The East Midlands From a great estate to your plate

Date Published:

05/09/2008

Map user, Emma, heaped praise upon Welbeck farm shop ending with; "they are just brilliant!" I found there was plenty to get anyone with even a passing interest in food excited in this well run estate

Where to start with Welbeck? Not only is there a farm shop, there's an art gallery, café, garden centre, bookshop, extensive grounds, but a few miles away there's also a creamery producing some amazing cheese.

First off I’m standing with Michael Boyle, director of the farm shop. He's a softly spoken local chap with a background in farming and animal feed production. He, along with the Parente family, set up the farm shop in 2006. "100 per cent of our lamb, 80 per cent of the beef and 50 per cent of our pork come from farmers on the estate," says Michael. After a tour of the cold room, where there's some great looking well-hung beef requested by a customer, he introduces me to Mark Brown, the resident butcher. We chew the fat so to speak; Mark talking me through what he does. "I can do anything a customer asks for - yesterday I boned out a chicken for someone and at Christmas I do a lot of multi-bird roasts," he says.

Welbeck is noted for good game from the estate too. "I'm also proud of my rumps of beef," says Mark and cuts whatever a customer requires off the bone on a large hindquarter on display. There's also in-shop chef, Andrew Norman, who makes meals and soups that are blast-frozen or chilled ready to take home.

Pleasing cheese

Welbeck's other claim to fame is that it's also home to the Stichelton Dairy. In 2006 Randolph Hodgson (from Neal's Yard) teamed up with Joe Schneider to produce a traditional raw-milk Stilton cheese on the estate and it's Joe I go to meet next.

Bizarrely, they are unable to call it Stilton as, when the cheese was awarded its Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status in the mid 1990s, pasteurised milk was listed as the main ingredient and that production technique is now protected by the full might of European law. The last unpasteurised raw-milk Stilton was made at Colston Bassett in 1989. It's a crying shame, as this is the quintessential English blue cheese - the cheese synonymous with Christmas. The cheese whose centre is scooped out and filled with port by people who think it's classy, the cheese Mrs Beeton refers to as British Parmesan! And now it can be made only with pasteurised milk? Pah!

A scour of the history books revealed Stichelton as an old Saxon name for the town of Stilton, so the boys plumped for this and a raw milk Stilton-style cheese is now back on the menu. Made slowly and properly from the fresh organic milk of a herd of Friesians on the estate, it is a joy to taste; incredibly smooth and yet with a little tang on the tongue.

If you're in the area, Welbeck's well worth visiting. I ask Michael what the future held. "We're planning to open our own on-site bakery and cooking school." Cheese, beef and bread in the heart of England. Well done.

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