The bee’s knees of cheese
When Venetia Hill got the phone call from the organisers of the Cuisine New Zealand Champions of Cheese Awards, she immediately assumed the worst: maybe her entry in the hobbyist category had gone mouldy while being couriered to Auckland from her Motueka home, and wasn%26#39;t fit for judging.
But it was quite the opposite. The call was to ask if she would be able to fly up to Auckland for the awards dinner, to receive the two prizes for hobby cheese-making in the keenly contested competition: the Curds and Whey Champion Hobbyist Cheese title, and the Katherine Mowbray Champion Hobbyist Cheesemaker award.
As it was, the notice was too late for Hill to manage a trip, but her success is probably no surprise to those fortunate enough to have tasted her efforts with fresh goat cheese made in the coulommier style (similar to brie).
While Hill is self-taught, she has been making her own cheese since the 1980s and has more than once been urged to go into commercial production.
She is a firm advocate of goat milk. She originally introduced it to her family%26#39;s diet in an attempt to find something to cure her oldest son%26#39;s eczema.
It worked, and she went on to discover its many other qualities, particularly for cheese-making.
At the time, in the 1980s, she was running a herd of 80 goats on a Dovedale property and while most of their milk went for calf food, she kept a little aside to dabble in cheese-making as part of her enthusiasm for self-sufficiency.
Among various cheese-making mentors she has had over the years, one of the first was an English woman who provided her with %26quot;bit and pieces%26quot;, including, early on, a pamphlet containing recipes and including one for a coulommier-style cheese.
Hill tried it, successfully, and has continued to build on that success, sharing it with friends and family, often to acclaim.
Judy Finn of Neudorf Wines, for example, had long told her she should go into commercial production, Hill says. The real irony, though, is that from the beginning, Hill didn%26#39;t know if her interpretation tasted as a coulommier cheese is supposed to, and she still doesn%26#39;t. Not that it matters, obviously.
The key to it, she says, is a delicate touch. The delicacy is rewarded and repeated in terms of the texture and flavour; it is not at all %26quot;goaty%26quot;.
While the coulommier has been her mainstay, she has branched out and one of her current projects is to produce a feta-style cheese marinated in a local olive oil.
She is also planning a camembert-style goat cheese, and will start hard-cheese production when the days are cooler and conditions are better for storing the hard styles without a specialist cellar.
Hill works occasionally at Neudorf Dairy and it was her sometimes-boss there, Brian Beuke, who encouraged her to enter the awards (Neudorf was also a winner, receiving the Massey University Champion Sheep Cheese Award for its Neudorf Ewes Milk Cheese).
Hill%26#39;s dream is to launch into commercial production of her own. But the hurdles set by regulation are high, not least the pasteurisation rules which have frustrated many a purist%26#39;s enthusiasm for classic, unpasteurised cheese.
While Hill says unpasteurised milk makes a superior cheese and thinks the treatment is pointless anyway for goat milk, since goats don%26#39;t suffer the diseases pasteurising is intended to counter her main problem with pasteurisation is pragmatic rather than principled.
The cost of a pasteuriser would be prohibitive at the scale she would like to work at.
While she hopes that the authorities might relax the rules and allow the commercial production of unpasteurised cheese, she is continuing to investigate options to get into business.
Her current milk source is one of her two pedigree toggenburg goats (although the prize-winning cheese was supplemented with some milk from an anglo-nubian goat owned by Julie Nicol of Kina, who shares a block of land with Hill for the goats%26#39; grazing).
She would like to increase her flock to six goats, which would give her up to 30 litres of milk a day still a minuscule production, but enough to mean that her prize-winning cheeses are not confined to those lucky enough to be in the know.
