Sparkenhoe Blue: Eight Years in the Making

Sparkenhoe is synonymous with Red Leicester. For more than twenty years, Jo and David Clarke have made their clothbound Sparkenhoe Red Leicester at the family’s dairy farm in Leicestershire. But when their son Will returned home from university in 2017, there was both milk to spare and an opportunity to do something new.

Sparkenhoe Red Leicester.

“We were only using about half the milk we produced for Red Leicester,” Will explains. Being in one of the three counties associated with Britain’s most classic blue cheese, the original idea was to produce a traditional example of that style using pasteurised milk. But when their first trial batch was made, the pasteuriser wasn’t yet installed. The raw milk batch worked, and the project took its own course. The new custom-built blue cheese make and maturing rooms were ready by August 2017. Sparkenhoe Blue has been in development ever since.

Blue cheese is far less forgiving than Red Leicester. Red Leicester is robust: small variations in the milk tend to disappear in the make. In the blue, they are amplified. The protein-to-fat ratio in the milk has proven especially critical. With normal fluctuation across the seasons, the texture and breakdown of the cheese shift dramatically. Rather than constantly adjusting the make, the Clarkes have focused on feeding and herd management to stabilise the milk’s properties themselves.

Tasting through batches of Sparkenhoe Blue with cheesemaker, Will Clarke.

The technical challenges have been numerous. Early batches sometimes refused to “go blue” at all: the curd was too dense, with insufficient air pockets for the Penicillium roqueforti moulds to colonise. Adjustments at milling (creating a slightly firmer, more open curd) resolved this. At other times, unwanted yeasts caused browning in the paste. Temperatures in the ripening rooms were tweaked. On one painful occasion, a culture house supplied yeast instead of the blue mould they had ordered, resulting in cheeses that tasted, in Will’s words, “like really yeasty sliced bread.”

Even the choice of blue mould strain has evolved. The current strain, the third they’ve trialled, breaks down the curd more effectively, delivering the buttery texture Will had always been aiming for. A brief period working with pasteurised milk unexpectedly clarified what that texture should look like at milling: pasteurisation makes milk calcium more soluble, helping the curd to demineralise and soften. Replicating that effect in raw milk has meant fine-tuning starter levels and continuing to experiment.

Sparkenhoe Blue maturing at Sparkenhoe Dairy. 

The tenacity required to make this style of cheese is matched by Will’s belief its potential. He was clear from the outset that he wasn’t trying to mimic other British blues. His target texture is “like a cold pack of butter from the fridge”: sliceable, smooth, not quite spreadable. The target flavour has always been clean and savoury: mellow, buttery, distinctly blue but never overpowering, and without bitterness. At around 3½ to 4 months old (depending on the season and fat levels in the milk), the best examples show an orange-tinged bacterial rind with neat caps of white mould.

Meanwhile, farming at Sparkenhoe Farm continues to evolve. The cows now graze diverse herbal leys, with silage cut from the same species-rich swards. Direct drilling has reduced soil disturbance, and cereals grown on the farm, often undersown with clover, are fed back to the herd. The aim is simple: healthier soils, healthier cows, and more consistent milk for cheesemaking.

After years of trials, feedback from the Neal’s Yard Dairy teams, and incremental improvements, Sparkenhoe Blue is now appearing more regularly on our counters and in our wholesale and export ranges. We are excited to introduce it to a wider audience.