It’s as gouda as it gets! It’s cheese week at Big Barn

If you get your local milk from the milkman, local farm shop or even the supermarket, then you might have noticed them heavily promoting British milk, the next step is supporting British cheese to help give our dairy industry the support it needs!

There are over 2000 varieties of cheese world wide and  over 700 beautiful British cheeses to choose from. It won’t come as a huge surprise that Britain’s favourite cheese is stil

Real cheese

l Cheddar,  but there are some brilliant varieties which we produce from soft goat’s cheeses to hard sheep’s cheeses or for something a bit more exotic than cheddar, you can get delightful concoctions mixed up with herbs, spice or fruits, so there’s definitely a cheese out there to suit all tastes.

Local farm shops and cheesemongers all over the country stock delicious local cheeses, so when you are next on holiday pop in and get yourself something special from your holiday destination.

It wouldn’t be a celebratory week without some fun facts, so here are 13 surprising cheese-related facts:

1. Cheese isn’t just made with cows milk, but also with sheep milk, goat milk, buffalo milk, horse milk and even camel milk! Cheese made from Moose milk is successfully made on a farm in Sweden, despite the short lactation period of the Moose.

2. To make cheese, milk has to be separated into curds and whey. Cheese itself is made with the curds.

3. Some cheeses, like Mature Cheddar, are stored for a year or longer before they are ready to eat.

4. Cheddar is named after the Cheddar Gorge caves in Somerset where the cheese used to be stored to ripen. Cheddar is one of the most widely made cheeses in the world.

5. The majority of Shropshire Blue is made in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.

6. Cheshire is one of the oldest British cheeses.

7. Cornish Yarg came from a recipe found in a book in a farmer’s attic.

8. Caerphilly was traditionally eaten by Welsh coal miners for their lunch.

9. Every spring sees locals in the village of Stilton, Peterborough, race along a course rolling Stilton shaped wheels.

10. Cheese production around the globe is more than the combined worldwide production of coffee, tobacco, tea, and cocoa beans.

11. A matchbox-sized piece of hard cheese provides a third of an adult’s daily requirement for calcium.

12. Cheese is a source of vitamin B12, which you need for red blood cell formation.

13. People of Greece are the largest consumers of cheese worldwide. An average person from Greece consumes around 27.3 kg of cheese every year, about ¾ of which is feta ch

Artisan cheese at your local Farm Shop

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While supermarkets actually are great places to source a variety of cheeses, it’s in your local cheesemonger, farm shop or deli where you’ll find Britain’s hidden gems and, no doubt, get the story behind them.

To buy a selection of delicious cheeses direct from the producer, visit the BigBarn Marketplace, or to discover tiny producers who may be churning unusual varieties in a village near you, search our local food map here. If you’re feeling particularly confident you could even try making your own cheese using a cheesemakers kit.

If you have a favourite cheese recipe that you’d like to share, or any other recipe, and would like the chance to win a prize, please video your recipe and add it to KIS (Keep it Simple) Cookery. Please have a look at existing videos here and try and keep your video less than 2 minutes long.