Cheese, Double Gloucester

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

Double Gloucester is a firm, close, buttery, orange English territorial cheese — smoother and less acid than a cheddar, and it is the one people roll down a hill.

🔴 And it hands this collection its final twist on protected names: the FAMOUS one is not protected, and the obscure one is.

Single Gloucester holds a PDO — it must be made in Gloucestershire, on farms keeping Gloucester cattle, a rare breed that came very close to extinction. Double Gloucester has no such protection and can be made anywhere by anyone.

⭐ So the designation went to the cheese that needed saving rather than the cheese that sells — which, set against Havarti being protected after going generic, is about as complete a demonstration as you could want that these instruments do several different jobs and are not one thing.

⚠ The “double” itself is contested. It is variously explained as milk from two milkings (against Single Gloucester’s skimmed-plus-whole), as a wheel of twice the height, or as twice-strength flavour. I have not found a settled answer and I am not going to pick one to make the paragraph tidier.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/4 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp annatto, diluted — Double Gloucester is properly a deep orange
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 2 to 3 Tbsp fine salt, about 2% of the milled curd
• Cloth for bandaging, or wax

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm to 88-90 F / 31-32 C, mesophilic culture, 45 minutes. Annatto now, and use a proper dose — Double Gloucester is a deep orange, considerably more so than a coloured cheddar.
2. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3. Cut to 1/4 inch — FINE, finer than a cheddar, which is what gives the close, smooth, almost waxy paste.
3. Stir gently while raising to 98-100 F / 37-38 C over 40 minutes, then hold and stir until the curd is firm.
4. Drain and mat, then cheddar BRIEFLY — 45 minutes to an hour, turning. ⭐ Less than a cheddar and more than a Cheshire, which is roughly where this cheese sits in every respect.
5. Mill to thumb-size and salt at about 2%, in two additions.
6. Press hard: ~10 PSI for 1 hour, flip and redress; ~25 PSI for 12 hours; ~40 PSI for 12 more. The close texture wants a real press.

Dry 2-3 days, then bandage or wax.

7. Age at 50-55 F for 3 to 6 months. It should be firm, smooth, close-textured and buttery rather than sharp — if it tastes like a cheddar, you cheddared it too long.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. ⚠ Double Gloucester is a generic name. Single Gloucester is a PDO and is not something you can make outside Gloucestershire.

🔴 Cheddaring is not pressing To cheddar is a specific operation, and it happens after the whey is gone and before the cheese goes anywhere near a press.

You drain the vat, let the curd knit into a solid slab, cut that slab into blocks, and then stack and re-stack the blocks, turning them, for one to two hours while they sit in their own warmth. The pile’s weight squeezes whey out, the acid keeps developing, and the texture changes completely.

⭐ The texture is the instrument. At the start you have a mass of fused curd. By the end it tears into fibres and looks, unmistakably, like cooked chicken breast. When it does that you are done — not when the timer says so. The pH at that point should be around 5.2–5.4, and this is the single best place in the whole section to own a meter, because “chicken breast” is a real instrument and a slippery one.

🔴 The protection went to the one that needed it Single Gloucester’s PDO ties it to Gloucestershire and to herds that include Gloucester cattle — a breed that dropped to a tiny remnant population in the twentieth century. The designation is doing conservation work, on a breed as much as on a cheese.

⭐ Set that beside the rest of what this collection has found designations doing — protecting a cave, a raw-milk practice, a seasonal blend, a branding iron, and a word that had already gone generic — and the honest conclusion is that “protected designation” is not one instrument. It is a legal form that different people have picked up for very different reasons, and reading them all as heritage preservation gets several of them badly wrong.

⚠ Why “double” Three explanations circulate: two milkings; twice the height of a Single; and twice the strength of flavour. ⚠ I cannot settle it. What is reasonably clear is that Single Gloucester is the leaner, lighter, part-skimmed cheese and Double is the full-cream one, so whatever the word originally described, the surviving distinction is richness.

⭐ Cooper’s Hill The cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill, where competitors chase a wheel of Double Gloucester down a slope steep enough to injure people annually, is the cheese’s other claim to fame. ⚠ It is genuinely old as an event, and it has nothing whatever to do with how the cheese is made — which has not stopped it becoming the first thing most people know about it.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/hard-pressed-cheddar/ and /cheese/history/the-english-story/ on the site.