Get to Know Stichelton: A British Blue Cheese (That Isn't Stilton)

Stichelton Dairy and Collingthwaite farm photo credit Pamela Vachon

“Raw milk Stilton” is often used as shorthand to describe Stichelton. As a cheese educator, I myself have been guilty of using this terminology. Similar to the relationship between Herve Mons 1924 and Roquefort, Stichelton is an effort to produce a cheese that nods to the long history of Stilton, whose coordinates became fixed as pasteurized milk cheese in 1996 once the PDO system was invoked.

But Stichelton isn’t Stilton, raw milk or otherwise, (at least not for now,) and its producers have taken care not to use “Stilton” in the way the cheese is marketed, though these things often take on a life of their own, intention of the producers be damned. Stichelton is the main character in its own story, one that is fitting for the complex and nuanced nature of the cheese, and one that the oversimplified notion of “raw milk Stilton” can’t easily convey.

Schneider with the wheels photo credit Pamela Vachon

Born of an agreement between Randolph Hodgson, founder of London’s Neal’s Yard Dairy, and Joe Schneider, an American agricultural engineer with a background from Cornell University who has been making cheese in Europe and the UK since the 1990s, Stichelton is both bold and delicate in every aspect of its existence. I visited Stichelton Dairy for a day recently for a close encounter of the curd kind, to see how this enigmatic cheese was made.

History of Stichelton

Joe Schneider and the recently cut curd photo credit Pamela Vachon

Stichelton is ancient in name, and in process, but its official history begins only in the last 25 years. Hodgson, who had long championed raw milk versions of Stilton when he could get it for Neal’s Yard, envisioned a cheese that would return Stilton to its roots. Stilton PDO had forever enshrined any cheeses bearing the Stilton name as necessarily made with pasteurized milk, owing to a food poisoning scare in the years preceding the PDO designation. (At the time it was thought that raw milk Stilton was to blame, but it was later proven not to have been the case.)

Schneider entered the picture as a cheesemaker-for-hire, which was atypical, at least then, in England’s more common multi-generation dairy farm history. “Most cheese makers in Great Britain are attached to their farms,” Schneider told me. “So they’re not peripatetic; they can’t just wander around, but that’s exactly what I was,” he says, an employee at the time of another producer, but who wanted to have a larger hand in the creation of a cheese.

The name Stichelton comes from the Lincoln Rolls, an ancient document from about 900 AD that served at the time as a record of villages. It was pointed out to Hodgson by a Neal’s Yard regular customer, a member of the English Place Names Society, as an Anglo Saxon-era version of the name of Stilton village. A way of calling the cheese Stilton without actually calling it Stilton.

Stichelton Dairy

Once Schneider agreed to the project, the question became where and how to produce this raw milk blue. The resulting model is unique among dairy producers, for all of the various players that now make up its multi-tiered organization. Stichelton Dairy occupies several historical buildings on The Welbeck Estate, a property that has been in the same family since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It is a rare estate in contemporary England that has been operating as an employer and land management operator in a way that isn’t so vastly different than it would have 400 years ago. (One can also learn cheese making on the estate, at programs offered through The School of Artisan Food nearby.)

Collingthwaite farm Holsteins photo credit Pamela Vachon

Stichelton is made as part of a farmstead operation, insofar as the 200-cow herd is on the premises, but that is managed by Collingthwaithe Farm, which is a partner, but not the same business, and which also supplies milk to other purposes beyond Stichelton. A majority of Stichelton is sold through Neal’s Yard Dairy, which is primarily responsible for processing, marketing, and sales of the cheese, according to Schneider. Wheels spend the majority of their time aging at Stichelton Dairy, though Neal’s Yard may continue to age out different wheels for specific customers. “The French like it runny,” says Schneider, but wheels destined for the U.S. are more green at the time they are shipped out since they will spend an extra six weeks in transit. All wheels are sold as whole wheels or as cut-to-order, never as packaged precuts.

While the cheese bears the name of the dairy, “everybody’s got skin in the game,” says Schneider. When the project first took off, he told me, initially the dairy farmer at Collingthwaite was annoyed at having to deal with any input about how the cows were fed or milked from an interloper, but, “cheese is an excellent ambassador,” says Schneider. “It can represent the farm and the place in a way that liquid milk can’t do,” and eventually the farmer was won over by the value-added endgame, experiencing how the cheese was celebrated all over the world.

