Colston Bassett Stilton Cheese

What’s the shelf life on cheese?

• Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

• What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

• Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

How do we ship artisan cheese year-round across the country?

In warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship cheese with two business day service plus warm weather care. We employ an ice pack and insulation defensive strategy to protect against warm delivery trucks and warm warehouses and ensure your shipment arrives in great shape.

The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the shipping method will either be flat rate service (1-4 business days) for our durable hard, aged cheeses or two business day service for our more perishable soft cheeses and cheese spreads.

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable.

How should the cheese be stored once it arrives?

• Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold.

• We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper.

• After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

• Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty. 

How should the cheese be served?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

“Territorial” is a term of art for traditional regional British cheeses. As a definition it’s a bit loosey goosey. It can mean an area as big as a county where a cheese was made, like when it’s used for Lancashire or Cheshire. Or it can be as specific as the town where the cheese was sold, like cheddar, which was made in Somerset county but sold at market in the town of Cheddar.

What all the British Territorial cheeses have in common is style and flavor.

Save Stilton, territorials are all pressed cheeses, which means a weight has been applied to squeeze out liquid whey, making the cheese dry and firm, not gooey and soft. Once aged, the cheeses sport a flaking, crumbling texture. There’s also a kick of acidity. They are not smooth and sweet in the mouth, which puts them in contrast to perennial favorites like gouda or Comté. British Territorials are defiantly distinct. They take a moment to get used to. I find their flavor utterly rewarding.

In their pre-industrial versions, territorials were what are known in the UK as “kitchen cheeses,” which, in typically straightforward English phrasing, literally means they were made in a kitchen and stayed in a kitchen. If there was milk left over from what the family farm needed for the day, it was rescued from rot to become cheese. Mostly for home use, maybe a bit to sell. As territorials became more popular they moved from kitchen to professional creamery. By the early 20th century, all of these cheeses would have been made for market by dozens–if not hundreds–of small-scale cheesemakers. All that changed with World War II, when milk was pooled together for rations. Fast forward to 2018 and there is often just one cheesemaker remaining for a given territorial. Thus the other feature that British Territorials have in common, unfortunately, is near extinction.

The go-to source for the last great examples of British Territorials is Neal’s Yard Dairy. You can taste and buy cheeses firsthand at their Borough Market or Covent Garden shops in London. They also export to the USA. We’ve been hand cutting and wrapping them to order, then shipping across the country, for a quarter of a century.

Storing Territorials

Territorials are adapted to the temperatures of an ambient 19th Century, not a refrigerated 21st Century one. British ambient, that is. Cool-ish, wet-ish. The best American alternative you’ll probably find is your salad crisper with plenty of salad nearby for humidity. Avoid plastic wrapping. The cheese bag we send them with is great. If you don’t have one wrap them your cheese in waxed paper or aluminum foil.

Serving Territorials

Neal’s Yard Dairy’s experienced cheesemonger and partner Jason Hinds remarked to me, “Modern cheeses are more affected by heat than cold. Territorials are the opposite.” I agree. You really need to warm these up to make them taste right, to have them flaking and crumbling like they should. Take the whole wedge out of the fridge an hour or two before you want to serve it. You can lay a wet, wrung out cloth over it if it appears to get a bit too dry before you eat.

First things first: it’s not a cave.

Cheesemongers universally refer to their cheese storage rooms as caves but these rooms have about as much in common with a cave as astroturf has in common with the field of dreams. Cheese caves are commercial coolers. Usually walk-ins, which is industry speak for a refrigerator big enough for a full-sized door.

Our cave is ten feet wide, twenty feet long, about the size of a short container truck. It is stark white and sits right in the middle of our warehouse, across the pick line from the bread bagging tent. Between the two they mark the two poles of our operations. Bread and cheese. Both made by hand. Cut by hand. Wrapped by hand. Traditional, practically ancient foods.

We work mostly in whole wheels of cheese.

That’s the way the cheesemakers make them and that’s the way we buy them. We haul them into the cheese cave and cut them open by hand. Sometimes with a big knife. Sometimes with a cheese wire: a thick steel cable with handles that the cheesemonger uses to glide through cheese like butter.

And sometimes you’ve got to tackle Parmigiano Reggiano. Those 80 pound wheels have a hide as tough as a stegosaurus. They need to be coaxed open with a set of wedge shaped knifes that become part of every cheesemonger’s rite of passage. A freshly cracked wheel’s aroma is beguiling. Every one who splits one stops for a moment, puts their face up to the cut surface, and inhales. Fresh shards of parmesan always flake off too – cheesemonger’s treat.

Once a wheel is open we cut pieces of cheese and hand wrap them in waxed cheese bags.

If we cut a piece that weighs exactly the right size on the scale we ring the bell – perfect cut! We send the just-cut cheese out to be packed in boxes, then wait for the container to empty and return to let us know we need to cut a few more. We do this all day long for the 50+ cheeses we carry. On our busiest day in December we’ll do it thousands of times.

That means your cheese is essentially cut to order.

It spends a few hours at most from when it’s cut to when it’s packed to ship. It sounds simple – and it is. But it’s also rare. Most companies that ship cheese these days don’t cut cheese to order. They ship cheese that has been cut long ago – weeks, even months – and sealed in cry-o-vac. It’s not terrible, but remember that once a cheese gets cut it never gets better. It fades. Cry-o-vac slows the fading, but if it spends a long time cut in a wrapper its flavor will become a shadow of itself.

Freshness matters, even when you’re talking about aged cheese.

The primary culprit for flavor loss is air. Air surrounded the wheel of the cheese, of course, but it didn’t penetrate the paste inside thanks to the rind. Now the cheese, with its insides showing, is under siege by air. Air swoops in to dry out the cheese, carrying the environment’s off-aromas and unwanted bacteria along the way.

To protect the cheese’s cut face from air’s ravages we wrap each cheese in a waxed cheese bag. This bag lets the cheese breathe yet keeps it from drying out. The wax lining keeps them in perfect shape. It lasts, too – reuse it for other cheese, it’ll keep almost any hard cheese in great condition.