I am what I eat: Bill Oglethorpe

This post first appeared on the Borough Market website as part of my series, I Am What I Eat, where I explore the links between food and identity, interviewing traders about the foods that are important to them and why. In the second series I chose to speak to Bill because I knew his path into cheese-making had been an interesting one. Actually, we ended up talking a lot about food science, in particular transformations, and this instead became the focus of my article.

“I’ve always been interested in anything to do with transformation,” says Bill Oglethorpe, owner of Kappacasein Dairy. “It’s kind of magical. Like mayonnaise, the emulsification of egg yolks and oil – that’s amazing – turning something that’s oily and separated into something that’s creamy. Or béchamel or soufflé…”

Or cheese, one might add – he doesn’t say it, but it’s implicit. Bill has worked with cheese for over 20 years. He started on the shop floor at Neal’s Yard Dairy and gradually moved into affinage, the aging and maturing of cheese, arguably one of the most important transformative processes in cheese making. In 2008 he started Kappacasein Dairy, producing cheese in a railway arch in Bermondsey with milk that he collects from the Common Work Organic Farm in Kent.

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