My nose is key to the job I do. It might not be priceless, but it’s certainly worth £5m – which is what it is insured for. Wyke Farms has a turnover of £80m and it’s my smelling ability that ensures our stock is sold.
I started at a Cornish cheese factory in 1963 and have been working in the dairy industry for 52 years since. I’ve made yoghurt in Wootton Basssett and cream desserts at Melksham. Sometimes a bad cheese can make me wince or my whole body shudder in repulsion. While other cheese tasters can spot that it’s not perfect, they don’t get the same reaction. I suppose I must just be super sensitive.
Back when I was working for St Ivel, one of their milk-bottling factories had a serious problem. The milk smelled like TCP. I was sent to Totnes to find which farmer’s milk was contaminating the whole bulk supply. I had to taste and smell every single farmer’s milk until I isolated the offender. A visit to the farm revealed that there were some recently-creosoted fencing panels next to the milking parlour that had caused the problem.
Smell is the first sense I use after drawing a sample from a 20kg block of cheddar using my cheese iron; a thin, spade-like tool of about 100mm by 18mm that extracts a core from a block of cheese. I only ever grade cheese in the morning before lunch; my senses are much sharper at this time and tend to dull down as the day progresses. Your nose is working all day as you breathe, whether or not you have turned on the smell receptors, so no wonder it gets tired. Especially at this time of year when it can get blocked with pollen.
Above all, cheese should smell clean with no off odours. Poor cheese can have all sorts of smells from things the cows have eaten like wild garlic or onions. Bacterial taints can lead to sickly smells, while a rancid cheese can, frankly, smell like a cow’s backside. I have to quickly add that farm milk quality and cheese production methods have greatly improved over the years and we hardly ever get a poor smell, let alone a seriously bad one. These days I concentrate more on degrees of good smells like caramel, butterscotch and lemon.
Cheesemaking is a live process. It’s therefore unpredictable; some blocks mature faster than others and a cheesemaker needs to be able to spot that early on, so we can release it for sale at the optimum time. Some characteristics, like harshness or bitterness, cannot be detected by smell but do require tasting. I check all the Wyke Farm cheeses many times through their life. I have to be a bit of a fortune teller – deciding at three months when a vintage recipe cheese will mature and how it will taste after 18 months.
When a good cheese has matured it will smell of clean, sweet creaminess. As I break the piece of cheese down and warm it up in my fingers all these lovely smells are released and I know that the taste will be divine. If a cheese has very little smell then the flavour will be bland, even acidic.
While having a sensitive nose is great for my job, it can also be a bit of a burden. I love going to Glastonbury for the music and experience, but I find some of the smells, particularly toilets and unwashed people, downright disgusting. I also hate the smell of TCP and remember telling my mum that I wouldn’t visit if she kept a bottle of it in her bathroom.
I’ll celebrate my 69th birthday next week and my sense of smell is still great. I’m already four years past normal retirement age but look forward to going to work every day.
