Cornish Gouda

I was watching Rick Stein’s new series about Cornwall the other night and his visit to the Cornish Gouda Company brought back memories because I went to see young Giel Spiering back in 2015. I am sad to say I cannot find the original article I wrote about the visit to Giel and his charming family - but here’s a snippet from a piece I penned at Cornwall Show a few years later.

And I put it up here because I really do think that Cornish Gouda is one of the best cheeses made in Britain today.

Giel and his mother and father walking along with their South Cornish dairy herd

A young Cornish cheesemaker who went home from college five years ago to find a “For Sale” sign on the gate of his parents’ farm has been named the best maker of hard cheese in Britain - a product made from the family’s dairy herd which he helped to save.

Giel Spiering’s Original Mature Cornish Gouda was voted the UK’s best hard cheese in a new competition set up by the Great British Chefs organisation and sponsored by Peter’s Yard.

Thanks to Giel’s cheesemaking abilities and business acumen, there is no longer a “For Sale” sign on the gate at Talvan Farm, in the hills behind Polperro. 

 “Cornish Gouda is growing as a business and everything we make comes from the family’s milking herd,” Giel told me yesterday after travelling to London to find out how successful he’d been in the Great British Cheese Awards. 

Giel Spiering

“I sold my first bit of cheese four years ago, so we’ve come a long way - we produced 30 tonnes last year and the aim is to grow even bigger. We use about one third of the farm’s milk now - but we still lose big money on the two thirds we sell as milk that goes into the supermarkets. By this time next year I want to be using at least 50 per cent of all the milk we produce.”

Giel was delighted to have won a national award in the new competition: “It is absolutely fantastic because it is the most prestigious cheese award we’ve won so far - we’ve won a few in the South West but this competition is for the whole of UK. 

“We were nominated by one of our suppliers and from there we had to get the general public and consumers to vote for us. Then, in the final, five cheeses were shortlisted after we’d all sent in samples - so I had no idea I was going to be outright winner of the best hard cheese until I went to the awards ceremony.” 

Giel’s Cornish Gouda is nothing like the salty product, wrapped in red wax known as Edam, sold in British supermarkets. The Dutch are a nation obsessed with fine cheese - not a single person in the Netherlands would dream of eating the UK version. And Cornish Gouda is the kind of product you’d find in one of the countless Dutch cheese-shops. It is of very high quality, and delicious. 

Giel’s mum, Anne-Marie, made us fabulous cheesy treats when we visited the South Cornish farm in 2015

“I really did come home to a For Sale sign and I wanted to save the farm,” Giel told me when we visited his Cornish business last year. “But there was no money in dairy farming - and this farm was old and falling apart. The buildings need replacing. I said - if we are not going to make money out of selling milk we’ve got to do something else with it.

“It was a desperate and necessary attempt and I knew we had to do something right then. So I went to Holland for three weeks and learned how to make cheese the Dutch way with my cousin - and then I bought all the equipment,” he explained.

As he says, the 24-year old has come a long way since then. But he is still in production at the family farm where he and his parents have adapted and renovated buildings to house the sort of products which the Great British Cheese Awards wish to discover and promote. 

A happy cow decides when she wants milking at the Spiiring farm’s robot powered dairy

“We hope to produce a catalogue of great artisan cheese and discover up-and-coming cheesemakers,” say competition organisers. “Both Great British Chefs and Peter’s Yard rely on fantastic tasting ingredients and the people who produce them. Together we have a social media reach of over 1.3 million and we want to utilise this platform to help promote talent in the British cheese industry.”

As I say, this article was written a couple of years ago - and I was very pleased to see on the Rick Stein programme that Giel’s endeavour is going from strength to strength.