Dorset is a soft, washed-rind cow's-milk cheese from Consider Bardwell Farm in West Pawlet, Vermont, modeled on Italian Taleggio and named after a village up the road.
It is also a cheese you can no longer buy.
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Can You Still Buy Dorset Cheese?
No. Consider Bardwell Farm stopped making cheese, and the creamery that inherited its recipes has not restarted Dorset.
Woodlawn Creamery, run by Seth and Kate Leach in Pawlet, leased the Consider Bardwell plant in January 2024 and licensed the farm's recipes and cheese names. It brought back two of them, Pawlet, a semi-firm Italian-style toma, and Rupert, an Alpine-style wheel.
Dorset was not among them, and no producer has announced plans to make it since.
The handover happened because Angela Miller and Russell Glover, who had run the farm since the early 2000s, were well past retirement age with no family member willing to take it on. When the Leaches offered to buy the cheese business, they sold.
The people did not all leave with the owners. Leslie Goff Tyminski, who started at Consider Bardwell in 2005 and worked her way up to running its creamery, now makes cheese at Woodlawn.
That is worth knowing if you are hoping Dorset returns. The recipe, the licence, the aging rooms, and a cheesemaker who knew the make are all still in the same valley, which is a very different position from a cheese whose method died with its producer.
Any wheel still floating around retail is aged stock from 2023 or earlier. A washed-rind cheese that far past its intended window turns ammoniated and slumps, so treat a surviving wheel as a curiosity rather than a bargain.
Vermont's Dorset, Not the Cheeses of Dorset, England
Two unrelated things answer to the phrase Dorset cheese, and the search results mix them freely.
One is this Vermont wheel. The other is cheese from Dorset, the county in southwest England, where the famous local cheese is Dorset Blue Vinny, a hard crumbly blue made from skimmed cow's milk and nothing like a soft washed rind.
The Vermont cheese takes its name from the town of Dorset in neighboring Bennington County. Consider Bardwell named its whole range after towns within a short drive of the creamery, so Pawlet, Rupert, Manchester, Danby, and Dorset all sat on the same board as a small map of the region.
Retail listings usually settle which one you are looking at in a single word. The Vermont cheese is described as washed-rind or soft-ripened, and the English one is almost always sold under the full name Blue Vinny rather than as Dorset alone.
What Dorset Tastes Like
Savory first, sweet underneath. Tasters for Culture magazine picked out green olive and vegetable broth, plus a long finish, which is the flavor most people mean when they call a washed rind brothy.
The Jersey milk shows up as texture rather than flavor. Butterfat runs higher in Jersey herds than in Holstein herds, and Dorset's paste was correspondingly rich and bright yellow instead of chalk white.
Retail tasting notes describe it as mildly sharp and pungent with undertones of nuts and hay, which fits a rind washed often enough to grow a real bacterial crust but not aged into aggression.
Cheese writer Kirstin Jackson, tasting the raw-milk version, found it creamy "in that cream-off-the-top-of-the-glass-milk-bottle type of way," sweet and funky with a tang keeping it bright.
The raw version was seasonal, made when the neighboring Jersey herds were out on grass rather than on winter feed, so the grassy and floral edge of it moved through the year instead of holding steady.
Judges agreed with the shops. Dorset took honors at the 2008 American Cheese Society competition, the 2008 World Jersey Cheese Awards, and the 2010 World Cheese Championship.
The Jersey award is the telling one. That competition judged Dorset only against other cheeses made from the same breed's milk, which is a much narrower test for a cheese whose entire texture came out of Jersey butterfat.
How Dorset Was Made
Dorset started as raw Jersey milk from two neighboring farms, since Consider Bardwell's own herd was goats and its cow's-milk cheeses always ran on bought-in milk.
That herd was Oberhasli-led and grew to roughly 140 animals, which is a real dairy operation and still had nothing to do with Dorset. The cow's milk came from the Brooks and Browes families down the road, and later, for the pasteurized relaunch, from Woodlawn Farm.
Buying milk from neighbors also meant the make followed the milk. Dorset appeared in shops seasonally rather than year-round, which is part of why it never became easy to find even when the farm was running well.
The curd was drained in perforated forms that pressed a faint woven pattern into the surface, which is why the finished rind carries a basket-weave imprint rather than a smooth face.
From there the wheels went into the farm's cave and got a light brine wash every three or four days. Salt water suppresses most molds while favoring Brevibacterium linens, the bacterium that colors a washed rind orange and supplies the smell people associate with the style.
The wheels ripened in cellars Glover designed and built himself. Having purpose-built rooms let the farm hold a washed-rind cave at its own humidity, separate from the drier rooms where the hard goat's-milk wheels sat.
The pasteurized version aged a minimum of 45 days before sale.
Size was part of the design. A full wheel weighed about 2.5 pounds, and the farm also made Dorset Minis at roughly four inches across and under an inch tall, about three-quarters of a pound, which ripened faster and sold to households that would never finish a full wheel.
Why Dorset Went From Raw Milk to Pasteurized
Routine testing in the autumn of 2019 found Listeria monocytogenes in the farm's washed-rind cave, the room where Dorset aged.
On 30 September 2019 Consider Bardwell recalled Dorset, Slyboro, and Experience covering everything dated from 28 April 2019 onward, shipped to California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Vermont. No illnesses were reported.