The dairy itself was built as a shell structure inside the building it occupies to preserve the historical architecture. And a clever detail — Schneider swears it’s not intentional, but every accessory that hangs on the white-washed walls or is stacked in the room is penicillium roqueforti blue: the hoses, the gloves and aprons, the insect zapper that hangs on the wall, and the large truckle cylinders that await filling with freshly salted curd. “They just came that way,” he insists. (But he also introduced me to one of his fellow cheesemakers as someone from an “early prison release” program. Only when I started speaking in earnest about an inmate rehabilitation program in the wine industry was I rescued with the truth that he was kidding. If the cheese in any way assumes the personality of the cheese maker, I know where Stichelton gets some of its spice.)

How is Stichelton made?

“Small batch” is a term that gets too easily bandied about in food production, but Schneider and his team of five other cheese makers can process about 36 wheels of Stichelton a day. It was 40 wheels on the day I visited, a point driven home by one of the cheesemakers, Megan Colton, who chastised him for overfilling the intake tank. By comparison, one of Stilton’s remaining producers makes upward of about 3000 wheels daily.

Morning milk is pumped from the milking parlour, across the small lot directly to the dairy, via a slow-moving bespoke pump designed to move viscous liquids gently, which Schneider procured with the help of a Danish dairy scientist. “You have to make your own solutions,” he says. “Dairy engineers don’t know how to treat milk,” a problem he sees in other operations. “Because milk is a liquid you can’t see the damage, but every time you pump milk you damage the proteins. Any time you see foam, you’ve damaged it.”

Curds ready to drain photo credit Pamela Vachon

Once cultures and rennet are added and the curd has formed, resembling a mattress of silken tofu, the curd is hand-cut and hand-ladled from the tank to the draining table. The ladle itself also makes additional cuts to the curd while it is transferred, a process that is meditative in its rhythmic, meticulous nature. It sits with its whey for about 24 hours before the plug is pulled and the whey allowed to drain. This is an unusual step in cheese making, but one that Schneider insists upon. “Whey acts as a buffer,” he explained. “It keeps it warm, and the curd would otherwise acidify too quickly if drained right away.”

Curds are ground and salted one wheel at a time, due to the delicacy of their structure, culled from different zones on the draining table in order to more evenly distribute curds that have experienced different conditions even in the 24-hour draining period. It is one element where even a slight notion of consistency among wheels is the goal. Otherwise, “our motto is, ‘where consistency can go f*ck itself,’” says Schneider, given the inherent inconsistency one must acknowledge in cheese that expresses seasonal variation and is made by hand at nearly every stage.

Young wheels awaiting piercing photo credit Pamela Vachon

Wheels are further drained and become compacted without the aid of pressing over several days in the warmer environment of a hastening room. Following that, they are rubbed on the surface to create a homogenous layer that oxygen can’t easily pass through. Piercing only happens for the first time after six weeks, late in the game for most cheeses, to allow the paste to develop in flavor and complexity. Wheels of Stichelton continue to age at Stichelton Dairy for four to six months, developing a mottled, natural rind.

Stichelton Tasting Notes and Pairings

Stichelton care of Neal's Yard

On the mild to wild scale, Stichelton is definitely more untamed in its nature, but has tremendous balance and a rich texture owing to the care in the process. Neal’s Yard markets it as having “juicy acidity and toasty, biscuity notes,” with a range of possible flavors such as “crisp green apple right through to beef stock umami.” Nuts and caramel are also frequently employed as descriptors.

Beyond being an exemplary snacking blue, “I’m not precious about it,” says Schneider. “I’ll put it on a burger or steak, or make a pasta sauce with some cream.” He also especially likes it with a dark and malty Porter, or with a fruity, nervy ice wine.

Future of Stichelton

Make Stilton Great Again hat photo credit Pamela Vachon

While Stitchelton is a cheese worthy of independent name recognition, Schenider and Hodgson have lobbied the Stilton PDO and the European Union for its inclusion in the label. PDOs can be necessary protection for certain cheeses, but they can also be seen as a barrier to entry. (A session that Schneider contributed to at the 2024 American Cheese Society conference.) “There are people everywhere that are trying to wrest back control over the traditional aspects of their cheese that have just been lost through industrialization, but then these consortiums exercise so much control” as to make it impossible for small, responsible operations to enter the market. Meanwhile, Schneider had a personal ballcap made whose design is familiar to anyone in America, with syntax that plays upon the familiar: “Make Stilton Great Again.”

Asked whether any collaborations are in the works with other cheese makers, or with local products such as beer and honey for Stichelton variations, Schneider had a definitive answer. “Cheese is like a mistress,” he says. “One is enough. All my cheese heroes, the ones I want to emulate, have been making the same cheese for over 100 years.”