Ewe's milk (East Friesian)
Southern Highlands
random weight wedges
8 weeks-8 months maturation
www.pecoradairy.com.au
Most wine-lovers are prepared to pay more for an aged bottle of wine, but would the average cheese-lover fork out a few extra dollars for a matured cheese?
It's a dilemma many small cheesemakers face - how to balance cash-flow with a desire to produce cheeses that require maturation of more than a few weeks. Think of it this way - every 1kg of cheese sitting quietly in a cheese maturation cellar represents around 10 litres of milk that the cheesemaker has not yet made any return on.
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| Pecora Dairy 'Mezza' |
It's a shame, then, that most of the "Mezza" sold is barely a few months old. The younger version is a very pleasant cheese with clean, fresh flavours, but the aged version fills the mouth with toasted nuts and caramel and lingers with a hint of lanolin on the finish. And there's something magical about the very fine-grained texture, which is smooth and dense and utterly scoffable.
(Scoffable, by the way, is not a technical term, and unlikely to have been used by any of the judges who recently awarded Mezza a gold medal at the Sydney Royal Cheese Show.)
So my plea is two-fold: please, wonderful cheesemakers, have the confidence and patience to give your beautiful cheeses the time they deserve to fully develop their potential. And please, dear consumers, reward their efforts by paying a little bit more for these cheeses that are aged to perfection.
