Sparkenhoe is the only raw milk Red Leicester made in England, and for a shopper that fact does more work than it sounds like it should.
Nearly all Red Leicester is a waxed factory block. Sparkenhoe is a cloth-bound wheel of 10 to 20 kilos made on one farm from one herd.
They share a name and a colour. Almost nothing else about them is the same.
In This Article
What Is Sparkenhoe Red Leicester?
Red Leicester is a name almost everyone recognises and almost nobody has eaten in its farmhouse form. This is that form: a hard pressed cheese made by David and Jo Clarke at Sparkenhoe Farm in Upton, western Leicestershire.
They started making it in 2005, to bring some value back to the farm rather than sell the herd. It was the first Red Leicester made on that farm since 1875.
The milk comes from around 150 pedigree Holstein Friesians, descended from the herd David's grandfather bought in the 1940s.
Cheese had been made at Sparkenhoe before, from 1745 through to 1875, which is where the revival took its recipe direction from rather than from a modern dairy manual.
The wheels are large and flat, cloth bound and rubbed with lard, and they age between six and fourteen months.
It carries a Slow Food Presidium, which is the recognition given to a traditional food at risk of disappearing rather than an award for quality.
How Is It Different From Supermarket Red Leicester?
The two cheeses share a name, a colour and almost nothing else, which is unusual even by the standards of a supermarket copy. The gap is bigger than the price suggests.
Raw milk clothbound Red Leicester went extinct around 1956, when the last farm making it stopped. For roughly fifty years the only Red Leicester in Britain was factory block.
Those blocks are made from pasteurised milk, set with vegetarian rennet, sealed in wax or plastic, and sold young. Nothing about that is dishonest, but it is a different cheese wearing an old name.
Sparkenhoe uses unpasteurised milk from a single herd and a rind that breathes, so the paste dries and concentrates the way a traditional wheel does.
The texture is where you notice it first. The block sold in every supermarket is soft enough to bend and slightly waxy.
Sparkenhoe is dry and firm, and it breaks instead.
The flavour follows the same line. Where the block is mild and mostly a colour, this has caramel and a sour lift at the end.
Why Is Sparkenhoe Orange All the Way Through?
Almost every coloured cheese carries its colour on the outside, which is why a cut wedge usually shows a pale interior behind a bright rind. This one works the other way round, because the colour goes into the curd before the cheese is even a cheese.
The colouring is annatto, an extract from the seed of a tropical shrub, and at the quantities used it carries essentially no flavour.
That makes the colour a signal rather than an ingredient. It tells you which cheese you are holding and does nothing to what you taste.
Because it goes in with the curd, the shade runs even from rind to centre. A wedge with a pale core is either a different cheese or a badly made one.
The dye is annatto, from the seed of a South American shrub, and it has been used to colour cheese for close to three hundred years.
Before annatto reached England, Leicestershire cheesemakers used the roots of lady's bedstraw for the same job. Annatto took over from the 1840s because it was easier to buy and more consistent.
This is worth knowing because plenty of orange cheeses get their colour from a washed or rubbed rind. Here it goes nowhere near the surface, which is why a wedge is the same colour in the middle as it is at the edge.
Is Sparkenhoe Red Leicester Vegetarian?
This is the question that stops a lot of people at the counter, and the answer is a flat no rather than a maybe. It is set with animal rennet, which is the traditional method and the one the revival stayed faithful to.
Rennet is the enzyme that sets the curd, and the traditional source is the stomach lining of a calf. A vegetarian coagulant does the same job from a microbial or fungal source.
The two are not interchangeable over a long maturation. They break the proteins down differently, and the sweetness and nuttiness that arrive late in this cheese are part of what the traditional one produces.
So the choice is not indifference to vegetarians. It is a maker judging that changing the coagulant would change the cheese.
That is the opposite of what most shoppers expect, because supermarket Red Leicester is usually made with vegetarian rennet and labelled as such.
