Tunworth is a soft Camembert-style cheese made in Hampshire, and it was built on purpose to compete with the French original rather than to imitate it politely.
The thing that gives it away on a counter is the rind. Instead of the thick flat white coat most British soft cheeses wear, Tunworth is covered in fine wrinkles.
That surface is not decoration. It is a different mould doing a different job, and it changes how the cheese tastes.
In This Article
What Is Tunworth?
A small round soft cheese of about 250g, made by Hampshire Cheeses at Herriard from pasteurised whole cow's milk.
It is set with vegetarian rennet, which puts it in reach of people who normally have to skip traditional Camembert altogether.
The cheeses ripen for roughly seven to eight weeks, and most cheesemongers reckon they are at their best somewhere around five to six.
Stacey Hedges founded the dairy in 2004 and the cheese followed in 2005. Charlotte Spruce now makes it alongside her.
It has won more than most: Supreme Champion at the British Cheese Awards in 2006 and again in 2013, and gold at the World Cheese Awards in 2018.
Winning the same national title twice, seven years apart, is the part worth noticing. One win can be a good week; two is a make that holds.
It is sold in a thin wooden box, which is not packaging in the ordinary sense. The box holds the shape of a cheese that would otherwise spread as it ripens.
Why Did an Australian Set Out to Beat Camembert?
The origin story here is more specific than the usual account of a farmer deciding to make cheese, and the specificity is the interesting part. She asked what was missing from British cheese and got a straight answer.
Stacey Hedges had worked as a cheesemonger in Sydney before moving to England. When she decided to make cheese, she went to British cheesemongers and asked what the market did not have.
The answer that came back was an English Camembert good enough to stand against the French ones.
So she went to Normandy, visited traditional producers, and built the recipe from what she saw there rather than from a British soft cheese template.
That is why Tunworth reads as a French-style cheese made in Hampshire rather than as a British cheese with a French name.
Setting out to beat a protected French cheese at its own recipe is an unusual ambition, and it shaped every decision that followed.
The cheese could not be called Camembert, since that name is confined to Normandy, so it had to succeed on the eating rather than on the label.
What Makes the Wrinkled Rind Different?
A different mould. The rind is grown with Geotrichum candidum rather than being dominated by the Penicillium that gives most bloomy cheeses their flat white coat.
Geotrichum grows in ridges and folds rather than a smooth felt, which is where the wrinkled look comes from.
It also breaks the paste down differently, and that is the part you taste. The earthy, faintly cabbage-like aroma and the garlic and cured meat notes underneath are its work.
Most supermarket brie-style cheeses go the other way and grow a thick even coat that tastes mainly of mushroom. Neither approach is wrong, but they are not the same cheese.
The rind is thin enough to eat and is meant to be eaten. Cutting it off removes most of what makes this cheese itself.
How Do You Know When Tunworth Is Ready?
Press the top gently through the box. A ready cheese gives all over rather than only around the edge.
Cut one too young and you get a soft ring with a firm pale core still sitting in the middle, which is edible but chalky and tastes of very little.
Left longer, the whole paste turns rich and slightly runny and the vegetal notes come forward.
Trust your nose over the date. A clean earthy smell is right, and a sharp ammonia hit on opening the box means the cheese has gone past where you want it.
A little ammonia that clears after a few minutes in the air is normal and not a fault. It is the smell that stays and gets stronger that tells you the cheese is finished.
If it is not quite there, leave it out of the fridge on the counter for a day. Ripening restarts at room temperature and stalls in the cold.
Ripening in this style runs from the outside inward, because the work is done by the mould on the rind rather than by anything in the middle.
That is why an underripe one has a firm chalky core with a soft band around it, and why waiting fixes it rather than doing anything to it.
It is also why there is a window rather than a date. Left too long the paste goes past soft into runny and picks up ammonia, and that direction has no way back.
Should You Bake It?
Baking a soft cheese is a good idea far less often than the internet suggests, because most of them collapse into a greasy pool. This is one of the few genuinely built for it.
Leave it in the wooden box, put the box on a tray, and give it around twenty minutes in a moderate oven until the top splits and the middle moves when you nudge it.
The high moisture is why it works. A drier cheese would go oily and separate instead of turning to liquid.
Resist the urge to press garlic and rosemary into the top. Those savoury notes are already in the cheese, and adding more just covers them.
Crusty bread is the whole accompaniment it needs, though it will happily take a glass of Beaujolais alongside.
Baking works because the box does the containing, and the paste is already soft enough that heat only has to finish the job.
Take the lid off, score the top, and give it a moderate oven rather than a hot one. Too much heat splits the fat out and leaves a greasy pool under a skin.
Where Should You Buy It?
Where you buy this cheese changes what you get more than it does for most, and the reason is not what people assume. Cheesemongers first and supermarkets second, because the difference is ripeness rather than quality.
A counter will have kept the cheese warm enough to keep ripening and can tell you how it is eating that week. A chilled supermarket shelf slows the whole process down, so those cheeses often arrive home younger than the date suggests.
If you buy one from a supermarket, give it two or three days out of the cold in the warmest part of your fridge before you plan to eat it.
The wooden box is not packaging in the usual sense. It absorbs moisture from the rind, holds the shape once the paste softens, and is what lets you bake the cheese without a dish.
Keep the cheese in it. A Tunworth tipped out onto a plate and covered in cling film goes wet and then ammoniated fast.
Tunworth or Camembert: Which Should You Buy?
Setting these two against each other is the comparison the cheese was created to invite, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a diplomatic one. They are close enough that the choice comes down to what you are doing with it.
| What you want | Which to buy |
|---|---|
| A cheese to bake whole in its box | Tunworth. The moisture and the box make it the easier bet. |
| The classic mushroom and cream flavour | Camembert. Its Penicillium rind gives that note more directly. |
| Something a vegetarian at the table can eat | Tunworth. It uses vegetarian rennet, where AOP Camembert does not. |
| Raw milk and the strongest possible version | Camembert de Normandie. Tunworth is pasteurised by design. |
On flavour, Tunworth runs earthier and more savoury. A good example of the French original is creamier and leans on mushroom.
On availability, Tunworth is easier to buy in ripe condition in Britain, because it has not spent a week travelling to get to the counter.
On a shared board the two do not need each other. Put one out with an English blue and a hard cheese and the plate is done.
Where the two genuinely differ is reliability rather than quality. A supermarket Camembert is a known quantity; this is a single dairy's cheese that varies with the season.
If you want the same thing every time, that counts against it. If you want the better cheese on the day, it counts for it.
Where the whole style sits against the larger flatter French wheel is a question about size and ripening rather than about any single dairy.
A supermarket Camembert is a known quantity and this is a single dairy's cheese that moves with the season. If you need the same thing every time, that counts against it.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Tunworth FAQ
Two questions the box itself tends to raise.
Yes, and you should. The wrinkled rind is thin and carries most of the earthy and savoury character, so trimming it leaves you with a much plainer cheese.
It is made from pasteurised milk, but UK advice is still to avoid soft mould-ripened cheeses in pregnancy unless they are thoroughly cooked. Baked until piping hot throughout, it falls inside that advice.
