds are dense, waxy, and creamy. The flavor is nutty, complex, and bursting with juicy tropical fruits like pineapple.
When Poacher was first sold, it was so popular that the local shops had to ration it in 1/4 lb. slices to customers! Luckily, we’ve got enough Poacher to send you home with an honest chunk. Stop by the shop today to try Lincolnshire Poacher and you might be singing your own lyrics to the tune of “The Lincolnshire Poacher” about the joys of eating this rascally cheese.