Ludlow Food Centre Produces Ewe’s Milk Cheese

The Earl of Plymouth Estate’s Dudley Martin and Paul Bedford won last year’s Best Blue Cheese In Britain title with their cheese made with the estate’s heard of Friesian Holstein diary cows, but this year set themselves the challenge of creating the county’s first cheese made with ewe’s milk.

The coated ewe’s milk cheese range they’ve created includes rosemary, mint, dried chilli, cumin seeds and natural ash. The soft sheep’s cheese won a silver medal at the recent British Cheese Awards.

Dudley Martin said, “We were approached over a year ago by a couple who said they wanted to start a flock of Zwartbles sheep.  These sheep are renowned for the quality of their milk and are black and white just like Friesian cows.  We took our first batch of the milk from them in April and started experimenting with different cheeses.

“We’re delighted at the Pitchford Estate to be working with the Ludlow Food Centre to provide sheep milk to their award winning dairy led by Dudley Martin. We were incredibly excited that within two months of producing sheep milk on the Estate that the Ludlow Food Centre won a Silver Medal in the new cheese category at the British Cheese Awards.

“Using a vegetarian rennet from the Cardoon plant we wanted to make a naturally soft and mild ewe’s milk cheese. When we separate the curds from the whey the natural characteristic of the curd is to be firm but we found that if we reduced the amount of rennet we created a natural, lactic fermentation which kept the cheese soft.”

Dudley Martin plans to extend the range, making the most of the gap in the market for ewe’s milk cheeses which are suitable for consumers suffering from lactose intolerances.