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Once upon a time, across little young New Zealand, a proud regional cheese-making tradition thrived.
These days, New Zealand is world famous overseas for its milk powders, infant formulas, block cheddars and assorted commodity industrial dairy products. The good farm cheese – the one with a long characterful flavour and complexity, continues to be off the radar to many.
This country has a modest history of new world farm cheese production relative to the old world cheese-making traditions overseas. Take Saxelby Stilton for example – a cheese produced in Woodlands Invercargill from 1890–1935. Saxelby Stilton was exported all around the world and praised for its superior flavour. It is both New Zealand’s most famous, and most unknown, cheese (in its native land), an important footnote in our culinary history.
Right now, good cheese is one of the few locally produced foodstuffs where the best quality is only available here, not exported like so many other foods are. The regulatory requirements to export unfairly work against small cheese-makers, particularly so for those producing raw milk cheese.
No one stumbles into cheese making in New Zealand, you have to go out of your ‘whey’ to do it. The food police – the Ministry of Primary Industries – make it so much harder. If left unchallenged, they will further regulate local cheese into a hermetically sealed and tasteless existence. The irony is, New Zealand is in this deliciously good cheese bubble and many folks don’t know it.
I am currently on the lookout for a cave to create further food adventures. I am looking for a dark place. Objectionable microorganisms and associated disagreeable tastes develop in the light, solar light, and ultra violet light rays, so I need somewhere with thick walls without windows, any thermal changes from the outside are reduced by insulation.
Ideally, the temperature needs to be 10°C to 12°C, comfy for bacterial activity and ripening. No ripening will take place if it is cold. Also important is the ability to release heat, and provide clean air with a gentle airflow to release this. Lots of water on the floor is cool too, to get a good mixture of air and water vapour.
I love the cheese cave at Fort St Antoine of Marcel Petite in France. It is an old ammunitions bunker converted in the early 1960s as a place to age cheese. A while back I emailed the Defence Forces about the huge World War II tunnel complex at the end of Whangaparaoa Peninsula. The ‘unclassified’ reply advised me that “all the tunnels are currently in use for training and other purposes”.
I’m hoping to reignite this conversation. I’ll bring the cheese.
Calum, who lives in Stanmore Bay, has a passion for cheese and fermented or pickled foods. He is also a keen forager, who supplements his family’s pantry and meals with clever use of wild found foods. His column will be monthly.
