If you are a cheese lover don’t miss this week post from our expert collaborator! A tour around Catalan dairy world is what you will find below!
CATALAN CHEESE
“During the last 12 years, there has been a revolution in the Catalan dairy scene. There has been a significant increase in cheese production in Catalonia. Mostly thanks to small producers with its own milk production, therefore, shepherds with their own sheep.
Some producers were already selling milk and other by-products, others are newly set or are back to the lands that their grandparents abandoned when they had to leave to work in the big city …
These circumstances led, somehow, to complete the former landscape of poor distribution with new actors who reinforce Catalan cheese world by taking care of the product with a certain complicity.
At this point is where Caseus Afinadors appears. We found three people who already operated in the gastronomy world and all three had trouble finding “interesting” cheeses other than foreign ….. precisely, this lack of product made our project come up !!!
So, we began to work closely with small producers distributing their cheeses, as well as giving marketing advise. We help to rationalize production, adopt foreign styles in our dairies and adjust to sales ups and downs. We must not forget that cheese depends on seasonal availability due to both natural course of cattle and the maturation process.
After 8 years in the market, everyone has found a gap and become a reference company for each speciality.
At present, we work with 32 small cheese makers who are animal owners and other small cheese makers who buy milk from neighbour farms. This means that we deal with around 214 different dairy products. (barcelona weddings)
The proximity helps makes quality control more feasible. We have specialized in maturation The production of a cheese is based in 3 large pillars. The milk would be the first (food, grass, etc …), production would be the second (technology, micro, etc …) and maturation is the third great pillar (proteolysis, lipolysis and glycolysis). If we seek excellence, it is necessary that each pillar is very well controlled and that every step is well engineered. One without the other would lead to a poor final result.
Maturation is the result of controlling of all the variables in order to obtain a cheese with character, flavor… Then every little piece of this cheese is a piece of land and has something of the character of its producer. This is our aim !!!!
And last but not least, we need to strengthen the relation with our customers so they prefer to choose our local cheeses for their shops, restaurants or other gastronomic centers as, in this case, Heretat Sabartés.”
