Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar is a raw cow's milk cheddar made by COWS Creamery in Prince Edward Island, wrapped in cloth rather than wax or plastic and aged in a cave on the island.
It is made to a recipe that came from the Orkney Islands, and the company that makes it started out selling ice cream.
Both of those facts show up in the cheese. The Scottish recipe explains the style, and the cloth explains almost everything about how it eats.
In This Article
What Is Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar?
A hard, cheddar-style cheese made from raw Holstein milk gathered from small Prince Edward Island farms and set with vegetable rennet.
The wheels are large and drum-shaped, roughly 12 inches across and 12 inches tall at about 22lb, which is a traditional clothbound format rather than a modern block.
Ageing runs six to twelve months in a cave held at 50 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit with 90 percent humidity. Those are the conditions a cloth rind needs, and they are the reason the cheese cannot simply be stacked in a chiller.
The vegetable rennet matters more than it sounds. Most traditional clothbound cheddars use animal rennet, so this is one of the few in the category a vegetarian can eat.
How Did an Ice Cream Company End Up Making Cheddar?
The origin of this cheese is a genuinely odd one, and it explains a flavour that surprises people who expect an English cheddar. The founder went to Scotland and came back with a recipe.
Orkney is a long way from Somerset in every sense, and the recipe he brought back reflects that.
Scott Linkletter started COWS in 1983 as an ice cream business. On a visit to the Orkney Islands he got to know a local cheesemaker, who shared a cheddar recipe with him, and Avonlea launched in 2006.
That is an unusual lineage for a North American cheddar, which normally traces back to England's West Country rather than a Scottish island group. It was recognised quickly all the same, and Avonlea was named World's Best Vintage Cheddar at the 2015 World Cheese Awards.
What Does Clothbound Actually Mean?
The wheel is wrapped in cloth, usually with lard or butter pressed into the weave, and the cloth then becomes part of the rind rather than a wrapper you peel off.
Its job is to let the cheese breathe. Moisture leaves slowly through the weave across months, which concentrates the paste and gives the flavour somewhere to go.
Surface moulds settle on the cloth and work inward, which is where the earthy note in a good clothbound comes from. A block sealed in plastic has no such surface and cannot develop it.
| Clothbound | Vacuum-packed block | |
|---|---|---|
| Moisture | Leaves slowly through the weave for months | Sealed in, so the paste stays wetter |
| Surface life | Moulds grow on the cloth and ripen the cheese inward | None, the film prevents it |
| Texture | Firmer, drier, prone to flaking | Smoother and more elastic |
| Flavour direction | Earthy and complex on top of the dairy | Cleaner and more purely lactic |
| What it costs | Cave space, humidity control and handling | Almost nothing |
The trade is yield and labour. A cheesemaker loses weight to evaporation and has to turn and tend the wheels, which is the practical reason most cheddar is not made this way.
The cloth also changes what the cheesemaker can correct. Once a wheel is bound the rind is committed, so faults that a vacuum-packed block would hide are on display for a year.
That is why the format signals confidence as much as tradition. A dairy only binds wheels it expects to still be good in twelve months.
The cost of the method is paid in weight. A wheel that breathes loses water for its whole life, and the maker sells the cheese that is left.
It is paid in labour as well, because a breathing rind has to be turned and checked rather than left on a pallet in film.
And it is paid in risk. An open surface can grow the wrong thing, and a wheel that goes wrong at ten months has taken ten months of space with it.
Against all that, the cloth gives a paste that concentrates rather than sits, and a rind that adds an earthy note no sealed cheddar develops.
What Does Avonlea Taste Like?
Clothbound cheddar has a reputation for sharpness that this cheese does not live up to, and that is a feature rather than a shortcoming. It runs sweeter and rounder, with caramel and butterscotch leading.
Culture describes the texture as fudgy and unusually smooth for a clothbound, which is a fair way to put it. Many cheeses in this category go dry and crumbly, and this one keeps a certain give.
Underneath the sweetness the descriptions get specific and slightly odd, running to tomato and peanut butter, and finishing sweet and milky on brown butter. Those are not flavours added to the cheese but the by-products of a long slow ageing.
What it is not is a sharp cheddar. If you want acid and bite, this is the wrong wheel, and a mature English farmhouse cheddar will serve you better.
This is not a sharp cheddar and is not trying to be. If you want acid and bite, a mature English farmhouse cheddar will serve you better than this will.
A 22lb Wheel Means You Are Buying a Cut Piece
A cheese sold in twenty-two pound wheels is never handed over whole, so the thing you are actually assessing at a counter is a wedge and a strip of cloth rind. That narrows what there is to look at, and makes each of those things count more.
Look for a paste that is evenly deep gold with no pale dried band at the cut face. A wedge that has sat exposed goes waxy and slightly translucent at the edge, and that band never comes back.
The cloth rind should look dry, matted and evenly greyish. Damp patches, orange smears or a sour smell at the rind mean the wheel was stored badly rather than aged well.
Wrap it in waxed paper rather than film when you get it home. A clothbound cheese has spent a year losing moisture on purpose, and sealing it in plastic undoes that in a week.
Serve It Warm, Not Cold
Take it out of the fridge a good half hour before eating, because this cheese hides most of what it has when it is cold.
Culture notes that the warmer temperature pushes it savoury, which is the useful bit. The same wedge reads sweet at fridge temperature and savoury at room temperature.
For wine, a light red or an aromatic white both work. Pinot Noir keeps out of the way and Gewürztraminer runs alongside the caramel rather than against it.
It also makes a very good grilled cheese, which is a slightly extravagant use of a prize-winning wheel but a genuinely good one. The paste melts without splitting and the caramel note survives the heat.
What Can You Use Instead of Avonlea?
Substituting for this cheese usually goes wrong in the same way, which is that people match the country and not the rind. Stay clothbound if you can, because the cloth is the part you would miss.
Cabot Clothbound is the closest North American comparison and the easiest of these to find in the United States. It is aged in the same cloth-and-cave way, though it runs drier and more savoury where Avonlea stays sweet.
An English farmhouse clothbound cheddar is the other direct comparison. Expect more acidity and a flakier paste, so that swap runs sharper rather than sweeter.
For a similar sweetness in a different family, an aged Gouda gets you the caramel and the crystals without the earthy rind character. It is the better substitute if the butterscotch note was what you liked.
Do not reach for a supermarket block cheddar. It will give you the milk and none of the ageing, which in this case is the entire point.
The milk is unpasteurised, so raw-milk cheese guidance applies here even though the cheese is aged for months under cloth.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar FAQ
Two things the cloth rind raises that the sections above do not settle.
No. Cut the cloth and the rind beneath it away and eat the paste. The cloth is a working part of the ageing rather than something to serve.
Yes. It is set with vegetable rennet, which is unusual for a traditional clothbound cheddar and worth knowing if you normally have to skip the category.
