The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Tasting notes
How a family-run dairy farm saw the future in two leftover saucepans of milk
A family-run dairy farm’s crowd-pleasing produce
‘WHEN WE FIRST started selling yogurt from a stall under a striped umbrella at local farmers’ markets, Alan couldn’t see the sense in it,’ says Valerie Kingston. She is talking about her husband, whose dairy farm in Co Cork has been in the family for generations and who ‘never even thought of doing anything’ other than continuing to sell milk. When they married in 1997, however, and Valerie settled into the farm, which sits between hilly fields leading down to the River Ilen, she couldn’t help but experiment. ‘I’ve always loved making food from scratch, and here was all this milk going off to the creamery.’ Armed with soft cheese, yogurts and cheesecakes she went along to a nearby country market; ‘One day I came home having made £100 from two saucepans of milk.’
That was their ‘eureka moment’, and what started out as a cottage industry of a few crates of yogurt made on the kitchen table now processes 1.5 million litres of milk a year for Glenilen Farm’s products, from a thick, tangy natural live yogurt above barely sweetened crushed fruit, to crème fraîche and cheesecakes (Valerie’s original lemon version being the runaway favourite). They are now sold in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Ocado, but the Kingstons still consider themselves ‘small fish’; they’ve expanded their production units but still make everything on-site, bolstering milk from their herd of 60 Friesianjersey crosses with that from nearby farms. ‘I’m very glad we diversified when we did,’ says Valerie. As for Alan, he’s now ‘hooked’ on the yogurt idea – and with such delicious (and reusable) pots, I don’t blame him. glenilenfarm.com