Donegal's perfect grazing is the starting point for a simply spectacular soft cheese.

Best Irish Speciality

Yeats Country Organic Full Fat Soft Cheese - Green Pastures (Donegal)

It's often the simplest things in life that provide the most pleasure - like a really well made soft cheese, spread on a slice of warm crusty bread.  You could surely make a fantastic cheesecake with Yeats Country Organic Full Fat Soft Cheese, but to properly appreciate its silky, clotted cream texture and delicate yet rounded flavour, you really need to eat it unadorned.

The company behind this smooth little number is Green Pastures (Donegal), based in Convoy, Donegal, which began life as a regional dairy in the early 1980s.  'It was a sideline from my father's veterinary practice,' explains director John Molloy Jnr.  'The first creamery was in Sligo, which is known as "Yeats Country" because WB Yeats and his artist brother Jack drew inspiration from the area, so that's where the brand name comes from.  It fits in with our aspiration to make products from traditional methods but delivering a unique texture and taste.'

Beginning as a milk business, delivering door to door around the country, the Molloys soon diversified into cheese-making, initially producing a rustic-style strained quark.  'One of our focuses at the time was on clotted cream,' says John.  'We were really drawn by how such taste could be imparted to a relatively simple product and we wondered if we could do the very same with cheese.'

In the early days, using 30 kilo vats, a mixture of cream and milk was inoculated with a blend of cultures, then incubated for 14 to 16 hours in a similar way to sour cream.  The result was a distinctive curd that John says was unlike anything available in the marketplace at the time.  Lightely salted, it was packed and sold under the Yeats Country brand locally for a number of years.  'That was really the basis of our soft cheese,' he says.

Green Pastures relocated to its current site in the early 1990s but the process and the raw materials for the cheese remain fundamentally unchanged.  'The milk is the real key, and that hasn't really latered through the years,' says John.  'It's collected daily from farms in the north-west, and it's the treatment of the cattle that gives the products its taste - they're on a totally non-intensive system.

'Historically we have had very high rainfall in the area, and grass grows from March through to November.  So the cattle would be out for that whole period and they would be housed for a relatively short period, which leaves us with a very wholesome milk.'

Although its soft cheese, now produced in a range of fat levels between 5 and 32 per cent, remains the mainstay of the business, Green Pastures has developed to meet changing market demands.  It supplies cheese for Sainsbury's cheesecake and mascarpone for M&S carrot cake, and between its raw milk and cheese-making activities, the firm now employs about 50 people.  That's quite a step up from the small farmhouse dairy of the early 1980s, yet this is no big industrial creamery.  'We're still a small family business,' says John.

Article and Images Appeared in UK Guild of Fine Food Taste Gold 2011-12 Publication    www.greattasteawards.co.uk