The milk is also unpasteurised, so this is a cheese that two common dietary rules will rule out at once. Worth checking before you buy it for a shared board.
It is set with animal rennet. If you need a vegetarian Red Leicester, the supermarket blocks generally are one, and that is a real trade rather than a lesser version.
What Does Sparkenhoe Red Leicester Taste Like?
Sweet and nutty, with caramel through the middle and a citrus edge at the finish.
Jo Clarke describes the test for a good piece simply: bend it and it should snap like a carrot.
That snap is the whole difference in one gesture. A cheese that bends has held its moisture, and this one has not.
The paste is dry and slightly flaky rather than crumbly, closer in body to a clothbound West Country wheel than to anything soft.
Older wheels push further into savoury and pick up a mineral note. The vintage version some cheesemongers stock is the same cheese held longer, not a different recipe.
The cloth rind is not eaten. Cut it away with the darker paste directly under it.
How Should You Store and Serve It?
Wrap it in waxed or greaseproof paper, not cling film, and keep it in the least cold part of the fridge.
Cling film traps the moisture the rind spent months letting out, and the paste goes soft and slightly sweaty within days. The general storage rules apply, but this cheese punishes the plastic mistake faster than most.
Bring it out at least half an hour before eating. Cold, the caramel does not register and you are left with salt and colour.
Cut it in thick slabs rather than thin slices, because a thin slice of a dry paste just crumbles on the way to the plate.
How Do You Pick a Good Piece?
Buying this well is mostly a matter of asking one question before you ask for a quantity, and it is not about price. Ask how old the wheel is before you ask for a weight.
Six months and fourteen months are both Sparkenhoe, and they are not the same cheese. The young end is sweeter and softer, and the old end is drier with the mineral note showing.
Look at the cut face for a dry, slightly darker band just inside the rind, because a narrow one is normal.
A wide one means the wheel has been open a long time, and the shop will usually trim it for you.
The paste should be matte, not shiny. A glossy or damp-looking face has been wrapped in plastic, which undoes months of the rind's work.
Buy it in a piece rather than pre-cut slices, and cut from it as you go. A dry paste dries further at every new surface you make.
Does Sparkenhoe Melt Well?
Melting is where the difference shows between this and the supermarket version most obviously, and it is not close. The farmhouse cheese melts better.
Two things decide whether a cheese melts smoothly or splits into grease and rubber, and both of them favour this one.
The first is moisture. A cheese with more water in the paste flows before its fat has a chance to separate out.
The second is acidity. A high-acid curd tightens under heat and squeezes fat out, which is what makes a cheap block go oily on toast.
Sparkenhoe sits on the right side of both, so it goes soft and glossy rather than greasy, and it holds together long enough to be worth putting under a grill.
The lower moisture means it melts into a sauce without going stringy, and the annatto colour holds through the heat.
It is very good in a cauliflower cheese or a rarebit, where the citrus finish stops the sauce sitting heavy.
The one caution is cost. At specialist prices this is an expensive thing to bury under a grill, so most people keep it for the board and cook with the block.
What Can You Use Instead of Sparkenhoe?
There is no second raw milk Red Leicester, so any substitute swaps one of the two things that define it.
To keep the traditional make and lose the colour, a farmhouse clothbound cheddar is the closest thing on a counter. Same cloth, same drying, more acidity.
To keep the colour and lose the make, the other annatto-coloured English cheese sits gentler and creamier.
An ordinary block will do fine for cooking, and there is no sense paying twice to melt it.
Being the only raw-milk one in the style also means it is the only one where raw-milk cheese guidance comes into the decision.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Sparkenhoe Red Leicester FAQ
Two points the name causes trouble with.
It is the traditional version of it, and both are coloured with annatto in the same county. Sparkenhoe is raw milk, cloth bound and aged for months, where the standard block is pasteurised, waxed and sold young.
No. The rind is cloth bound and rubbed with lard, so cut it off along with the darker layer of paste sitting directly beneath it.
