Doru and Cooloney Irish Farmhouse Cheeses

Niall: Hi there guys and welcome to the video. I am here with Brita at Cooloney in County Tiperrary and she is going to tell us a little bit about the three cheeses that they produce here, which are Doru, Dunbarra Cooloney. Welcome Brita. Brita: Thank you Niall and welcome. Niall: Thanks very much. So Brita, if you’re making cheese here for quite a long time, I believe. Brita: We started in September 1986 to produce some special cheeses use and then make up our own dairy. These cows produce the milk on the really rich lands of Tiperarry which produce quite a distinctive milk, giving us the flavor and taste that we get in our cheeses. Niall: And it’s going back a long way through the same family. Brita: Yeah, this is fourth generation, our family, looks after the farm and my husband and myself look after the cheese business. Niall: So you’re all involved literally day to day. Brita: Yeah, hands on day to day and we have team of 13 and ourselves in the cheese. And the farm has three people working, so it’s small business. Niall: I don’t suppose you could maybe show us around the farm, could you? Brita: Would be delighted to. Let’s go. Niall: Brilliant. Tell us a little about this cheese that you’re making here. Brita: These are Dunbarra cheeses, they come in three flavor, natural flavor, pepper flavor and garlic flavor. Niall: And is that like a Celtic motif? Brita: It’s a Celtic motif and this from motif resembles peace and tranquility. Niall: And what type of cheese, if it’s a soft medium cheese or? Brita: It’s a semi soft cheese, not as soft and runny as your breeze, it’s likely more solid and has a very strong pronounced pepper cheese and a very strong pronounced garlic cheese. This is Cooloney, , Cooloney is our first cheese here from the farm at Cooloney. It’s a soft mold ripened cheese, comes in a five wheel and a half pound wheel. Maybe just in this particular one, the first the cheese, the last, just 22 years now, it’s a national and internationally award winning cheese available in some outlets in America, available widely in the UK and in Ireland. Niall: And is it softer cheese or? Brita: Yes, it’s a soft creamy style of cheese, quite strong in flavor as a fully mature cheese. Addition to our range of cheeses here, it’s a hard cheese, it’s made with cows milk, vegetarian and it has a natural rined, this lovely nice crinkly rin that you see on the outside of it. The cheese matures in this special maturing rooms which have been developed for them so that they take al of the environment into the taste and the flavors. They’re produced in a number of sizes, at two KG, a 400 gram and a 200 gram size. And you can see, it’s quite a hard cheese, wonderful natural rined, nice and wrinkly, it brings a lot of attraction both in appearance as well as taste of the cheese board. Niall: I think you’re telling me a second ago that they’re going to go into— Brita: Absolutely, this is it, just as you see it here, a 400 gram doru, it comes in a clear paper wrap so that the customer can actually see the rined on the cheese and can see it’s natural format. Niall: So all we have to do now is go inside to the farm and maybe try of these lovely cheeses? Brita has been kind enough to bring us into her kitchen here in Cooloney in the farmhouse and absolutely gorgeous it is and we’re going to try some of these fantastic cheeses. And which one do you recommend to start with? They’re all good. Brita: Let’s start with Cooloneyt, it is the first cheese we made. It was the original cheese, so why don’t we start with this one, soft creamy cheese. Here we are. Niall: Give it a little taste. You could just see that that would work really well in a nice, you know, like a salad. It wouldn’t just be for a cheese board, I mean there’s a lot of different— Brita: Used by a lot of chefs for starters and final pastry, many things Niall: Yes. Pretty much anything that you could with a common—you know, it’s exactly the same. Brita: Same cheese. And we’re going to Dunbarra and Dunbarra actually starts out, it’s like in the small church in Dublin, right in the center of Dublin in North King Street comes in a natural cheese, milder format than the Cooloney and it comes in pepper flavor and a garlic flavor cheese. We start of with this recipe, I think today we have modified that slightly and put our own little tweaks on that you know. So this is Dunbarra pepper cheese, you can actually see the pepper corns, they’re crushed black pepper corns. Niall: I think the motif, the logo on top would look very nice, you know, if you had a cheese board, definitely there’s something completely different and so there’s a bit of a kick to this with the pepper, so yeah. Brita: Absolutely. Niall: Really, really nice strong pepper taste, really, really nice. You certainly wouldn’t need any crack pepper on that on top of it. You could make like a gorgeous little salad again or a sauce. Brita: Sauce also, chefs use it for a baked potatoes and they just slice a pepper cheese on top. You got pepper taste and you got cheese as well. Niall: Brilliant. Brita: Well, last year has been about doru cheese from unpasteurized milk, a natural flavor cheese versus a natural rined cheese. The cheese were tasting as matured for nine months, so it has quite a depth of flavor. Niall: And quite a long shelf life you were saying as well. Brita: Nine months. Niall: Again, this would be something that would work well. Brita: Quite good in cooking also. Niall: Really good flavor, a fantastic flavor of a very, very nice class. Brita: We use only our milk for cheeses. Niall: Right. Brita: In milking we try to grace for about and 10 and a half, maybe 11 months of the year and we try to get them out by day to grass, because the input of grass into their diet is hugely important to the flavor of the cheese. Niall: But it’s great to see from talking to cheese producers in Ireland that there’s a really community there and I think they’re all starting to build it up very nicely. Well, thanks very much for letting me taste those. Absolutely delicious.