Birmingham chef Glynn Purnell is championing the credentials of British cheese. Roz Laws spoke to him.
Call Birmingham chef Glynn Purnell cheesy and he’ll take it as a compliment.
The man has been mad about the stuff since he was a boy when he showed early culinary flair by inventing soup with cheesy string.
Now he’s moved on to rather more refined dishes, but he’s still passionate about one thing – flying the flag for British cheese.
He’s urging us all to buy homegrown produce and be on our guard for foreign imports.
Glynn, the owner and head chef of Michelin-starred Purnell’s restaurant in Birmingham, is using the BBC 2 series The Great British Food Revival to champion cheese.
We eat about 600,000 tonnes of the dairy produce a year, but more than half of it is imported. While 60 per cent of the cheese we eat is Cheddar – a fine homegrown product, you would have thought – a third of that is produced abroad, in countries as far away as Australia and Canada.
Shoppers are fooled into buying foreign cheese because 53 per cent of Cheddar is sold in pre-packaged wedges with own-brand supermarket labels, which fail to reveal the country of origin.
Glynn says: “We need to clarify the labelling laws so people can buy English Cheddar if they want. I suggest looking for the Red Tractor mark, or buying one of the protected designation of origin cheeses, like Stilton or West Country Farmhouse Cheddar. That’s made in Dorset, Devon, Somerset and Cornwall on farms using the farmers’ own milk.”
Glynn unearths the disturbing fact that Britain’s dairy farmers have halved in number in the last 15 years, and that their average age is 59, with few new farmers coming into the business.
“Now is the time to revive our cheese industry,” says the amiable 35-year-old, who prides himself on serving a good cheese board at Purnell’s with varieties like Barkham Blue.
“I’m concerned that we’re not doing enough for British producers, who are making the effort to come up with new varieties all the time. There are more than 700 different types of British cheese.
“We forget how much we use cheese in cooking, and it’s easy to substitute British varieties for our foreign favourites.”
He proves the point in The Great British Food Revival by making baked blackberry cheesecake.
He admits he would normally use a soft foreign cheese in the recipe, but instead uses a West Yorkshire cream cheese.
Glynn has a typically Brummie way of showing us how to cook. Jamie Oliver may talk about food being “pukka”, but Glynn tells us our cheesecakes should have “that fantastic wibble wobble”.
And when mashing up blackberries, he says: “Some people call this a coulis, I just call it a juice. Coulis is a bit too posh.”
No one could accuse Glynn, who grew up on a Chelmsley Wood council estate, of being posh. And for all the intricate, lovingly-crafted dishes that he serves now, he remarks: “At the end of the day, you can’t beat cheese on toast.
