A boutique outfit from South Gippsland has been named “supreme artisan” at the 2023 International Cheese and Dairy Awards, cementing Australia’s presence as a force to be reckoned with in the world of specialty cheese.
The awards, held this year at Staffordshire in the United Kingdom, attracted 5,500 entries from around the world.
Berrys Creek Gourmet Cheese won the prestigious Supreme Artisan Specialist Cheese award and is the first Australian company to do so in 125 years of the competition.
General manager, owner-director, and master cheesemaker Barry Charlton said his team entered four blue cheeses in the show, and they all won gold medals.
“Which then allowed us to be in the running for the supreme artisan cheese of the world,” he said.
As a serial winner of numerous national and international cheese awards, Mr Charlton said Australian cheesemakers had benefited from advances in technology with milk cultures.
He said Australia now had decades of experience making premium blue cheese, bries, and washed rinds, and its cheesemakers were taking their rightful place on the world stage.
“I think Australia has stepped up and proven to the rest of the world that the French and Italians, and whoever, are not really the best in the world anymore,” he said.
Made with love, care, precision
After working in the cheese industry for 48 years, Mr Charlton and his partner Cheryl Hulls established Berrys Creek Gourmet Cheese in 2007.
“I’d worked for numerous companies and I’d had enough, so Cheryl came up with this crazy idea to start our own business and here we are today,” he said.
From humble beginnings at local produce markets, the company now makes about 60 tonnes of cheese per year, employing a dozen dedicated and diligent artisan cheesemakers, who take great pride in their work.
“We focus here on quality … the staff here are fantastic,” Mr Charlton said.
Situated at the picturesque Fish Creek, on a hillside overlooking Corner Inlet and Wilsons Prom, each day the operation’s cheesemakers begin their day at about 5:45am.
Its staff, comprised mostly of women, begin pasteurising refrigerated milk into vats that then cool down before cultures are added, forming bacteria to coagulate and set the milk.
The solid milk mass is then “cut” with a wire slicer, before enduring a “healing” process that shrinks and separates curds from the whey.
The curds are then stirred and agitated in the vat by hand with a stainless-steel squeegee, and scooped into round, sieve-like hoops where the excess liquid drains away.
The cheese nursery
The coagulated cheese wheel is then turned several times, before being hand salted the following morning.
The cheese wheels are then taken to a maturing room, where precise humidity, temperature, and airflow create the perfect conditions for the cheese to age over the next four weeks.
“The cheese wheels are constantly turned and monitored — it’s like looking after little children,” Mr Charlton said.
The scene resembles a cheese nursery, of sorts, where a team of cheese nannies lovingly turn the sleeping cheese wheels every second day.
“We also needle the cheese to get the blue mould to grow because, without the oxygen inside, the blue mould doesn’t like to grow very well,” Mr Charlton said.
The company’s cheese-making process is so bespoke and handmade, it only recently acquired a robotic needling machine, which punctures up to 420 holes in a cheese wheel.
Before that, Ms Hulls painstakingly needled holes by hand in up to 24 wheels of cheese per day, spending about 10 to 15 minutes on each wheel.
The cheese wheels are still packaged and labelled by hand, before sitting in a cool room for another four weeks.
Then at about eight to 10 weeks, the cheeses are finally dispatched.
Quality over quantity
“I’ve always been a big believer that quality beats quantity, so we focus a lot on trying to maintain the premium quality product,” Mr Charlton said.
“If you’ve got a beautiful product, people will keep buying it.”
The company distributes to wholesalers Australia-wide, with Melbourne the strongest market.
But you won’t find Berrys Creek Gourmet Cheese on your standard supermarket shelves.
The majority of the product goes to the food service industry, with the cheese finding its way to restaurants, cafes, delicatessens, and a handful of independent supermarkets and providores.
The company also supplies airlines and Qantas lounges.
“We don’t export overseas because there is a lot involved, and we simply couldn’t produce enough cheese to be able to do it,” Mr Charlton said.
“We’re flat out supplying our local market here in Australia.”
Quality milk makes quality cheese
Mr Charlton believes much of the company’s success comes down to the quality of the milk, his artisan team’s high standards, precision with timing and temperature, and never letting go of the handmade cheese-making process.
He said high-quality farmers and cattle also made a “huge difference”.
“We’re able to get beautiful grass growth here in South Gippsland, we get very good rainfall and then we get some nice warm days as well, which helps the grass to grow”, he said.
Production manager Rocky Vega said the creamy, umami taste of the company’s cheese was the result of Mr Charlton’s expert knowledge, recipes and a more natural cheese-making process.
“Most vast productions of products, they usually add stuff in to help mature the cheese faster, to get it out the door faster,” she said.
“They also add stuff to make it stay on the shelf longer — we don’t do any of that.”
She said the additives in some mass-produced blue vein products could leave a lingering sandy and acidic taste in the mouth.
Ms Vega said that naturally produced blue cheeses — particularly the company’s Riverine blue, made from buffalo milk and designed for the lactose intolerant — sat much easier in the stomach than mass-produced products.
“We let the cheese naturally grow on its own, we let the cheese naturally mature,” she said.
She described cheese as a living organism that continued growing and developing in the consumer’s fridge.
A gourmet cheese needed to be kept in dry, air-tight conditions, Ms Vega said.
And a like a good wine, it needed to “breathe” at room temperature before serving to “reactivate the blues”.
Ms Vega said the optimum time to consume one of the company’s prized blue vein cheeses was at the 11-week mark.
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