Slyboro and Experience were the farm's other washed-rind cheeses, aged in the same room, which is why all three went back at once rather than Dorset alone.
The scale of it was unusual for the state, and E.B. Flory, Vermont's dairy section chief at the time, put that on the record.
Flory said it had been "probably closer to 50 years" since Vermont saw a pathogen recall that serious, and noted plainly that pasteurization kills listeria.
The farm announced that October it would stop making and selling cheese, then spent the better part of two years rebuilding. Federal paycheck protection money in the spring of 2020 and a public fundraiser carried the payroll while the creamery was stripped, cleaned, and retested.
The small format came back first. By April 2021 the farm had rehired cheesemakers and released pasteurized Dorset Minis, and in August 2022 the full-size wheel returned, pasteurized, made with milk from nearby Woodlawn Farm.
US rules require raw-milk cheese to age at least 60 days before it can be sold, which is why the pasteurized Dorset could go out at 45 days and the raw version never could.
That switch changed the cheese as well as the risk. Pasteurizing strips out the wild flora that gave the raw wheels their seasonal, grassy swing, which is the trade any producer makes when a cave test comes back positive.
The 1864 Co-op Behind the Name
The land Dorset came from carries the oldest cheesemaking story in Vermont. In 1864 Consider Stebbins Bardwell founded the state's first cheesemaking cooperative there, the Pawlet Cheese Co., which gathered milk from surrounding farms and made it into cheese in one building instead of leaving every farm household to do it alone.
The model worked well enough to reach New York City buyers, and within a decade cooperative factories like it operated in essentially every farm town in Vermont.
The Depression ended it. The West Pawlet Dairy Association closed in 1932, and the site went quiet for close to 70 years.
Miller, a literary agent who represented cookbook authors, and Glover, an architect, bought the 300-acre property in 2001 and kept the founder's name. They started with nine Oberhasli goats in 2002 and licensed the creamery in 2004, with Glover designing the aging cellars himself.
By 2018 the farm turned out 115,000 to 120,000 pounds of cheese a year across six varieties, three from raw goat's milk and three from raw cow's milk. Dorset was the soft one in that lineup, and the only washed rind.
Miller's day job explains part of the reach. She ran a literary agency representing cookbook authors, which is an unusual road into cheesemaking and a useful one for getting a small Vermont wheel onto national counters.
The cheeses landed accordingly. Consider Bardwell sold through Murray's in New York and appeared on the cheese course at The French Laundry, and Vermont's Sustainable Agriculture Council named it Farm of the Year in 2013.
Washed-Rind Cheeses to Buy Instead
Taleggio is the obvious replacement, because it is what Dorset was built to resemble. It is a square Italian washed rind with the same brothy savor and thin fruity edge, and unlike Dorset it is stocked almost everywhere.
Pont l'Eveque is the second comparison the farm itself used. It is Norman, square, and a little more barnyard than Taleggio, and it suits anyone who liked Dorset's pungent end rather than its sweet end.
Pawlet is the sentimental choice and the only one still made in the same building, now by Woodlawn Creamery from the licensed recipe. It is a washed rind too, but a firm toma rather than a soft-ripened wheel, so it slices and melts where Dorset spread.
Munster is the easiest of these to find in an American supermarket, and the real Alsatian kind is a soft orange washed rind that lands close to where Dorset sat on intensity. Skip the pale sliced deli cheese sold under the same name, which shares the spelling and nothing else.
Epoisses is the one to know about and mostly to avoid as a substitute. It is spoonable and washed like Dorset, but the wash is brandy rather than brine and the result is several steps louder, so it overshoots anyone who liked Dorset's quieter savory register.
None of these is a straight swap for a seasonal raw-milk wheel, and it is fairer to say so than to pretend otherwise. Taleggio gets closest on texture and savor, and that is the honest ceiling.
| Cheese | Format | Closest to Dorset in | Where it differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taleggio | Square, about 4.5 lb | Brothy savor and soft paste | Milder rind, far easier to find |
| Pont l'Eveque | Small square, about 1 lb | Pungent washed rind | More barnyard, less sweet |
| Munster | Small round, about 1 lb | Soft orange rind, similar intensity | Ammoniated fast; buy it young |
| Pawlet | Round wheel, about 5 lb | Same farm, same washing habit | Firm and sliceable, not spreadable |
| Epoisses | Small round in a wooden box | Spoonable washed-rind texture | Brandy-washed and far louder |
Serving and Storing a Wheel of Dorset
Cold is the enemy. Pull a wedge out 45 minutes before serving and the paste goes from stiff to yielding, which is the whole point of a soft-ripened cheese.
The rind is edible, though the basket-weave crust firms up with age and plenty of people cut it off. Trim it if the aroma reads stronger than the paste tastes.
Honey, apples, and something with bubbles were the pairings the farm's retailers pushed, and apricot conserve works on the same logic of sweetness against salt. For wine, Alsatian whites and off-dry Riesling handle the savory end better than a tannic red does.
The reason is the salt. Tannin and a salty washed rind pull against each other, while a little residual sugar in the glass lands on the same side as the honey on the plate.
It also made an unusually good grilled cheese, since a soft washed rind melts fast and brings its own salt.
Wrapped properly, a cut wedge holds about a week before the rind starts pushing ammonia into the paste.
