It took 10 hours for the nettle-wrapped, creamy Cornish cheese wheel to win over the two FDA inspectors – but it succeeded, and now Yarg, a semi-hard cow's milk cheese made from a recipe thought to date back to the 13th century, is finally being sold in the US.
"The process was fairly gruelling," says Catherine Mead, a cheesemaker at Lynher Dairies. "Being audited by US inspectors was very different to audits within the European dairy industry. For a start, the US inspectors had never seen stinging nettles before, so we had to explain what they were, then explain that we paint them on to the cheese after sterilising them with lemon juice." At one point, the two FDA officials brought out a manual on pasteurisation numbering 1,700 pages. "We all thought, 'Wow, that is a lot of procedure on pasteurisation'," says Mead.
And finally, they tasted it. "I think they liked it, but taste wasn't part of their job description," says Mead. The FDA was visiting Lynher Dairies at Pengreep Farm to determine if Yarg – which was to be exported into the US by Neal's Yard Dairy – complied perfectly with US food production standards, following President Obama's FDA Food Safety Modernisation Act.
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