Randolph Hodgson - The Whey of The Cheese
January 1, 2007 - brandchannel.com
He is a king whose domain includes a Golden Cross, a Stinking Bishop, and two Irish saints (Tola and Gall). His complete inventory reads like Wallace and Gromit’s wish list. When it comes to dairy products from the British Isles, Randolph Hodgson is the big cheese.
Relatively little-known outside of England, farmhouse cheeses from the British Isles rank among the best in the world, deserving a place next to the high-quality offerings of their European neighbors. Much of their growing quality and exploding popularity can be traced back to one man: a quiet, clever, and rather funny Brit named Randolph Hodgson, who runs Neal’s Yard Dairy—London’s top cheese purveyor.
The keys to Hodgson’s success and that of farmhouse cheeses—the two are practically synonymous—are his connections with his clients and producers. The real key, however, is his linchpin role between the two.
Producers almost always benefit from Hodgson’s advice. When Hodgson suggested how to improve a particular brand of cheese, the producer listened—and saw the quality of his cheese skyrocket.
The result? “Its sales [at our stores] multiplied by ten,” Hodgson says.
Call it the Hodgson Effect. His technique might be best explained by comparing it with that of his French counterparts across the English Channel.
In the established cheese culture of France, most people know what they want, the season to get it, and where to get the good stuff. French cheese shops tend to be quiet places where people queue up, don’t make much noise, and tell their cheesemonger what they want; there’s very little salesmanship or interaction involved. Clients count on their shop’s quality to be the bellwether for the quality of its cheese.
Looking at Hodgson’s pair of busy stores in London, you’d wonder whether he was in the same industry as the French. In this less-established culture, there’s constant interaction. There’s a palpable excitement (yes, excitement in a cheese shop) in the lines at his stores, and you have to wonder if the French couldn’t learn a thing or two from him.
At Neal’s Yard, a client may taste every cheese in the shop before making a choice, and there’s a constant exchange between salesperson and client that relies strictly on the quality of the cheese, and not the reputation of the shop.
“You can have all kinds of cheese and products, but you’ve got to make things happen by [actual] selling,” says Hodgson. “The way we sell is very much based on tasting. It’s like natural selection. If you can base your sales on flavor—as opposed to reputation, fancy labels, or price—that becomes the motivator.”
Hodgson takes what he and his staff learn from their customers and presents it to his purveyors. In a sense, he becomes his cheesemakers’ eyes and ears.
“All you have to do is make sure the customer tastes before they buy and then turn to the producer and say, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’ ” he says.
“Cheesemaking means doing the same thing every day,” he adds, noting the role of his producers. He contends that the cheesemakers—who don’t necessarily have much customer contact—need someone who can tell them which varieties were liked and disliked.
“Could you imagine a chef never getting a review or never hearing what a customer had to say?” he asks. “We’re just helping them in the development of their cheeses.”
He also goes to the source.
“When you taste one day’s production with [a producer] and it’s fantastic—and you say so—they’ll ask themselves, ‘Well, what did I do on that day?’
“It’s very different from the French school, which tends to ask, ‘Well, what did my grandfather do when he was making cheese?’ “
With a T-shaped hand tool known as a cheese iron, we walk and talk and he shows me some of his beauties—room upon beautiful temperature-controlled room of the British Isles’ finest cheeses.
Occasionally, he lines up a cheese we’re talking about (or just walking next to) and stabs it with the cheese iron, giving it a twist and pulling out a core sample. He pushes a nub off the inside end that I peel from his thumbnail, takes a bite for himself and replaces the sample, making sure it’s airtight from the outside.
We start by tasting a couple different rounds of cheese from a tiny batch of Tunworth that he is helping a brand-new producer age.
“This one’s better than that other one,” I venture.
“I know,” he replies with equal parts pride, dismay, and irony that reflect working on an artisanal scale with living products.
Helping new producers create better products turns out to be a benefit of Neal’s Yard’s growing success. For cheesemakers who might be making a new cheese in their home kitchens, Hodgson offers space in his new storage and aging facilities so they can see the effects that professional equipment will have on its flavor, and if the cheese is worth pursuing further.
The service also extends to his employees. We walk into the next cold room and he says, “This is the room William inhabits,” while giving me a bite of Ogleshield.
Turns out, William Oglethorpe is a longtime Neal’s Yard employee who gives a cheese called Ogleshield a special in-house aging treatment as a bit of a pet project. The cheese turned out so well that it’s now sold in both raclette (a semisoft form) and sandwich form from a cart at the company’s Borough Market store on weekends.
When Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl found Oglethorpe’s sandwich on a fancy-restaurant binge in London, not only did she declare the city the best place on Earth to eat, she also added that his sandwich was the best-tasting thing she had while she was there.
Now that’s some good press.
Lending the Neal’s Yard facilities to debutants and dabblers, along with its principal use of aging his chief clients’ best products also has a definite business-centered goal for Hodgson, whose modesty makes Gourmet sound like some sort of small-but-respectable American magazine.
“It sounds altruistic, but we need good cheese to sell,” he says.
Word of this kind of altruism gets around. He cites an industrial manufacturer who came to him looking for help in creating a higher-end product.
“We tweaked a few things,” he says while comparing the new product with the company’s supermarket offerings. “It’s not wrapped in plastic anymore,” he deadpans with a bit of cheese-insider snarkiness—despite what you see in the grocery store, storing cheese in plastic is a no-no. “That helps.”
He’s also pushing the envelope. To make a sweeping generalization, cheese made with raw (unpasteurized) milk tastes better than that made with pasteurized milk. Curiously, Stilton, one of Britain’s best-known cheeses and one of the few that is name-controlled for quality, must be made with pasteurized milk. Undaunted, Hodgson launched his own side-project cheese, making what boils down to a raw-milk Stilton he calls “Stichelton”—a name he likes because it’s hard to pronounce.
To the likely dismay of many an industrial Stilton producer, he’s hoping to get the name-control rules changed so that his cheese (and others who want to make something similar with raw milk) can be called Stilton.
“Our role is to push the boundaries a bit more than a large, cumbersome company could,” Hodgson says. “Here, we can try out something tomorrow and be more experimental.
“There’s a difference between being the safeguard to a tradition and allowing tradition to happen,” he explains. “If you’ve got your hands in a vat and you’re making cheese, [which Hodgson does from time to time] then return to the floor and get a buzz off of the customers, it’s the best feeling in the world.”
Instead of hedging around the question, I ask him directly what he thinks his role is in the world of cheese and he responds quickly: “Asking questions.”
Then he fades off for a second and you can see the gears turn.
“Driving the quality,” he adds. “Asking the questions. Being the link.”
I ask what he wants to do next and he gives me a funny look, then he grins.
“This.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writing specialist based in Europe. He can be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.
