Gringa Dairy: THE place to get Mexican cheese in Britain

If there's one Mexican ingredient that's nearly impossible to find outside of Mexico it's real Mexican cheese.

(And I haven't found fresh epazote yet.)

That's why London's Gringa Dairy, based in Peckham, is so amazing. They're making real queso fresco right here in the UK!

Cheese is probably the least exported of all Mexican ingredients, and therefore the least familiar to non-Mexicans.

Queso fresco literally means "fresh cheese". It's an unaged white cheese made from cow's milk with a consistency similar to feta.

Recipes aimed at cooks living outside Mexico often suggest substituting feta, ricotta, or even cottage cheese. But none of these are quite right.

Feta for example, is too salty and made from the wrong kind of milk.

Because Gringa Dairy produces its cheese here in the UK, we can now add a level of authenticity to our Mexican food that hasn't previously been possible.

Obviously I have ordered some for myself (you can order yours here).

In the meantime I asked Kristen, the Dairy's founder (and fellow Californian expat) about her journey to becoming to UK's first producer of Mexican-style cheese.

What inspired you to make Mexican cheeses here in the UK?

I have long wanted to be a cheese maker and felt that no one needed another cheddar!

It was clear to me that there was finally an opportunity for this kind of cheesemaking in the UK, based on the rapid and recent increase in the availability of quality Mexican food and the correspondingly rapid maturing supply chain importing ingredients from Mexico, the US and the EU.

However, one of the missing pieces of the puzzle is the supply of goods like cheese that require a cold chain (that is, they must be continuously refrigerated).

It’s expensive to import these kinds of products and a short shelf life and tricky import laws make it even more economically risky.

So, it just really made sense to me that there was an opportunity to make these cheeses in the UK.

Due to Tex-Mex influences, authentic Mexican cheeses are among the least familiar Mexican ingredients outside Mexico. How did you discover them?

Did you know that Mexico exports less than 3% of the cheeses it produces?

As you might guess, 99% of what is exported goes to the USA.

There are some people out there who are committed to increasing the awareness of Mexican cheeses, such as Carlos Yescas at Lactography, but there is a long way to go before these cheeses get the recognition they deserve!

As for me, I am originally from California, living in both the Central Valley and San Francisco.

My teen years were spent at a high school that was primarily Latino and Mexican culture has simply been there most of my life. So, I guess I have always been familiar with the cheeses.

But I agree about the Tex-Mex influence really skewing the role of cheese in the cuisine as a whole and then Monterey Jack somehow became seen as “Mexican” cheese. (Though I admit Monterey Jack is something of a guilty pleasure…kind of like eating Pringles!)

A lot of the recent flowering of interest in Mexican food here is inspired by expats, either from Mexico or parts of the United States, who find they can't do without their favourite cuisine. What brought you to the UK?

Work. My partner got a job here and we thought it would be fun to shake things up a bit and live abroad.

What are your favourite Mexican dishes and is cheese a vital part of them?

This answer could take a very long time, so I will keep it short.

I dearly love the regionalism of the cuisine, so I have a lot of favourite areas.

I really like the traditional food of Oaxaca and will walk miles for good cochinita pibil. Do not get your hand between my mouth and a really fresh tuna taco and I have been dreaming of tres leches cake for the past week.

But I do tend towards dishes that are best finished with a sprinkle of Queso Fresco or Cotija as I like cheese as an accent.

I think it is because so many Mexican dishes are created through “layering” flavour.

Meat, veggies, moles and cheese really come together to make some amazing dishes.

Oh, and let’s not forget LARD - there is a town an hour from where I grew up named Manteca!

Okay, and another admission - I do love a good burrito. I am from California after all! I prefer Chihuahua for these.

Is Mexican cheese (in particular) or Mexican food (in general) bound up with any specific memory or experience?

After 5 years in London, I will say “being warm”!

I do have lovely memories of the places I have been and the people I have met, but I think if I trace it back to the start of it all, it was my neighbour’s abuela teaching us how to make refried beans when I was about 12 years old.

Life changing stuff, that.

