Say Cheese @ Tamarind Hill Farm

Here at Hotel Mocking Bird Hill we are very fortunate and grateful to be able to include Jamaica’s Tamarind Hill Farm amongst the wonderful providers of locally sourced produce on offer to our guests & diners. Located in Tom’s Hope, nestled in the Rio Grande valley in Jamaica's north-eastern parish of Portland, Tamarind Hill Farm was founded by New Yorker Joanna Slimforte and her Jamaica-born husband Vincent Slimforte in 1990, and has gone from strength to strength ever since, offering an ever-expanding & diversifying range of magnificent cheeses, yoghurt & milk.

Inspired as a young child by the family pet goat named Sheila, Joanna has now built up at Tamarind Hill Farm a herd of 22 does, 2 bucks (impressively named Samson & Goliath) and innumerable kids (28 at last count!), and milks the does herself every morning, freshly returning to the house with a pail of frothing milky goodness with which to make their cheese.

From the humblest of simple, naturally zesty chevre, Tamarind Hill Farm now offers a prodigious selection, including chevre with fresh herbs & garlic, ground black pepper, spicy tamarind chutney and flavoured with their own honey, to name but a few. They also now produce a tangy feta, a mozzarella, creamy dreamy ricotta, quark, goats’ milk yoghurt, their own version of the fermented milk drink kefir, and their signature cheese, a ripened bloomy rind cheese named “Tom’s Hope”, resplendently representative of the Slimforte’s optimism and confidence for the future perhaps! It is this cheese they feel truly expresses their uniqueness of revolutionary approach to cheese making in Jamaica.

To quote Joanna herself: “Of all the cheeses, these bloomy rinds most reflect what the French call terroir, that is, their flavour and characteristics vary according to the local conditions on each individual farm. And that makes these cheeses, produced right here in Jamaica, truly unique. So the adventure continues”

Tamarind Hill Farm is approximately 1.5 miles (2.93 km) from Hotel Mocking Bird Hill (see our map of locally sourced produce)

simple & naturally zesty

Feta Cheese,
Tamarind Hill Farm

"Of all the cheeses, these bloomy rinds most reflect what the French call terroir, that is, their flavour and characteristics vary according to the local conditions on each individual farm. And that makes these cheeses, produced right here in Jamaica, truly unique. So the adventure continues..."

Joanna Slimforte