Kappacasein Dairy

The toastie goes into a dry pan hot enough to brown the bread before the cheese has fully melted, because Bill Oglethorpe wants the flavor concentrated rather than liquid.4

Why go

Oglethorpe drives from Streatham to Chiddingstone in Kent and brings back six hundred litres of milk, and it goes into a hundred-year-old copper vat in a railway arch under the main line out of London Bridge while it is still warm. Already Bill had been awake since quarter to four, wrote the gentle author, who went to watch.3 The curd comes out of the whey by hand, on a strip of metal wrapped in a cloth.3

The milk is from one organic farm, Commonwork on the Bore Place estate, and he only makes cheese between May and July while the cows are out on grass. Most dairies buy a starter culture because it makes the cheese predictable. He grows his weekly from that week's unpasteurised milk and a little live yoghurt, so what the pasture did shows up in the wheel.1

He learned to make cheese on a farm in Provence, selling goats' milk with a friend from agricultural college, and set up on his own while he was working for Neal's Yard Dairy.3 He has been selling the toastie at Borough Market since 2003.4

Order this / avoid

Order: the toasted cheese sandwich. It is mostly Montgomery's cheddar, with Ogleshield, London raclette, comté and Bermondsey Hard Pressed alongside it, and four alliums cut fine into the mix: red onion, white onion, spring onion and leek. The bread is Poilâne sourdough.4 2
Order: the raclette if you want the London raclette on its own terms, scraped over new potatoes with baby gherkins and pickled onions.2
Order: a wedge of Bermondsey Hard Pressed off the counter. The wheels age up to a year in the next arch along, washed or stroked and turned every Wednesday.3
Avoid: eating it in the market crush. Harden's tip: eat it down by the river to improve the ambience.5

What locals & experts say

Bill Oglethorpe, to Spitalfields Life, on what he is actually doing: I'm interested in transformation. And on how far he will push it: Nature's that much more complicated. If you let it do its own thing that's much interesting to me than trying to impose anything. It's about finding an equilibrium with Nature.3
Harden's survey: Scrumptious, über-cheese on sourdough toasties from raw-milk cheesemaker Bill Oglethorpe's hole in the wall, a Borough Market staple for nigh on two decades, with the standing caveat that there always seems to be a queue… but no wonder!5
Borough Market's own trader page: Kappacasein's raclette and toasted cheese sandwiches are the stuff of Borough Market legend.2
Neal's Yard Dairy, which is where Oglethorpe worked before this, publishes his recipe and calls it the unofficial Best Toastie in Town.4
Award: London's favourite street food stall at the 2017 London Restaurant Awards. That is a street-food award from 2017 and says nothing about the cheese.5

Good to know

Where: 1 Stoney Street SE1 9AA, at the Borough Market end.
Closed Monday.2
Two sites in the business: the counter here and the production arches in Bermondsey, where the cheese is made in one and matured in the next.3
The season: cheesemaking runs May to July. Everything on the counter the rest of the year came out of that window.1
On screen: Phil Rosenthal came to the stall for a toastie in the London episode of Somebody Feed Phil.1

Verdict

must-visit — Bill Oglethorpe makes cheese for three months of the year and sells it out of a hole in the wall on Stoney Street for the other nine. The milk is from one organic farm in Kent, Commonwork at Bore Place, and the make runs May to July only, while the cows are on grass, so the year is built around the pasture rather than around demand. The starter is grown every week out of that week's unpasteurised milk and a little live yoghurt instead of bought in, which is the slow way and the reason the cheese moves through the season. He is up before four to fetch the milk and it goes into a hundred-year-old copper vat still warm; the curd comes out by hand. What lands in yours is a toastie, mostly Montgomery's cheddar with Ogleshield, London raclette, comté and his own Bermondsey Hard Pressed, four alliums and Poilâne sourdough, toasted in a dry pan hot enough to brown the bread before the cheese goes liquid. That last detail is the difference between this and every other cheese sandwich in London. Harden's calls it a Borough Market staple of nigh on two decades and warns you about the queue in the same breath. Two things on a menu, both made from milk the maker can name, is worth the queue.

Kappacasein Dairy.