Birmingham chef Glynn Purnell is championing the credentials of British cheese. Roz Laws spoke to him.

Call Birmingham chef Glynn Purnell cheesy and he’ll take it as a compliment.

The man has been mad about the stuff since he was a boy when he showed early culinary flair by inventing soup with cheesy string.

Now he’s moved on to rather more refined dishes, but he’s still passionate about one thing – flying the flag for British cheese.

He’s urging us all to buy homegrown produce and be on our guard for foreign imports.

Glynn, the owner and head chef of Michelin-starred Purnell’s restaurant in Birmingham, is using the BBC 2 series The Great British Food Revival to champion cheese.

We eat about 600,000 tonnes of the dairy produce a year, but more than half of it is imported. While 60 per cent of the cheese we eat is Cheddar – a fine homegrown product, you would have thought – a third of that is produced abroad, in countries as far away as Australia and Canada.

Shoppers are fooled into buying foreign cheese because 53 per cent of Cheddar is sold in pre-packaged wedges with own-brand supermarket labels, which fail to reveal the country of origin.

Glynn says: “We need to clarify the labelling laws so people can buy English Cheddar if they want. I suggest looking for the Red Tractor mark, or buying one of the protected designation of origin cheeses, like Stilton or West Country Farmhouse Cheddar. That’s made in Dorset, Devon, Somerset and Cornwall on farms using the farmers’ own milk.”

Glynn unearths the disturbing fact that Britain’s dairy farmers have halved in number in the last 15 years, and that their average age is 59, with few new farmers coming into the business.

“Now is the time to revive our cheese industry,” says the amiable 35-year-old, who prides himself on serving a good cheese board at Purnell’s with varieties like Barkham Blue.

“I’m concerned that we’re not doing enough for British producers, who are making the effort to come up with new varieties all the time. There are more than 700 different types of British cheese.

“We forget how much we use cheese in cooking, and it’s easy to substitute British varieties for our foreign favourites.”

He proves the point in The Great British Food Revival by making baked blackberry cheesecake.

He admits he would normally use a soft foreign cheese in the recipe, but instead uses a West Yorkshire cream cheese.

Glynn has a typically Brummie way of showing us how to cook. Jamie Oliver may talk about food being “pukka”, but Glynn tells us our cheesecakes should have “that fantastic wibble wobble”.

And when mashing up blackberries, he says: “Some people call this a coulis, I just call it a juice. Coulis is a bit too posh.”

No one could accuse Glynn, who grew up on a Chelmsley Wood council estate, of being posh. And for all the intricate, lovingly-crafted dishes that he serves now, he remarks: “At the end of the day, you can’t beat cheese on toast.

“My first experience of cooking with cheese was when I was a 10-year-old boy, with my little brother and sister. I’d grate it over hot beans to get cheesy beans on toast.

“And I’d really blow their minds by grating cheese into the bowl and pouring hot soup on it to create elastic, cheesy string.

“They thought I was a genius – and they still do.”

The Great British Food Revival takes Glynn to Yeovil in Somerset, to meet James Montgomery who is using unpasteurised milk to make Cheddar with a complex flavour, with truckles that are left to mature for at least 12 months.

Glynn uses that cheese to make a baked Cheddar custard with beetroot salad.

And he uses Farmhouse Lancashire – “a blue cheese as good as any Roquefort and Gorgonzola I’ve tasted” – to rustle up fillet of beef with blue cheese bonbons (“a bit like potato croquettes”), rocket and shallot puree.

Glynn says: “We’ve developed a taste for imported cheeses and while you may be partial to a slice of Camembert, Danish Blue or Parmesan, have you tried Waterloo, Shropshire Blue or Berkswell?

“Our heritage cheeses are more delicious than any import and can be enjoyed in recipes or simple heaped on a crisp cracker.

“It’s so important to keep our cheesemaking industry alive. Let’s put British cheese back on the map.”

* The Great British Food Revival is broad-cast on BBC 2 on Wednesday at 8pm.

Baked Cheddar custard with cooked and raw beetroot salad

Glynn says: The reason I’ve chosen to do a basked Cheddar custard is because it brings the best out of the sharpness of the Cheddar. The top of it reminds me of cheese on toast, which brings back great memories of my childhood. (serves two)

Custard

* 180g Cheddar cheese, grated
* 275ml double cream
* ½ tsp English mustard
* pinch of salt
* ½ tsp ginger powder
* Four free range eggs

Dressing

* 50ml aged balsamic vinegar
* 200ml light olive or rapeseed oil
* 1 tsp icing sugar

Beetroot salad

* ½ candied beetroot, striped
* ½ orange beetroot, peeled and thinly sliced
* ½ red beetroot, peeled and thinly sliced
* 6 baby beetroot, cooked and split in half lengthways
* 1 small packet of cooked beetroot, diced
* 200g small red-veined sorrel leaves
* 100g watercress

Method:

Preheat the oven to 160C/310F/Gas 2½. Place 125g grated Cheddar cheese in a saucepan.

Add the cream and the mustard and gently heat together to melt the cheese into the cream.

Season with salt and ginger and pass through a sieve into a 10 x 20cm ovenproof dish.

Sprinkle with the remaining grated cheese.

Place in a roasting tin bain-marie, add boiling water to come halfway up the side of the dish and cook in the oven for 40 minutes.

The custard should have a bit of a wobble to it when you take it out.

In a bowl, whisk together the balsamic vinegar, rapeseed oil and icing sugar and set aside.

Place the raw beetroot and cooked baby beetroot in a bowl and pour over the balsamic dressing. Place the beetroot on a plate and top with the sorrel leaves and watercress.

Serve with the warm baked cheese custard.