2023-08-28 16:40:40
There were those who raised their hands to their heads, those who gaped at the runaway rise in figures and even those who cheered on the bidders to add 500 euros more to an auction that exceeded all forecasts. The figure to beat was the 20,500 euros paid four years ago in the bid that set the all-time record for the best Cabrales cheese and, despite the magnitude of the challenge, El Llagar de Colloto, from Oviedo, managed to raise the amount at auction of vertigo that Iván Suárez stopped at 30,000 euros. That price never recorded before – and which will earn Cabrales his third Guinness World Record – was paid by the hotelier for a 2.2-kilo piece from Quesería Los Puertos, winner of the best cheese award in this 51st edition. “Little by little, you get hot and in the end these things happen,” said Iván Suárez. Eight other Asturian and Madrid establishments participated in the bid.
Despite the fact that its rivals offered a battle, El Llagar de Colloto managed to get the best cheese in the contest for the fourth time through an auction that in the last five years has risen from 3,000 to 30,000 euros. For Iván Suárez, who had already paid large amounts such as 17,000 euros last year and 20,500 in 2019, such investments are explained by the “passion for the land” and the commitment to “support restaurants, reward my people, who supports me all year long. With “the closest people” he will taste the most expensive cheese in the world.
Behind this record-breaking piece is the Los Puertos cheese factory, opened in 2004 in the town of Poo de Cabrales and run by Rosa Bada Herrero and her son Guillermo Pendás Bada. Yesterday was his second victory in the contest after 2007. “We had good cheese, but it is increasingly difficult to win,” said Pendás, 32. His, he reminded himself, is an “everyday job” and his cheese is the result of know-how that passes from generation to generation in the family. “It comes from my grandmother’s grandparents already and surely back too.”
As fate would have it, her grandmother, Rosa Herrero Campo, was distinguished in this 51st edition as senior pastor. Considered the “matriarch of the Bada Herrero cheese-making saga”, she at almost 89 years old -she will be celebrating her birthday this week- she treasures a career marked by Cabrales and herding. “The work was hard, but we were used to it. All my life I made cheese, at home and in the ports in summer », she recounted. She was the firstborn in a family of nine siblings, she had eight children. Today, part of her offspring “make cheese too,” she extolled.
The piece that brings together all that family wisdom and that won the competition «has cow’s and goat’s milk, matures in a high mountain cave at an altitude of about 1,500 meters, in Los Mazos, in Main. It is a creamy cheese and it has about ten months of maturation”, described Guillermo Pendás. In addition to Los Puertos, another 14 cheese factories gathered in the Arenas de Cabrales park, where they put up for sale a total of 1,075 kilos of delicacy from Los Picos at prices that ranged between 25 and 50 euros per kilo.
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