Snowdonia Cheese Company Hamper

Few things brighten my day more than the unexpected appearance of a large hamper of cheese on my doorstep, its cheeses plucked fresh from their bovine trees and delivered direct to my porch by the storks of the overnight courier industry. This is an event which happens with pleasing regularity. This time, my partner’s parents were kind enough to offer for consideration in the grueling gauntlet of the Grate My Cheese review process a hamper with four cheeses and chutneys from the Snowdonia Cheese Company (manufacturers of the legendary Black Bomber Cheddar).

If you are looking to explore a wide variety of soft and hard cheeses from an extensive range of lactating mammals, this may not be the hamper for you. It is, unsurprisingly, built around the strengths of the Snowdonia Cheese Company: wax-wrapped hard strong cow’s cheeses.

However, this razor focus on the company’s strengths, and ferocious resistance of scope creep into sub-par filler cheeses, can be an asset. Experience from previous cheese hampers has been that sometimes a substantial fraction of the provided cheese volume can be a blue cheese. While blue cheeses have their place, in my view that place is as an extremely small, pungent footnote below the dense, soaring, complex prose of a plethora of hard cheeses. This particular hamper therefore suited me well. The hit ratio (3/4 cheeses rated “extremely enjoyable to eat”) was very high for an unsolicited cheese hamper.

This hamper operates a bring-your-own biscuit policy (a common approach for delivery hampers). We added some of the Holly’s Wheat Crackers which are now one of our staple foods. In a desperate attempt to coax something useful out of them we yet again tried the Holly’s Mature Cheddar Crackers – surely pairing with a strong mature Cheddar is a sensible choice? – but were yet again disappointed: these are a great standalone snack, but they just overwhelm even the strongest of cheese mates.

The hamper did come with a pair of excellent accompanying spreads: a pear, date and cognac chutney, and a fig and apple chutney. These are extremely sweet, but that was a great foil for the strong cheeses present. Spreading these thinly is critical to not overwhelming the cheese. I was pretty impressed with the quality of this potentially-throwaway element of the hamper, and would consider seeking out the Snowdonia Cheese Company chutneys in the future.

The cheeses arrived well-packaged and in excellent condition (by no means guaranteed for posted dairy products). One can only assume that over hundreds of years of hamper usage these cheeses have evolved their robust waxy exoskeleton via Darwinian natural selection. Of course, the real judge of a hamper is not cheese transportability but cheese deliciousness; this was also not in short supply.

Truffle Trove

The imposing scent of this densely truffle-infused Cheddar provides an impressively true-to-life facsimile of what it is to be a truffle hog questing for black diamonds in the ripe loam of Lombardy. Mercifully the taste is a little milder, but it’s still quite overwhelmingly truffly: rich, earthy, pungent and cloying. The truffle totally overwhelms the underlying cheese. If you like truffles, you’ll enjoy this. If not, best to steer clear.

Green Thunder

A mature Cheddar densely infused with garlic and herbs – a combination which works much better than truffles, in my considered opinion. While the truffle cheese is a little cloying and sickly, here the quite intense garlic flavour adds a sharp twist to the creamy but tasty cheese. Supermarket versions of herb-infused cheeses often use the strong herb flavour to conceal the inherent mediocrity of the substrate cheese, but this is a large step up: a strong, enjoyable underlying cheese with authoritative onion-and-herb additions.

Black Bomber

An outstanding extra mature Cheddar, whose strength comes from the deep, complex and enduring flavour, rather than its overwhelming strength. There are substantially stronger Cheddars, but few with the well-balanced flavour and smooth, creamy texture of Black Bomber. The salty flavour of this cheese paired well with a very thin layer of the provided chutneys.

Red Storm

An unexpectedly delicious mature Red Leicester, this was, much to our surprise, the first cheese from this board to be finished – an impressive feat when there’s a Black Bomber in the running. It shares the Bomber’s creamy texture and complex, balanced flavour. It’s a little bit sweeter and more caramelly, a little less strong but still very mature. The result is a really moreish and highly eatable cheese which left us hungry for more long after we had lapped the last crumbs of cheese from its knife-scored ruby shell.

Overall, I’d rate this hamper very highly for actual enjoyment of eating the contained cheeses. Variety is more limited but that’s unsurprising given the focus of the box. There’s a great balance struck between the tasty but simple heavy hitters (Bomber and Storm) against the novel and interesting twists (Thunder and Trove). Larger hampers in this family look to lean more towards novelty cheeses (e.g. adding a mature Cheddar with whisky to the mix) and in my view that upgrade is probably a mistake: my suspicion is that it’s the classic Cheddar and Red Leicester that are the truly outstanding element.