There’s got to be more to Australian cheese than King Island Dairy and the crap that I tasted – but declined to sell – when I was still cheesemongering at Artisanal in NYC. At least that’s what I told myself when I set out to visit my first cheese shop in Melbourne’s Docklands district just after Christmas.
My experiences with Australian cheeses had been, until December, woeful and disappointing. I remember one importer bringing in more than a dozen cheeses for me and Daphne to taste and evaluate. Although they had been airfrieghted in and were, presumably, relatively fresh, some were ammoniated with slightly sticky rinds, while others were bland and no different from the mediocre cheeses we had in the US, at more than double the price. We took a pass on everything.
One of the lessons I took from my time working as a buyer is that there is often great cheese in the world, made by talented cheesemakers, that never makes it to US shores. Sometimes it is because the cheesemaker cannot or will not register with their own government and the FDA (see my entry for an explanation). Others are too small. And yet others just don't care or need US notice or recognition. Sometimes it is a combination of factors, sometimes it is the whim of the cheesemaker alone. And sometimes a cheese makes it in briefly, then disappears. Knowing this I was hopeful (but not overly optimistic) that I would find great cheese during my trip.
Turns out I was could not have been more disappointed. A little web research helped explain why.
Australia has steadfastly refused to allow raw milk cheeses of any kind into the country until 1998, when aged Swiss cheeses like Sbrinz and Gruyere were allowed, and still prohibits cheesemakers from using raw milk in cheesemaking, even in aged cheeses.
Will Studd, who runs Calendar Cheese Company and is Australia’s cheese guru, infamously stated that the prohibition against raw milk cheesemaking in Australia was holding cheese quality back:
“I don't think any specialty cheese industry in the world has ever developed without raw milk because raw milk cheeses essentially reflect the area they come from”.
This statement is both true (raw milk cheeses do reflect the area they come from) and untrue (pasteurized cheeses, when made well, also reflect the area they come from). Australia has yet to develop great farmstead cheese, due not only to the ban on raw milk but, among other things (including poor cheesemaking), tight regulations on microbial count in the cheese aging process – a ban which limits the temperature a cheese can be ripened and aged at and slows the growth of the bacteria responsible for flavor in pasteurized and unpasteurized cheese.
The Sydney Morning Herald, in an article from 2004, quotes Laurie Jensen, the cheesemaker from Tarago River Cheese Company, who is ready to see the regulations lifted:
“"I'm very frustrated by it: we mature our cheese at anything from 12 to 20 degrees [celsius] and we've got this stupid storage regulation of 4 degrees," he says. "We've been grinding away for 20 years, and every time we turn the corner, we get belted. I'm not sure how you're supposed to build flavour into cheeses."
Milk quality and low-grade or homogeneous pasture, as well as lack of diversity in dairy animals may also contribute to poor cheese quality, contends the articles author, Matthew Evans. Australia has some glorious brush and countryside, not to mention a diverse climate packed with micro climates; is the implication that farmers are feeding their animals the same thing, grazing them on the same grasses, regardless of their location in the country? This seems more a flight of fancy than truth.
Trying to understand why
In some countries in Europe, silage is used for feed during the winter – and the results are still tastier than 99% of the cheeses in Australia. I can’t believe it is only or largely the milk and pasture, although both do play vital roles in the creation and expression of terroir. Lack of cheesemaking expertise, limits on bacteria count, average milk, and high labor and feed costs can contribute to poor cheese in varying degrees. And bad cheesemaking may be the number one culprit.
As in the US, the size of Australia makes distribution a challenge for distributors and cheesemakers who want to get exposure for their product. A cheese made in Western Australia will be tough to move to a market in Sydney. Hot weather combined with expensive overland and air transportation add costs to the product similar to the markup on California cheeses in New York or Chicago. And as in the US before the artisan cheese boom (yes, there actually is one, it started around 1999) there isn’t much demand for domestically produced cheeses. It may be a chicken-or-the-egg question. Is poor cheese quality reason for the lack of demand, or is there no demand, thus no need or ability to improve quality?
In some ways, Australia’s attitude toward cheese (in general) reminds me of the US in the 1980s, when artisan goat cheese was first making an appearance in US restaurants with Laura Chenel’s cheese in California. Cheese was something people stored in plastic wrap singles, shelf-stable boxes, or bought shredded for pizza, but it was not something that we cared about. Goat cheese seemed to change all that. Soon the pleasantly acidic cheese was on the menus of "in" west coast restaurants, and worked its way across the country as it tracked to New York and back again.
Even in the mid-90s, it was hard to find truly great artisan and farmhouse cheese in the US. And then something took hold in the late ‘90s. A generation of young cheesemakers began to come of age, taking their inspiration from home grown American cheesemakers such as Laura Chenel and Sally Jackson; the great UK cheese evangelist Randolph Hodgson at Neal’s Yard Dairy, and the small, unsung heroes of cheesemaking across Europe, coaxing terroir from their milk and using the centuries-old methods of their teachers and mentors in Europe.
There is obviously more to the story than I'm acknowledging, so much more - I don't mean to trivialize anyone's role in the development and growth of the US artisan cheese boom. The American Cheese Society, Whole Foods, a growing interest in the source of our food, the Slow Food movement, Zingerman's, and countless small retailers across the country helped fuel interest in artisan and farmhouse cheese. It is far too much to include in a blog entry on Australian cheese....
