99 Station Street

When the British Cheese Board asks a question such as what is your favourite cheese, they will get a very biased answer from us. Of course, this is going to be The Staffordshire. This cheese recently won protected designation of origin (PDO) from the European Union. According to their website the cheese is made from a rediscovered monastic recipe and can only be produced from milk from cows kept on Staffordshire farms.

One of our first jobs when opening the restaurant was to go out and visit potential suppliers. We took the long journey through the back roads of the Staffordshire moorlands to just outside of Leek. This is where Leek Brewery and Staffordshire Cheese Company are based. The cheese is made by hand on the premises and it’s quite a surprising thing to see this done on a reasonably small scale.

We use their cheese not only on our cheeseboard, but as an active ingredient in some of our other dishes. We’ve made a foam for one of our soups using The Staffordshire, as an ingredient in one of our vegetarian friendly dishes as well as on the cheeseboard. It’s a very versatile hard white cows cheese and will fit most roles that a good cheese should.

Given that Britain has had a resurgence in great cheeses, it is especially wonderful to see something so local and made with such care. The time and dedication it took to obtain their protected designation of origin was probably something they would not have done with hind sight. In common with a couple of other Staffordshire finds, this was down to the monks.

They certainly knew a lot about bugs, those monks, oh and of course beer …