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Voted Best British Cheese

2023, 2024 & 2025 Fine Food Digest

Baron Bigod

Our aim from the beginning was to make a Brie better than the French. Today, we're proud to say that Baron Bigod has replaced French Brie on many UK cheese counters.

Our mission led us to buy French cows, build specially designed cheese rooms, travel the world to learn and spend thousands of hours perfecting our recipe, our soils and our farming practices... and you can taste it in our cheese.

Baron Bigod is the finest traditional Brie-de-Meaux style cheese produced in the UK and one of only a handful of its type in the world to be made by the farmer on the farm.

"Amazing Cheese. I can't believe how amazing it is. I love it more than anything in the world. It's miraculous and there is no Christmas without it!"

J. Norton - Fen Farm Dairy Customer

Our farmhouse Brie style cheese (approximately 1kg), handmade at Fen Farm from our own grass-fed Montbéliarde cows milk. Your cheese will be hand wrapped in wax paper and packed in its own beautiful wooden box.
Baron Bigod 1kg
£36.00
£36.00

A baby sized version of our farmhouse Brie style cheese (approximately 250g), handmade at Fen Farm from our own grass-fed Montbéliarde cows milk. Your cheese will be hand wrapped in wax paper and packed in its own beautiful wooden box.
Baron Bigod Baby 250g
£10.00
£10.00

Our farmhouse Brie style cheese (approximately 3kg), handmade at Fen Farm from our own grass-fed Montbéliarde cows milk. Your cheese will be hand wrapped in wax paper and packed in its own beautiful wooden box.
Baron Bigod 3kg
£99.00
£99.00

Our truffled Baron Bigod cheese (approximately 250g) with a layer of our own milk mascarpone, infused with the finest black truffles. Your cheese will be hand wrapped in wax paper and packed in its own beautiful wooden box. Made by Fen Farm Dairy
Baron Bigod Baby Truffled 250g
£20.00
£20.00

Tasting Notes

Beneath the nutty, mushroomy rind, Baron Bigod has a smooth, silky golden breakdown which will often ooze out over a delicate, fresh and citrussy centre. Baron Bigod is made by hand in small batches, very early in the morning so that we can use the fresh milk straight from the cow. The mould cultures are added to the warm morning’s milk and it is gently gravity fed into small vats just a few metres from the milking parlour, where the rennet is added. The curds are carefully hand-ladled into large moulds, using traditional pelle-a-brie ladles and the young cheeses are hand salted and then aged for up to 8 weeks in a cave-like environment.

It is a unique expression of the incredible milk of our free-ranging Montbéliarde cows and the diversity of our wildlife-rich grazing marshland.

These are our 3 secrets:

Shhh... don't tell anyone. There's a reason our products are some of the finest in the world and it has nothing to do with fancy tech or good marketing. It's simply that everything we do is right here on our farm. We have control over every step, from soil to finished product. Every process feeds the next. We call this circular farming.

Control

We grow our own forage and grazing right here in the surrounding landscape. We care for every cow in our herd as an individual and we care for our precious milk from the moment it leaves the cow. What we take from the land we then put back again. We call this circular farming.

Proximity

Within minutes of the morning milking, our fresh milk is already in the making rooms just a few metres away. Within hours it is being made into cheese and butter. Our milk doesn’t spend time being transported meaning our produce retains all the incredible characteristics of our fresh milk.

Gentleness

Our unique set up allows our milk to be gently gravity fed from the milking parlour into the making rooms next door. We choose to make our produce by hand, avoiding the use of big industrial dairy equipment. No piece of machinery can imitate the gentleness of a true artisan, who really cares.

Learn about Fen Farm Dairy, our family farm and the home of Baron Bigod.

Who was Baron Bigod?

Our cheese is named after Baron Hugh Bigod (Prounounced by-god), a rogue nobleman and descendant of the powerful French Bigod family. The Bigods arrived on British soil from Normandy in 1066 with William the Conqueror and were subsequently granted extensive lands and titles as a reward for helping the new king achieve a successful conquest.

Hugh Bigod inherited Bungay as part of these estates in 1120 and set about building Bungay Castle, a well-fortified structure that would become his power base. An ambitious rogue, Baron Bigod formed alliances among other local barons, making several attempts to defy the crown and capture nearby royal castles, thereby falling in and out of favour with successive monarchs.

After a successful seizure of nearby Norwich Castle, a furious King Stephen marched his army to Bungay and summoned Bigod to the royal camp to answer for his misadventures.

