Made in Britain winner: The Durham Cow Cheese Company

The Durham Cow Cheese Company in Hutton Henry, Co Durham is one of the prestigious winners of the Country Living, Waitrose and Farmers Guardian annual Made in Britain Awards.

Country Living magazine features local food producers every month - the Made in Britain Awards were launched by the magazine, together with Waitrose and Farmers Guardian, to reward those who are creating the best-quality and most innnovative foods, while keeping traditional skills alive. Five food producers of the year each received £5,000 from Waitrose to develop their business. The overall Made in Britain Food Champion (selected from these five) received an additional £5,000. Seven finalists were given the chance to have their product stocked in local branches of Waitrose. The Farmers Guardian Best Farm Entrepreneur will also receive £5,000 from Waitrose.

Julia Cammiss's kitchen isn't quite what you picture when imagining an award-winning artisan cheese dairy. The fitted cupboards and counters in her modern house in a cul-de-sac on the edge of a Co Durham village are a far cry from the cool, stoneflagged, farm buildings that house the archetypal small-scale cheese maker. Yet when Julia decided to try making cheese she didn't let her background, location or lack of experience put her off. "People thought I was mad when I started - I wasn't a farmer and didn't have access to a dairy herd," she says. "At times I still wonder what I'm doing. But then I taste the cheese and I tell myself: ‘You've cracked it'."

The Durham Cow Cheese Company's triumph in the Made in Britain Awards just a year after Julia sold her first batch of cheese is a testament to her skill, courage and gut feeling that Co Durham needed its own cheese. She began making cheese to take her mind off a stressful office job. "Others might have taken up knitting," she says, "but this idea had been in the back of my head ever since I went to France six years ago." Holidaying in Limousin with her husband, Barrie, she was amazed by the quality of the local cheeses. "I thought about cheese-makers in the north-east of England and realised there were hardly any."

After a two-day cheese-making course at Reaseheath College in
Cheshire, Julia experimented at home using a 50-litre cheese vat
on her kitchen table. Her goal was a soft blue cheese, because no one
else in the north east made one. She sought advice from established
cheese-makers, playing around with temperatures, humidity levels,
moulds and cultures. "The first person to try it was my neighbour,
Michael," Julia recalls. "He said ‘Bloody hell, that's fantastic.' That
was the moment when I realised that I was on the right track."

Made using pasteurised milk from local processor Rock Farm
Dairy, Durham Cow Cheese is ripened for five weeks in the
temperature-controlled cheese room that Barrie built in their
garage. Julia wraps each cheese in foil to preserve its soft, pale
orange skin, which adds a gentle bite to a silky soft centre striped
with thick columns of blue mould (the result of hand-piercing at 8
and 15 days). Mild, mellow and moreish, it is unlikely to survive
one outing onto the cheeseboard. In the unlikely event that there
are leftovers, they melt divinely into pasta or cauliflower cheese.

Scooping cut curds from the cheese vat into plastic colanders,
in which they drain before being turned, dry-salted and ripened,
Julia explains how her cheese got its name. "Early on I lost confidence
and thought it wasn't going to work. Barrie took me for a walk by the
river at Durham, where I saw a statue of the Durham Cow. When
I got home I researched the legend of the cow that led Lindisfarne
monks to the spot where Durham Cathedral was founded. It inspired
me to link that story with my product - it felt like an epiphany."

Julia makes just 18kg of cheese each week, but plans to move
production to a converted farm building, where she'll use her
prize money to buy a bigger vat and more moulds. She hopes the
business may one day provide for herself and Barrie, without whose
support and building skills her cheese would not exist. "Imagine what most husbands would say if you told them you were giving up
your job to make cheese," she says. "He just said ‘Go for it, girl.' So I did."

The Durham Cow Cheese Company (01429 836819; www.durham-cow-cheese-company.com)

Find all of this year's Made in Britain Awards winners here 

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