The motto of MexiGeek is All Mexican Food is Local, which means two things:

Mexican food has incredible regional variation and is always made with local produce and according to local traditions (even ubiquitous dishes like tamales vary greatly from one region to the next)

When you cook Mexican food outside of Mexico, you inevitably have to make some local substitutions, effectively creating your own new "local" Mexican cuisine

Thanks to Gringa Dairy, we now have a local version of an authentic Mexican cheese!

Five years ago - or even five months ago - I never would hadn't imagined this would be possible.

The New Mexican Revolution rolls on!

¡Viva la Revolución! or no quiero Taco Bell

I am not on vacation. I am on my Babymoon. (It's totally a word; look it up.)

I haven't been doing much elaborate cooking since the arrival of Baby MexiGeek número dos, but this is a good opportunity to talk about something that's been happening in the UK over the past few years. Some people are calling it the New Mexican Revolution.

I actually have a bad association with the phrase "Mexican Revolution" as applied to food, thanks to crap like this:

Once at Open Mic Night at the Mercury Café (which is the coolest place in Denver), a Hispanic poet summed up his opinion of this ad with the lines

Your revolución is not my revolución.
Fuck that dog.

And for the record, in 21 years of living in the US, I never once saw a Mexican eat at Taco Bell.

This UK "New Mexican Revolution" is essentially a growing interest in and awareness of Mexican cuisine in the UK. And this time it's legit. I've seen it myself.

When I first moved here, it was still a novelty to get flour tortillas in supermarkets, and they were invariably called "wraps".

Every "Mexican" restaurant seemed to be a fajita factory, and no one I met had ever heard of enchiladas.

I once got excited because I found a jar labelled "guacamole" at Tesco. It turned out to be avocado-flavoured mushy peas.

What is it with you Brits and your mushy peas? Seriously.

Of course, even back then there were some early pioneers.

Lupe Pinto's in Edinburgh has been importing and selling Mexican ingredients for over 20 years. They also make hella good guacamole and salsa.

And the Cool Chile Company in London have been importing dried chiles from Mexico since 1995.

I moved to Edinburgh in 2001, and if it weren't for Lupe Pinto's I wouldn't have survived. I got everything from them: tortillas, beans, spices and seasonings, tomatillos, even my favourite Mexican beer, Negra Modelo.

This one time I got a can of chipotles en adobo and made these awesome burritos. But I used the whole can (plus some other chiles) and they were so hot Mrs MexiGeek could literally see through time, like Lisa Simpson when Apu cooked Indian food.

Good times!

But in 2005 Thomasina Miers won Masterchef. Her cooking had a huge influence from her time in Mexico, and she went on to found the Wahaca restaurant chain and write two excellent Mexican cookbooks.

And in the past few years especially there seems to have been an explosion of Mexican products, restaurants, and suppliers, from chipotles in major supermarkets to recipes for Yucatecan pickled onions in Good Housekeeping to the rare and coveted pasillas Oaxaquenas being available on British soil thanks to Luchito.

The thing is, London is getting a disproportionate share of this New Mexican Revolution, especially regarding restaurants.

The majority of the UK quality Mexican restaurants are in London. They even had the UK's only Mexican bakery, Los Pastelitos, until it closed recently. ;(

As the UK's capital and largest city, you'd expect London to have more of everything, and to get everything first. But I'd still like to see a bit of that action up here in Scotland.

There's a Wagamama on Lothian Road; why isn't there a Wahaca as well?

Obviously, this has to be a two-way street. A browse of the menus of Auld Reekie's existing Mexican restaurants still yields a helluva lot of fajitas. But I'm starting to suspect that, at least in some cases, this has more to do with what the clientele demand than what the chefs want to make.

We, as a nation, need to put down the fajitas and try something new.

(Ironically, this "something new" would likely be a very old dish, like pato en pipián, which is duck in a delicious sauce made from pumpkinseeds.)

As soon as Baby MexiGeek can go on a plane, I need to arrange a trip to London to tour some of these places (Mestizo and Taquería are topping the must-see list so far).

Until then, let's all keep spreading the word about Mexican cuisine and see if we can make this a Permanent Revolution.