Contrasts in the US
The American cheese scene does get better every year but has much room for improvement. For every great new cheesemaker, there are 20 others making mediocre cheese. The last time I went to the American Cheese Society’s Festival of Cheeses, I was disappointed by the overall lack of quality, the ubiquity of flavored blocks of cheese, and the obvious omission of several great cheeses from the contest – either intentionally or unintentionally on the part of the cheesemaker. This is not to say there are no great cheesemakers in the States – there most certainly are, making (relatively) consistent cheese that can compete with the world’s best. I love Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Rogue Creamery’s blues, Cindy Major’s Vermont Shepherd, Mateo Kehler’s Winnemere, Cato Corner’s Drunk Monk, Love Tree’s Gabriel and Trade Lake Cedar, Winchester Extra Aged Gouda, Andante’s fresh goat, baton, and melange (see below for more on Andante), and many others I can’t recall as I write this. But there are dozens of other cheesemakers out there who are inconsistent or unremarkable and are propped up by their artisan or farmhouse or organic status, celebration in the local press, and romancing at the nearby farmers market. I think there is a place for this sort of local product…just not necessarily outside a 25 mile radius of their operation.
But I’m getting away from my focus – Australian Cheese.
My sister and I wandered around Melbourne, and after a little museum hopping, I suggested a walk out to the Docklands. What I really meant was that I wanted to go to Docklands and if I told her it was because I was trying to find a cheesemonger, she wouldn’t go for it. I abandoned her on a park bench and almost instantly bumped into The Wine and Cheese Providore – the holy grail.
The cheese section of the store was inside a cooler – yes, the same kind of cooler with the same kind of refrigeration/humidification unit that Murrays or Artisanal might have, except with a glass window in place of a wall. A sign on the door urged me to come in. None of the cheeses were behind glass or wrapped in plastic. Everything was out, either aging on wooden shelves or in neat piles and ready to buy. The cheeses with fleurie rinds were kept in a cooler, to control aging a little more. I was smitten!
Belinda Paterson, the cheesemonger at the Providore, led me through the Australian cheeses she had on hand. It didn't take long because there weren't many. The good ones were sold out and the rest weren't worth trying. There was not a single cheese from King Island Dairy -- those are carried by supermarkets and the stalls at Queen Victoria Market. Instead she gave me a list of 'must try' cheeses, and told me to head over to another part of town to see her old colleague Ryan Andrijich at Richmond Hill Cafe & Larder. On her list? Holy Goat's La Luna, Heidi Dairy's Tilsit, Gruyere, and Raclette, and Red Hill's Misty Valley.
Here's Belinda inside the cheese cave:
and here's another view of the cheese:
Can you spot the Australian cheese? There's just one in this picture.
So I was off to Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder. And sure enough, Ryan was there. Here he is, standing by the register just outside the cave:
The cheese room is gorgeous:
This view shows the construction of the room - and the shelves. Notice the wood? When we tried that at Artisanal the health department came down on us. So we used plastic...definitely not the same. I like that you can see the cafe through the window - it provides a sense of place and also gives diners something to look at other than the sidewalk or their dining companion.
Ryan confirmed what Belinda had said -- there wasn't much good cheese around, and the little good cheese available wasn't in stock because the Christmas holidays had wiped out the inventory. But there was French cheese to spare -- priced so many times higher than here in the US. He did have the Heidi Dairy cheeses -- they were just fine. But my feeling for them was tempered by the fact that similar cheeses from Switzerland were so much better, and priced lower. The novelty was that they were made in Australia, and were smaller than the originals on which they were modeled. For someone putting together a Australian-focused menu, they would be the perfect domestic melting cheese. For someone like me looking for a transcendent experience in the form of fermented milk, they were forgettable and irrelevant.
I grilled Ryan a little more about cheesemaking in Australia. He could name two cheesemakers who he thought were great - a woman from Western Australia whose name I cannot remember, and the two women from Holy Goat. And he didn't have any of their cheeses in stock.
When I came home I did a little more research on Holy Goat. I found this great article from Divine Online in which the author, Andrew Wood, takes Australia's cheesemakers to task. He writes:
There are too many so-called "specialist cheeses" produced in this country that are either stultifyingly bland and boring or wildly inconsistent to the point of being inedible.
Wood then goes on and describes how Carla and Ann-Marie learned their craft by working on organic farms in Europe and Ireland and from working for Gay Kervella in Western Australia (incidentally, Kervella's cheese as well as cheeses from Bruny Island, another acclaimed dairy, was and may still be available in the US via www.34-degrees.com ). They are completely in tune with the seasons and the land they work. They have 40 Saanen and British Alpine Goats, and will eventually milk up to 60 goats. That's not a lot of goat cheese. Harley Farms, where I spent a summer in 2002, milks nearly 250 goats, and even then easily sells out all their cheese). The two women employ traditional French 'soft curd' method of making cheese, ladling uncut curds into molds, which keeps them soft and supple, with a fine texture.
I will go back to Australia, and I will taste great Australian cheese. I will just have to plan better next time, and arrange to see some farms. I am optimistic that there is great Australian cheese, even if I have yet to taste it.
Recent Comments