Bayley Hazen Blue is the cheese that made a Vermont farm internationally famous, and the reason it wins is not the thing most blues are judged on.
It has the veining, but the peppery bite a blue usually leads with is deliberately held back.
What comes forward instead is the milk, which is a much harder thing to get right.
In This Article
What Is Bayley Hazen Blue?
Vermont's Northeast Kingdom is remote enough that a dairy there has to be worth travelling for, and Jasper Hill Farm at Greensboro built its reputation on exactly that. Bayley Hazen is its own recipe, made from the farm's whole raw cow's milk.
It is a tall cylinder rather than the squat wheel most blues come in, and it wears a natural rind rather than foil.
Ripening runs about three months in subterranean vaults built into the hillside below the farm.
The name comes from the Bayley Hazen Military Road, an eighteenth-century route cut through this part of Vermont, so it names a place rather than a person or a technique.
Why Does a Blue Have a Rind at All?
Most blues you can buy are wrapped in foil, and there is a reason for that: foil holds moisture in and keeps the surface from doing anything at all.
This one is left to grow a crust instead, and that crust is a mixed community of yeasts, moulds and bacteria rather than a single organism.
A rind changes two things. It lets moisture leave slowly, which concentrates the paste, and it adds its own aromatic layer that a sealed cheese cannot have.
It also costs a great deal more to run. Wheels have to be turned and tended in a humid room for months, where a foil-wrapped blue can sit in a cold store untouched.
The trade shows up in the paste. Dense and fudge-like is what slow moisture loss produces; a wetter, crumblier blue is usually one that was sealed.
The rind also does something to the veining. A cheese losing moisture evenly from every surface blues more consistently than one held wet in the middle, which is why the pattern here is fine and even rather than pooled.
And it changes how the cheese ages after you buy it. A natural rind keeps working in your fridge, so a piece bought young will move; a foil-wrapped blue is largely frozen at whatever it was.
Why Is the Pepper Restrained?
A cheesemaker can make a blue taste emphatic in a week by pushing the salt and the mould, and plenty do. This recipe goes the other way, because pepper is the flavour that most easily buries the milk underneath it.
The sharp peppery hit people associate with blue cheese comes from the mould and from salt, and both can be pushed hard to make a cheese taste emphatic.
Push them less and something else has to carry the cheese, which only works if the milk is good enough to be worth hearing.
What you get here is toasted nut sweetness and an anise note, with grass underneath from the herd, and the blue arriving as depth rather than as a spike.
That is also why it suits people who think they dislike the whole category. The thing they are usually objecting to is the part this cheese turns down.
Restraint is the whole design here, so a blue chosen to sit beside it will bury it. Serve this one first or serve it alone.
Where Do the Awards Actually Come From?
Award lists are easy to wave at and hard to read, so it is worth setting this one out with the categories attached rather than as a count of trophies.
It was named World's Best Unpasteurized Cheese at the 2014 World Cheese Awards and took Best in Class at the 2014 World Championship Cheese Contest in the same year. In 2024 it was named Best American Cheese.
The one worth pausing on is 2019, when it took its trophy at the International Cheese Awards in England as the first non-British cheese to do so since 1897.
These are raw milk and international categories rather than domestic novelty prizes, which is the part that makes the record mean something.
How Should You Eat It?
The instinct with any blue is to crumble it, and that is the wrong move here. The paste is dense enough to hold a slab, and crumbling throws that away for no gain.
The usual blue-cheese partners are the wrong instinct here. Honey and sweet wine exist to tame salt and pepper, and this cheese has less of both to tame.
Dark chocolate is the pairing the farm itself points to, and it works because bitterness meets the nut and anise rather than smothering them.
Toasted nuts do the same job from a different direction, and a dark beer covers it in a glass.
Slabs rather than crumbs also change what you can cook with it. A dense blue holds together on a warm steak or through a salad instead of vanishing into the dressing.
Serve it at cool room temperature and give it half an hour out of the fridge, because cold flattens the restraint into plain salt.
| Pairing | Type | Why It Works |
|---|---|---|
| Bayley Hazen + dark chocolate | Sweet | The farm's own suggestion. Cocoa bitterness meets the toasted nut and anise instead of covering them the way honey would. |
| Bayley Hazen + toasted hazelnuts | Nut | The same job from a different direction, and it echoes a note already in the paste. |
| Bayley Hazen + a dark beer | Drink | Roast and malt rather than sugar. A stout or porter sits under the cheese without competing. |
| Avoid: honey and sweet wine | Wine | Those exist to tame salt and pepper in a sharper blue. Here there is less of both, so sweetness just sits on top. |
How Should You Keep It?
Storage is where a natural-rind cheese is most often ruined, and the reason is simple enough to state once: a living rind needs air, and film does not let it have any.
Waxed paper rather than film, in the warmest part of the fridge, and brought out a good half hour before eating so the fudgy paste loosens.
Because the rind keeps working, buy what you will eat in a week or two rather than stocking up.
Waxed or greaseproof paper is the right wrapper, loosely folded rather than sealed, and a box left slightly open is better than a sealed one.
The cut face is the part that dries, so cover that and leave the rind exposed rather than the other way round.
If the surface picks up a little extra fuzz in the fridge, that is the rind doing what it does. Wipe it and carry on rather than throwing the piece away.
What Can You Use Instead?
Substituting means deciding whether you were buying the blue or the restraint, and most blues on a counter will give you the first and not the second.
For a similarly dense, nut-forward blue, an aged English cylinder is the closest widely available thing, though it will run saltier.
For the natural rind specifically, very few blues have one, and a foil-wrapped cheese will always be wetter and less concentrated.
Do not reach for a soft Italian blue as a stand-in. It is built for creaminess rather than density, and it will not hold a slab.
Raw milk and blue veining each carry their own caution, and the pregnancy guidance covers both.
If you want the restraint but not the rind, the sweet Italian blue gets closest, and the sheep one is the opposite decision made deliberately.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Bayley Hazen Blue FAQ
Two things the rind and the name raise.
Most people trim it. The crust is edible but dry and earthy in a way the paste is not, so it changes the balance rather than adding to it.
No, and neither is it two people. The name belongs to an eighteenth-century military road cut through this part of Vermont, so it points at the landscape the farm sits in.
