The Baliehof Cheese and Dairy Farm, a cheese company from the municipality of Jabbeke in the West Flanders province, has won several medals at the World Cheese Awards with their products this year.
The company submitted eight cheese varieties for the World Cheese Awards in Norway, and won a medal for each of them: one super gold, one regular gold, two silvers and four bronze medals.
"Everything starts with taking good care of the cows," farmer Luc Callemeyn told VRT. "At 06:00, the first thing we do is greet the cows. In the evening, we walk through the stable again to see if everything is in order."
The Callemeyn family business makes many types of cheese from their milk.
"Our Super Gold, the Houtlandse Assche cheese, won second place in the entire competition – meaning the jury thought this cheese was the second best in the world. The best was a Norwegian cheese," said Baliehof co-manager Sofie Callemeyn.
Their three-year-old cheese won a gold medal, and the Arnoldus and another mature cheese both won silver, she explained. "The medals cannot yet be seen in the store itself, because they are still on their way here."
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The Houtlandse Assche is "very spicy and made with a kind of charcoal," said cheesemaker Krista Stroo, who came up with the recipe herself. "I have been working on it for a long time. I have been making this cheese for at least five or six years and every time, I try to improve something until I achieve a good result."
She described the ripened cheese as having a "slightly salty, velvety and floral taste."
Since the awards, the company have already received many requests to export to the Netherlands and even to the United States, but the family want to keep it small-scale. "We want to care for, feed and milk the cows ourselves. And we want to make our cheese just from this milk."