Legend has it that upon receiving the summons, Bigod uttered his most famous rebuke to the King of England:

“Were I in my castle, upon the River Waveney, I would’ne give a button for the king of Cockney.”

The ruins of Baron Bigod’s castle still stand to this day, overlooking our farm. Our cows graze today on the same fertile river marshlands that the castle’s livestock once grazed, almost 1,000 years ago.

How we make Baron Bigod

Step-by-Careful-Step

1

Early in the morning when our milk is still warm and fresh from the milking parlour, it heads directly into the cheese making building next door. What makes our process so unique is that we gently feed the milk into our cheesemaking vats via gravity. This avoids using pumps, which would destroy the flavour and integrity of the delicate milk.

2

The milk is gently heat-treated. Next, Head cheesemaker Marc ads carefully selected strains of lactic bacteria to the milk. These live cultures quickly begin to acidify the milk, to start the cheesemaking process.

3

During the early stages of the cheesemaking process, we keep testing the milk temperature and acidity levels. This is incredibly important to make sure the cheese is a consistent product every time.

4

Once the milk meets the desired acidity, we gravity feed it into a series of small vats, ready for renneting.

5

Once we have calculated the precise amount of rennet required, we stir it into the milk. The natural enzymes in the rennet begin to coagulate the milk.

6

Within a precisely calculated window, the rennet transforms the milk into a firm jelly, called curd.

7

The pH and firmness of the curd are carefully monitored. By watching the curd closely, the cheesemaking team know exactly when to cut the curd. Precise cuts are made in the jelly-like curd, to allow the whey (liquid part of the milk) to escape from the curd (solid part of the milk).

8

As the whey escapes, it forms a deep puddle on top of the curd, which we carefully skim from the top of the vats.

9

The real skill in our cheesemaking process and what we believe makes it so artisanal, is the human element. No machine can emulate this level of care and attention. At this stage of the cheesemaking, we carefully hand-ladle all the curd in small layers into hoop-shaped moulds.

10

A great deal of care and focus is invested at this stage to make sure every single cheese has the right quality and quantity of curd added to the hoops.

11

Over the next few hours, we turn the cheeses over in their hoops to allow the correct level of drainage and to create the shape of the finished cheese. By 9:30pm, the working day is done but the cheesemaking process continues into the next day.

12

At 5am on day 2, we de-hoop the cheeses and after a moisture test and recording of weight, we sprinkle a carefully measured quantity of salt onto both sides of each cheese.

13

Once salted, the cheese begins its maturing process. Over the following few days, each cheese will be hand-turned daily in a warm room, to allow the moulds to develop evenly.

14

By about day 4, little specks of white mould begin to form on the cheese surfaces. In the coming days, the cheese grows more and more of the white mould which is called Penicillium Candidum. Other moulds and yeasts that are native only to our farm and have come in through the air vents or have established in the maturing rooms over time, also begin to grow.

15

We are very careful about how we wash the maturation rooms and walls, as so many of the unique flavours and characteristics of our cheese come from the environment around the farm. We don’t want to disturb the balance!

16

Once the cheeses are fully covered in white mould, we then wrap each one in waxed paper and place it in special poplar wood boxes. The boxes play a very important part in the maturation of the cheese, as they help create the right environment for the moulds to break down the curd of the cheese into all that delicious gooeyness.

17

Throughout the maturation stages, we taste-test the cheeses at certain ages to check that the maturation is going to plan (it’s a hard life). During these taste tests, we also make decisions about where and when each batch of cheese will be sold, depending on our customers’ requirements.

18

Several weeks later, the cheeses are now ready to be eaten. The gooeyness and flavours intensify when the cheese is left at room temperature for 30 minutes to one hour before eating.

Truffled Baron Bigod

Our award-winning Baron Bigod cheese with a layer of our homemade mascarpone, infused with the finest black truffles.

Beneath the nutty, mushroomy rind, Truffled Baron Bigod has a smooth, silky golden breakdown which will often ooze out over a layer of our unctuous truffle-infused mascarpone. You will find long lasting flavours of warm earth, farmyard and mushrooms.

Our truffled Baron Bigod cheese (approximately 1kg) with a layer of our own milk mascarpone, infused with the finest black truffles. Your cheese will be hand wrapped in wax paper and packed in its own beautiful wooden box. Made by Fen Farm Dairy

Where we are

Fen Farm Dairy
Flixton Road
Bungay
Suffolk
NR35 1PD

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