Cheese To Please

Amongst the rambling boulders, unruly grasslands and bent back trees that make up the outskirts of Bodmin moor, Stansfield Farm makes its cheese seven days a week. It’s a long, demanding process, one that requires acute attention to detail.

The farm itself, which is over 240 acres of bright green pastures, is home to over 240 British Frisian cows. Each one of them an essential part of The Cornish Cheese Company's entire business. 

The Cornish Blue, a worldwide award winning cheese sold across the country, was created in 2001 as an attempt by Philip Stansfield, the owner, to save his farm from plummeting milk prices. Philip and his family had investigated all sorts of ways to bring in a new revenue stream, from ice cream to flavoured milk, but in the end it was the aspirations of building a cheese business that set the wheels in motion. 

“The research and initial trials took about two years,” explained Philip, sat in the family's home kitchen which doubled as a makeshift office, “that included turning the dairy into a cheese room. It took 12 months to get the recipe right and you can only change one thing at a time with every batch you make.” With one kilo of cheese made from nine litres of milk, cheese was the ideal product to utilise the large quantity of milk the cows provided. The cheese itself is a blend of sharp, tangy tones and creamy, nutty flavours, for Philip it was important to get this balance right. “We went for a blue cheese because there was no blue cheese being made in Cornwall at the time, we didn’t want to be like a stilton, we wanted to be a speciality cheese. We decided to go down a softer cheese route, it’s a bit milder and not as sharp as stilton.