In The Beginning
In late August 1870, under a leaking roof at Gibney’s Hotel in the township of Maffra, a handful of farmers met to establish one of Australia’s first ‘automated’ cheese factories – The Maffra Cheese Company.
As the photographic record shows, there was no shortage of supervision over the vat. It was the labours of the sole, industrious milkmaid, pictured right, that ensured the factory ran like clockwork.
The Cheesemaker
Over 150 years later, Ferial Zekiman is one of Australia's finest Master Cheesemakers.
A chemist by training and a farmer by necessity, this shy, self-avowed food technologist has an uncanny knack of killing any marketing opportunity by engaging her audience on the finer points of syneresis, fermentation, phage and catabolism.
For nearly four decades Ferial's pursuit of technical excellence has led her to produce some of Australia's most celebrated cheeses, both nationally and internationally.
In 2016 she was awarded an Order of Australia for her services to primary industry and the dairy sector through her contribution to specialty cheesemaking.
The Cheeses
The science of cheesemaking demands technical understanding in three disciplines – farming, fermentation and ripening (maturation).
We do not standardise our milk, nor have we automated processes that are best performed by hand, such as milling, salting and cheddaring (yes, cheddar is both a noun and a verb). Our cheeses reflect the seasonality of our milk, which makes each batch unique.
The Farm
To make consistently good cheese you need consistently good milk.
Our cows roam freely over the farm, which provides a low-stress environment with plenty of feed.
The herd provides milk with a milk solids composition - fat and protein - that is deliberately targeted to to the cheeses we make.
In general, we do not standardise the milk (that is, altering the solids composition by adding cream or skim milk powder), which means that each cheese we make has a distinct seasonal imprint reflecting our farm at that time of the year.
All milk undergoes strict quality testing, not just for bacterial composition, but also specific vitamin and mineral content relevant to the maturation profile of our cheeses.