Roane, our head of food concepts and Rhuaridh choosing cheese.
Bread and cheese have always made sense together. Two ancient foods that begin in agriculture and become something else through fermentation, microbes, time and human judgement. Neither particularly likes being hurried. Both change with the seasons, the land and the people making them.
Perhaps that’s why, as bakers, we’ve always found cheesemakers so fascinating. It may also be because we eat a lot of bread and are slightly obsessed with cheese.
Over the years we’ve baked an extraordinary amount of it into our food. Mary Quicke’s cheddar has found its way into quiches, scones, breads and crackers. Lincolnshire Poacher into our Ham & Cheese Croissant. There have been Alpine cheeses, fresh curds, blues, cheddars and cheeses we had never heard of until somebody put a piece in front of us.
And somewhere along the way, a cheesemonger found his way into the bakery too.
Rhuaridh Buchanan runs Buchanan’s Cheesemonger, a small shop on Connaught Street in London. He has worked with us for so many years that it is difficult to remember how we tasted, chose and bought cheese before him.
He knows cheese, certainly, but his knowledge extends far beyond what tastes good. He knows the farmers and cheesemakers, their dairies and their land. He understands agriculture, restaurants, hospitality, the cheese industry and the politics surrounding it. He knows which maker is experimenting with something new, which cheese is particularly good this year and probably quite a lot that nobody has told us yet.
At Rhuaridh Buchanan’s maturing room in Connaught Village.
Just as importantly, he knows us.
Rhuaridh doesn’t make anything we eat. His craft is in the connections he makes between people. He understands what our bakers and food teams are trying to create, then looks outwards to the people he knows and asks what might be possible. Sometimes that means finding the right cheese. More interestingly, it can mean creating a relationship that didn’t exist before.
Our Ham & Cheese Croissant is a good example.
Years ago, we baked it with a cave-aged Swiss Gruyère that Rhuaridh had found for us. It was delicious and, importantly for a baker, behaved beautifully when heated. About a year before Brexit, Rhuaridh suggested we should start looking closer to home.
Finding a British replacement proved surprisingly difficult. We weren’t simply looking for another good cheese. We needed one that could melt and bake like Gruyère without losing its character inside buttery pastry, béchamel and ham.
Rhuaridh thought of Lincolnshire Poacher.
Made by Tim and Sam Jones on their family farm, Lincolnshire Poacher sits somewhere between the traditions of a Cheddar and an Alpine cheese. It was the sort of farmhouse cheese more accustomed to cheeseboards and restaurant dining rooms than being grated into croissants and baked commercially.
Lincolnshire Poacher dairy and maturing rooms.
Rhuaridh saw something in it.
Tim saw a perfectly good cheese that we appeared to want him to grate.
He said no.
It simply wasn’t how they sold Lincolnshire Poacher. Their cheese went out in wheels and pieces to cheesemongers, restaurants and people who understood what to do with a very good piece of cheese. Nobody had ever asked Tim to buy a machine so that we could have it grated by the kilo and put it inside thousands of croissants.
We could see his point. We still wanted the cheese.
So rather than explain it again, we sent him lunch.
A box arrived containing our croissants, béchamel, ham and a note explaining how to put the whole thing together. Tim made the croissants in his own kitchen, using his own cheese.
GAIL’s Ham and Cheese Croissant.
He tasted one.
Then he agreed to buy his first grating machine.
This is exactly why Rhuaridh matters to us. He knew Lincolnshire Poacher well enough to understand what made it special, and knew GAIL’s well enough to imagine what it could become in our hands. He brought two crafts together and let the food do the convincing.
And it worked in both directions. We got a British farmhouse cheese that made our croissant better. Tim found a new home for Lincolnshire Poacher, in a place neither they nor perhaps anyone else had imagined it going.
That relationship has continued to deepen. Tim’s raw, unhomogenised milk carries the character of their farm into their cheese. They work with seasonal variation rather than trying to erase it, slowly maturing each wheel and paying attention to the countless small decisions that accumulate into flavour.
Lincolnshire Poacher dairy and maturing rooms.
As Tim once told us, “With cheese, all the little things you do matter in the end.”
A baker understands that instinctively.
Bread begins with soil too. Grain changes with its growing conditions. Fermentation introduces another living element. Time does its work. The baker learns that flour will never behave exactly the same way every day and that consistency comes not from removing variation, but from becoming good enough to respond to it.
Lincolnshire Poacher pasture, their cows and their feed.
Perhaps bakers and cheesemakers recognise something in one another. Both take something agricultural and alive, give microbes and time a chance to interfere, then spend a lifetime learning when to intervene and when to leave things alone. At the end of it all are two of the simplest foods imaginable: a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese.
We’ve never really tired of either.
The more time we spend with cheesemakers, the more familiar their world becomes. And perhaps that explains Rhuaridh’s place in our Craft Community too.
He isn’t a farmer or a maker. His craft is knowing them, and knowing us. He has spent years building the kind of relationships that allow him to recognise when a great cheese, a baker with a problem and a cheesemaker with absolutely no intention of buying a grating machine ought to meet.
Our food is full of relationships like these. Some begin in fields, others in dairies or bakeries. Occasionally, they begin in a little cheese shop on Connaught Street, with someone joining the dots between them.
And sometimes they end with a very good ham and cheese croissant.
If you want to meet Rhuaridh yourself, you can find him at his lovely cheese shop in Connaught Village, 5a–7 Porchester Place, London, W2 2BS
Photography by Elliot Sheppard and Hector Marshall
Illustration by Emma Cantlay
