Why cheesemakers need more love

In the aftermath of the grate cheese robbery, I offer a recipe for massively cheesey cheese and garlic pull-apart rolls. Plus, how to tackle a fire in your oven.

This week’s newsletter was supposed to focus on cheese following the recent ‘grate’ cheese robbery. But I must digress a bit first, because I almost burned down the kitchen while making a salad.

We were heating the oven to make croutons for a Caesar when oil on the bottom of the oven caught fire. The more I tried to suffocate the flames with tea towels, the higher the flames leaped, threatening to attack the cupboards. Reader, I genuinely thought the kitchen might go up.

My sensible daughter called the fire brigade while I tried to remember whether damp towels were just as bad as water on such a conflagration. But by the time she had explained to the operator what had happened, and confirmed the address, the flames were extinguished.

The No Fire situation did not bother the fire brigade, who insisted on coming anyway to make sure everything was OK, and they arrived three minutes later, lights flashing (thankfully, no siren). My husband returned home from walking the dog, who started barking a great deal on finding the house full of smoke and two lovely, uniformed strangers in our kitchen. It was chaos for a while.

We were all a bit embarrassed that these lovely officers had come for absolutely no reason at all. But as they examined the barely visible blisters on my hands, they assured us we had done the right thing. My God we’re lucky to have this kind instant assistance at the end of the phone, aren’t we?

It’s worth passing on their advice in case you ever have an oven fire that don’t seem to want to go out. Turn the the oven off, keep the oven door closed and call the Fire Brigade. Don’t do what I did and open the oven door to try and put it out the flames.

It’s also worth noting that my daughter accidentally called 911 instead of 999 (understandably stressed, watches too much American television) and this number works! In Australia, emergency services is 000, so does this work too? Obviously, I’m not going to test it out but if anyone knows, could you let me know?

Anyway … what I was going to talk about this week was cheese, in the wake of alleged fraudsters stealing £300,000 worth of premium cheddar, weighing 22 tonnes, from the iconic Neal’s Yard Dairy.

Some people have expressed Suprise that anyone would want to steal cheese. But to my mind, that just demonstrates the extent to which we take artisan cheese and the work of cheesemakers for granted. Years of work had been poured into each truckle of cheese that was stolen, starting with the seeds planted to grow the animals’ feed to the painstaking labour that goes into transforming milk into the best possible cheddar. It wasn’t just food that was stolen, it was an attack on tradition, craftsmanship and labour.

Most of us rarely stop to consider the work that underpins the cheese in a properly good toastie, or a pasta dish strewn with finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. (In Italy, cheese is like gold, and wheels of Parmesan worth hundreds of pounds have to be kept under armed guard, cheese robberies are so common). 

But the latest heist is a reminder that in the UK we now have an farmhouse cheese industry so brilliant and successful that it’s become a delicious target for criminals. The stolen cheese will almost certainly never be recovered, but maybe the theft will encourage us to value our artisan cheeses a bit more.

In honour of cheese, I offer you these moreish cheesy pullapart rolls: loads of cheese, garlic and bread together in a group hug - there’s nothing more to add.