Cheesy Week for the Team #Blog

Briony Wilson
27th July 2018

Its been a cheesy week for the team at Taste Cheshire! On Tuesday Emma Shawcross, our Development chef, attended the International Cheese Awards as a judge, which from the photos below she clearly enjoyed. The International Cheese and Diary Awards has been running since 1897 and is very proud to call Nantwich its home. It is great to see that the biggest cheese awards in the world is held in Cheshire, but what else would you expect from the county of food and drink.

The awards hosted 300 judges, 150 stewards, 5000 cheeses; from 30 countries worldwide. Those of you that know Emma, will know that she is a massive cheese fan and spent days beforehand mentally and physically preparing herself for the vast amount of cheese she was going to encounter. Just in her categories alone she tasted up to 20 entries per category.

The categories were judged by a panel of four judges and was led by a lead judge who is generally from the cheese world; they advised the judges as to what they should be looking for, such as: mouth feel, texture, crumb, flavour etc. Every judge is asked to comment on every cheese and then as a collective the category is narrowed down to 5, and then the top 3 selected for the prizes.

After a morning of cheese tasting all judges, advisors and guests were invited to a proper Cheshire lunch sponsored by Joseph Heler; the buffet was truly fabulous, and people somehow found room despite being full to the brim with cheese. However it was the trifle and black forest gateaux that really stole the show. Following the lunch, a selection of prizes were awarded including the winner of the Celebration Cake by Williamson and Sons of Sandbach and our very own Henry Cooke of Clotton Hall Dairy took silver for their Clotted Cream.

I am also a massive cheese fan, so I couldn’t help but join Emma on Wednesday to also get involved in this cheese paradise. The Nantwich show is never one to miss, the great selection of livestock classes, floristry, crafts, vintage cars, music and entertainment, creates the perfect Cheshire day out. Of course, our first stop was the Cheese Awards Pavilion. We wanted to have a nosey at all the winners from the previous days awards, and to take in how enormous this event truly is, until you have seen it for yourself, it is quite hard to understand the scale of this fabulous awards class. This tent also hosted the chef demonstration stage that throughout the day had demonstrations from Celebrity chefs, James Martin, Will Holland, Sean Wilson and Jonathan Harrison.

Next stop for us, of course, was the food hall, where we bumped in to a few of our wonderful producers including: Caroline from Ridiculously Rich by Alana, Phil for Carslake Tea, Ryan from Weston Biltong and Matthew from Winding Rivers Liqueurs. We couldn’t stay for long as we didn’t want to get in the way of the bustling marquee full of eager shoppers. We made our way around the festival looking at the various live stock and horse presentations, and remaining stalls, before returning to the Cheese marquee for James Martins Food Demo, his funnel cakes certainly made us hungry. We finished off our experience by watch James Martin judge the Celebrity cheese award class, which was a variety of all different types of cheese, not an easy category to judge, but James managed well.

What better way to finish off a cheesy couple of days but with a cheesy fan girl photo of our very own Emma, we can’t wait for our next visit at next year’s awards.