This is Nottingham --CELEBRITY chef Jamie Oliver will be flying the flag for the revival of Colwick cheese on television later this week – and it gets a big thumbs-up from Olympic champion Usain Bolt.
Jamie and his farmer sidekick Jimmy Doherty filmed in Nottingham in August for their new series Jamie And Jimmy's Friday Night Feast.
In a mission to put the 17th-century cheese, which ceased production 20 years ago, back on the culinary map, the celebrity chef offers it to the Jamaican sprinter, a guest at the programme's pop-up cafe at the end of Southend Pier.
Usain, the fastest man alive, says: "That's really good."
Jamie says he loves Nottingham and has "a little bit of a thing for it", before he and Jimmy burst into a round of Robin Hood on their way to the city.
The duo met Alan and Jane Hewson, who last year began making the soft, curdy cheese at Belvoir Ridge Creamery, in Leicestershire, using milk from Red Poll cows.
One of their 50-strong herd, a calf called Myra, was in the spotlight as cameras rolled in the back garden of Jamie's Italian in Middle Pavement.
Jane joined Jamie in the kitchen, where he used the cheese to make pizza, pasta, risotto, stuffed courgette flowers and a salad with pea shoots, bean shoots, purple potatoes and mint.
"That tasted of spring. It was delicious," says Jane, who tells the Post: "It was fascinating to see how a TV programme is made. I think the cheese has got a really good future in Nottingham."
Jamie describes it as a "great cheese". He says: "This is not a cheese for a supermarket, this is a cheese for butcher's shops, delis, restaurants and pubs. I'm excited to communicate this story, this is just a beautiful, beautiful thing."
Reactions were good at a tasting session for 20 local chefs.
One of them, Richard Gash, executive chef at Great Northern Inns, which owns the Ned Ludd and Cross Keys, has incorporated Colwick cheese into his dishes.
Richard says: "It's quite an adaptable cheese. It can be used for sweet or savoury."
At the Ned Ludd, it is served for a breakfast dish of pancakes and bacon and is one of its cheesecake ingredients. Next month, the pub will introduce Hogmanay pie to the menu, made with onion, leeks, potatoes and Colwick cheese.
"It's great on its own on a cheese board or in a pie or quiche or pudding.
"It's in between a cream cheese and feta. When it's fresh, it's nice and smooth and when it gets older, it starts to get crumbly, so it's good on toast. I hope it's going to be around for centuries more. It's a great product and it's local as well, which is nice."
Shaped like a bowl, Colwick cheese can be sold fresh or ripened. Its resurrection has taken off in Notts with restaurants The Larder, Hart's, Tom Browns and Langar Hall using it on their menus and it is sold in shops and delis including The Cheese Shop and Delilah Fine Foods, in Nottingham, Fred Hallam, in Beeston, Delights, in Burton Joyce, and Robin Tuxford, a butcher's shop in Netherfield.
In a surprise for the Hewsons, Jamie tells them that the Slow Food movement, a worldwide organisation celebrating "real food", will be introducing Colwick cheese to its international network of chefs.
But they had better work quickly, as the cheese has a shelf-life of only ten days.
Colwick cheese was first rediscovered by Matthew Callaghan, chairman of the Artisan Cheese Fair in Melton Mowbray, who had a go at the old recipe during a three-month trip to Brazil. It was launched at last year's fair. Although he doesn't appear in the programme, he says: "In its day, it was one of Britain's most celebrated cheeses, so I am delighted it's back and with the publicity I hope other dairies will start producing it."
Jamie And Jimmy's Friday Night Feast starts on Friday on Channel 4 at 8pm.
--------------------
SAY what you like about Jamie Oliver, naked chef extraordinaire, he has certainly achieved a lot in his 38 years.
He's forced the Government to think about making school dinners healthier (following his Feed Me Better campaign, launched in 2005), turned countless unemployed youths into chefs with his Fifteen apprenticeship programme, set up restaurants around the world and had more books and TV shows than it's possible to count.
All this from a man who, by his own admission, did pretty badly at school.
"I didn't do well in the traditional sense," says Jamie, who's previously spoken of his dyslexia.
Luckily, this Essex boy had a saving grace – food. "I never got depressed about being crap because I always knew I could cook – I knew that by about 13."
He's been working in the kitchen since the tender age of 10, when his dad, Trevor, gave him a job in the family pub – The Cricketers, in Clavering.
His best pal Jimmy Doherty, of Jimmy's Farm fame, was on washing-up duties.
When they weren't working in the pub, Jamie says the pair had quite a Huckleberry Finn-esque childhood.
"We were quite free. We'd leave early, come back late and no one worried much."
They lived in a nice village, with a nice community and nice kids, he recalls.
"I'm very thankful for that – to this day I'm still very close to lots of my best mates from school, and probably still in contact with 90 per cent of them."
The young pals spent a lot of their time experimenting with food, creating unusual desserts and new crisp flavours.
Doherty's real passion, though, was animals.
"He's always kept hundreds of animals, from tarantulas to lizards. I'd go around to his on a Friday night at the age of 14 and he'd be dissecting roadkill – it would stink, but he'd be as happy as Larry," Jamie recalls.
Jimmy's parents weren't so pleased.
"His mum used to have fish fingers, which back in the day was quite posh," the chef explains. "She'd go to get them from the freezer and would find hundreds of frozen chicks for the snakes."
More than 20 years on and Jamie and Jimmy are still great friends. And following on from Jamie And Jimmy's Food Fight Club last year, where they pitted the best of British food against Europe's finest fodder, they're returning to screens with another joint project – Jamie And Jimmy's Friday Night Feast.
The series is all about cooking dishes to impress friends and family on the weekend, from the perfect roast potatoes to delicious meals prepared inside a dustbin.
Celebrities including Sienna Miller and Usain Bolt (see main feature) learn to cook their favourite dishes.
Bolt was a particularly keen student and when asked if there was anything he wanted to learn, the answer was simple.
"He went: 'Dude, I just got to learn how to chop fast like a chef.' Typical Usain – he wants to chop and he wants to chop fast."
As well as visiting Nottingham, Jamie and Jimmy travel to other places around the country (in their pimped-out Ford Capri) trying to bring back a traditional, regional delicacy that is dying out. Reported by This is 2 days ago.