GET THIS:Giana Ferguson and her family keep tinkering with the award-winning cheese, charcuterie and herbs made at their farm in Schull, Co Cork, writes Hugo Arnold.
GIANA FERGUSON loves to watch the change come over summer visitors on their annual jaunt to Schull, Co Cork. The first few days, she says, Dubliners, in particular, are hugely impatient with local shopkeepers. They want their groceries and they want them NOW. It takes a good few days, maybe even a week, before they slow down, look around them and start to enjoy themselves.
She wants us all to slow down all year round; to take time to shop, meet neighbours, talk to locals, engage in conversation. She is, of course, a great advocate of farmers' markets and the Slow Food movement.
But she's a great one to talk. Most of us would consider hanging up our hats, having produced one of the great Irish farmhouse cheeses for the past 34 years. But not Giana Ferguson, who is still experimenting with the flavour and production process that goes into making Gubbeen cheese. She is now making larger wheels - cutting cheeses, as the Germans call them - and using a new rennet. "They're built to last now," she says, with a certain satisfaction.
What was there to change or question about an award-winning cheese? "While I was more than happy with what we were producing, there was no doubt that after about a month or two, the flavour and texture were tailing off. I felt I wanted more, " she says.
There was also the question of the need to expand. Not to get bigger in size, necessarily, but to do something of more mass. As a cheesemaker, she explained, you face a choice. Use your own milk only, or buy in. The milk for Gubbeen comes from Tom Ferguson's own cows, which he describes as "a cheesemaker's herd", being of mixed breeds, which gives a special quality to the milk for the dairy. Having decided not to buy in, the choices become very focused. And creative. Which is where the subject of rennet comes in.
Rennet comes in both vegetarian- and animal- based forms and is a complex of enzymes that coagulate the milk, causing it to separate into curds and whey. Job done, you might think. But there is rather more to this than meets the eye. The Fergusons have, for lots of reasons, used vegetarian rennet from the start. What, so the niggling question went, would happen if they tried a different rennet?
The Fergusons tried three: two Danish varieties and a French one. Trying a rennet is an involved process, certainly when you make a cheese such as Gubbeen. As the cheese ages, it changes, and you have to follow its progress painstakingly: making observations, taking notes, forming judgments, often based on information that is distinctly hard to quantify. And in the case of the "new" Gubbeen, this went on for months. What drove this change was a view that the physics of the cheese was not correct - as it aged, the mushroom flavours of the rind started to dominate and the lactic flavours were falling away. A Gubbeen cheese is typically 1.5kg in weight. The new process led, at the start, to cheeses that were measuring in at 5kg, but with the vegetarian rennet the lactic flavours were still not showing through enough. The mushroom flavours of the rind were far too dominant. Introducing the French animal rennet changed not only this, but also the texture of the cheese, which started to remain more constant.
The most important breakthrough, however, was a dramatic improvement in the flavour. Over time, this was deepening, lengthening, becoming at once more satisfying and more complex - bigger - and with a texture that was more subtle, moist and integrated.
As a cheesemaker, Ferguson explains, you can become hijacked by your own vanity. "I was making a good cheese that aged well to two, maybe even three months. It is not so much a question of re-accessing the boundaries, but of seeing where the boundaries can be pushed.
"After ensuring your milk is good, the real secret to cheesemaking, in my view, is caring. The smaller you are, the more you can care. You can really focus on what you do in the curing room. I have fewer cheeses to care for at the moment and I am rediscovering the joy and excitement of that responsibility. It is easy to forget that cheese is a living thing. It's not human, but it does live and responds to attention."
At Gubbeen, for the first time, they are washing the rinds in wine, and increasingly looking at the effects humidity and temperature are having on their charges. "It is like rediscovering something that you know so well, but haven't really seen properly for some time."
I did a blind tasting comparing samples of the old and the new. The new Gubbeen is a different beast altogether. You get the same Gubbeen flavour, but it is as if turbo-charged. It is deeper, longer, more satisfying, a sort of grown-up version. And the best bit? The rind, texture and flavour seem to be at one, whereas I am not sure this was the case previously.
You can buy this new version of Gubbeen at Sheridan's in Galway and Dublin, and at farmers' markets and good delicatessens and supermarkets around the country. Berry Brothers wine shops are now selling cheeses too, to Giana's delight, and she thinks artisan bakers should start selling cheese, as a matter of course.
When you try the new Gubbeen, look out for Gubbeen Cheese Crackers made in collaboration with Robert Ditty at his bakery in Castledawson, Co Derry. "They're so good that we're hoping children will soon find these in their lunchboxes instead of crisps."
Meanwhile her son Fingal continues to perfect Gubbeen bacon and charcuterie, incorporating herbs grown by her daughter Clovisse, "our land person".
"We're not captains of industry; we don't want to be super-elite, but we do like the idea of creating alliances with other artisan producers." Doesn't sound like she'll be slowing down any time soon. harnold@irish-times.ie
www.gubbeen.com