After 40 years making cheese, Breda Maher knows well the craft of transforming simple milk into something more. Yet even she is sometimes surprised by the results. Midway through an interview in her cosy home kitchen at Cooleeney Farm, outside Thurles in Co Tipperary, she quietly cuts a wedge from a disc of cheese and passes it along.
“We have something new this morning,” she says. “This is kind of an Irish brie we’ve been trying. We already have one Irish brie, but we wanted something a little different.”
I take a small sample to taste. It is at the perfect stage of ripeness; the interior oozes from the bloomy rind. The flavour is explosive – rich and full, a combination of butter, mushrooms and that indescribable cocktail of flavours cheese fans sometimes refer to as “forest floor”. The cheese is so good it takes my breath away.
Maher just smiles. That was the reaction she expected. After all, way back in 1986 her Cooleeney was one of the first Irish farmhouse cheeses to achieve international favour.
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Brought to market as “Irish Camembert”, within six months Cooleeney had won a major award in London. From there, Cooleeney Farm has gone from one success to another. Besides Cooleeney, there are cheeses named Gortnamona (made from goat’s milk), Darù, Dunbarra and more.
Maher started making cheese as a way to use up excess milk from her husband Jim’s 200-head Friesian dairy herd and as a way to satisfy her fascination with food. “I had come from the hotel industry and I liked everything about food,” she says. “My children were growing up and they were getting big and I finally had some space. We had a very good dairy herd and our milk was our biggest asset, so we looked at various products we could use the milk for and add some value.”
Bloomy rind cheeses, such as French Brie and Camembert, get their character from the downy penicillium mould that covers them
She worked for a while with cheesemakers John and Anne Brodie in Cavan, then took a course in cheesemaking at University College Cork. After a series of experiments in her home kitchen, she developed the cheese that would become Cooleeney. While most novice cheesemakers might start with a simple and durable hard cheese such as cheddar, Maher jumped straight into the deep end with a bloomy rind cheese, which is much more complicated to make. She had worked at nearby Cashel Palace hotel before she married and she remembered that many of her customers were particularly interested in these cheeses, which then were scarce in Ireland.
Bloomy rind cheeses, such as French Brie and Camembert, get their character from the downy penicillium mould that covers them. The mould itself is mostly flavourless. It’s the action of the mould on the cheese inside that creates such an exciting range of flavours as it breaks down the protein and fat. What starts out as a bland, somewhat chalky paste over time winds up a rich, fragrant ooze.
When you’re shopping you can feel the difference through the wrapper. A ripe cheese will yield when pressed in the centre. Unfortunately, many people’s only exposure to these cheeses has been at the supermarket, where they are often stocked underripe and firm to the touch. This extends their shelf life, but the flavour is at best a shadow of what it could be. (Maher points out that even these will ripen perfectly in your home refrigerator, left in their original wrapping paper).
You do all this work, you know, and then it’s sold as this bland cheese. I want it to be mature when the customer gets it. It would be a shame to have it any other way
The changes made by the mould culture can be quite dramatic. For example, Maher says that when experimenting with this as-yet-unnamed new cheese, it took a while to appreciate what they had. “For the first two to four weeks we were wondering ‘Is anything ever going to happen here?’” she says. “Then suddenly one tasting, everything had changed, just from one week to the next.”
When this cheese is introduced to the market (Maher hopes before Christmas), it will be sold only by a select group of speciality cheese shops that are willing to handle it at an appropriate stage of ripeness. “You do all this work, you know, and then it’s sold as this bland cheese,” she says, shaking her head. “I want it to be mature when the customer gets it. It would be a shame to have it any other way.”
Each year Cooleeney Farm sells 270-280 tonnes of artisan cheese in Ireland and around the world. The cheeses are made in a state-of-the-art facility behind the Maher house. The cow’s milk cheeses are made predominantly from the milk of their own herd with some supplementing from an immediate neighbour. The goat’s milk comes from two farmers in the county.
As much as she loves the making of cheese, Maher is ever mindful that in the end (and in the beginning), it’s all about the basics. “We must remember and never forget that the cow is the most important thing around here, and now all of that is taken care of by my son Pat [the fourth generation of dairying Mahers]. The animal and the land and the grass are number one and if that’s not correct, then you don’t have good cheese.”
