Price range: £4.60 through £27.60
Baron Bigod is a rich, bloomy-rinded Suffolk cheese with a wonderfully creamy texture and flavours of cultured cream, mushrooms, warm hay and roasted nuts.
Baron Bigod (pronounced By God) is probably the best soft cow’s milk cheese being made in the UK. There, I’ve said it.
It isn’t just because it tastes wonderful, although it absolutely does. For me, Baron Bigod is one of those cheeses that shows just how far British cheesemaking has come. It takes its inspiration from Brie de Meaux PDO, but this isn’t an English copy of a French cheese. It has very much developed a character of its own.
Baron Bigod is made by Jonny and Dulcie Crickmore at Fen Farm Dairy in Suffolk, using milk from their own herd of Montbéliarde cows. It’s a breed much more commonly associated with France, and the rich, flavoursome milk they produce is particularly well suited to cheesemaking.
And because the cows, milk and cheesemaking are all there on the farm, Baron Bigod really is a cheese of its place.
The story began when Jonny Crickmore decided to make cheese as a way of adding value to the milk being produced on the family farm. Rather than making another British hard cheese, he set his sights on something considerably more ambitious: a large, traditional, Brie-style cheese.
A French cheesemaker helped Jonny develop the recipe, but what makes Baron Bigod special is the milk and the farm behind it.
The Montbéliarde cows graze the pastures around Fen Farm, and their milk travels just metres rather than miles to the dairy. The cows are milked early in the morning and the warm milk passes directly into the cheesemaking vat.
The curds are then carefully hand-ladled into large moulds before the cheeses are drained, salted and left to mature.
The result is Baron Bigod: a large, bloomy-rinded cheese that may have its roots in French cheesemaking but tastes unmistakably of Fen Farm.
A good Baron Bigod is a wonderful thing.
When it’s younger, the centre can still be relatively firm and lactic, while the paste immediately underneath the rind begins to soften first. As it ripens, that creaminess gradually works its way towards the middle until the cheese becomes wonderfully soft and yielding.
Flavour-wise, I often find cultured cream, warm hay, mushrooms and roasted nuts, with a lovely savoury depth and just a little sweetness.
And please eat the rind! That white bloomy rind is part of the cheese and adds another earthy, mushroomy dimension to everything going on underneath.
One of the lovely things about buying Baron Bigod from a cheesemonger is that we can help you choose one at the stage of ripeness you prefer. Some people love that slightly firmer centre; others want it beautifully soft all the way through.
I’m very firmly in the latter camp.
Jen’s note: If you’re ever near Bungay, you can visit Fen Farm and buy Baron Bigod, butter, raw milk and all sorts of other delicious things from their vending machine. A cheese vending machine. Quite frankly, every town should have one.
Sizes and Prices
Storage Advice
Delivery and Collection
Ingredients (Allergens are listed in capitals)
MILK, starter cultures, rennet, salt
Normal opening Monday – Saturday 9am – 4pm until:
Sunday 22nd 9am – 4pm
Monday 23rd 9am – 4pm
Christmas Eve 9am – 12pm
Christmas Day Closed
Boxing Day Closed
Friday 27th Closed
Saturday 28th 9am – 4pm
Sunday 29th Closed
Monday 30th 9am – 2pm
Tuesday 31st 9am – 2pm
New Year’s Day Closed
Thursday 2nd January Closed
Friday 3rd 9am – 4pm then open as normal
After Christmas our courier delivery slots start from 8th January.
