Our artisanal cheese, traditional manufacturing

Feel how our cheese reaches your palate and floods your senses. Traditional manufacturing, taking care of every detail, from our grasslands to your table, is the key to understanding the power of this aroma.

Finca La Granja: cheese pride

The land

It all starts here, in our land. We take care of every hectare of our grasslands so that the species in the area can feed our Manchegan breed sheep. In addition, to complete their feeding when they need it, we sow and harvest cereals and fodder.

We take great care of our animals’ daily lives and pasture. After all, their food in the pastures and their quality of life is one of the keys to the flavour of our Chisquero and Mingolucas Cheeses.

The milk

The flavour of sheep’s milk is not the same on all farms. Our milk achieves that intensity level because our 2,800 heads of adult cattle can spend the entire year grazing on the estate’s grasslands.

Looking after our sheep is hard work: we need to milk about 1,000 animals twice a day, assist with deliveries to prevent complications, help newborn lambs to suckle properly and stay close to their mothers, maintain maximum hygiene in the resting areas, take the sheep out into the fields each day to graze freely… But, to guarantee the production of our artisanal cheese, all this is worthwhile.

The cheese factory

Love, care, patience and a lot of knowledge about milk’s life cycle. That is what it takes to create quality artisanal cheeses. We share with you a step-by-step explanation of the entire process followed at Finca La Granja so that you can appreciate, even better, all the work behind such a unique flavour.

We milk and refrigerate in maximum healthiness controlled conditions, ensuring that the milk retains all its properties.

We coagulate using the exact amount of natural curd, and cut the curd in the vat until the master cheesemaker verifies that it is just right and that the grain size is ideal.

We drain the curd (remove the liquid part) on the preparation table.

We manually insert the right amount of curd into cylindrical moulds, then filling them by hand. We also check that the pH is optimal.

We place the moulds in the presses to continue removing the whey, at a certain pressure and for the right amount of time.

We incorporate the numbered casein plate provided by the Regulatory Board that identifies each cheese, enabling its traceability.

We continue with the salting process, by immersion in brine to provide the right amount of salt to the cheese and firmness to the rind. To do this, we determine a certain amount of time, temperature, concentration and pH. The whole process is carried out delicately so as not to hit or deform the cheese.

Finally, we carry out the drying, ripening and regular tipping of the cheese for a minimum of 60 days in chambers with controlled humidity and temperature. We also apply a light brushing and a layer of oil when the cheese requires it. To determine the right moment, we observe the health of each cheese daily.

As you can see, the artisanal cheese manufacturing process we carry out at Finca La Granja is completely manual. Discover the result in every bite of our Chisqueros and Mingolucas.