Second Mouse Cheese
Cheese has always seemed kind of magical to me. You start with milk then something happens, and maybe you leave it for a while, or maybe you don’t, and then voila: cheese. I had some vague basics — I’ve been a chef for over 10 years, give me a little credit— yet the mystery more or less remained. Cheesemaking was traditionally the domain of peasant women, which was part of the reason I was so interested in including it in my chefs gap year. A culinary art form with a feminine history, now mostly industrialised but being reclaimed as a craft by modern female producers? Well that ticks a LOT of boxes.
I’d been busy searching for a cheese maker to take me on as an intern without too much luck. There seemed to be an aura of secrecy about the whole process. One goats cheese business (run by what I can only assume to be two thirds of a coven) informed me that only those who have already committed to following cheesemaking as their true calling would be considered as students (or perhaps initiates). It was all sounding a bit cultish and spiritual for my tastes, but I suppose they’d taken ‘blessed be the cheesemakers’ very seriously. And then I found SJ. Zero superstition there: SJ (or Sarah Jane to her mother and nobody else) has an engineering degree and began her career designing power poles. Cheesemaking was definitely a left-turn, but I imagine anything would be a wild career choice after the straight up and down world of power poles. Anyway, there was to be no interrogation about my higher calling here: SJ needed someone to help out during a busy time and I sounded like I’d be a good fit. She’d teach me about cheesemaking, I’d work hard, and she’d even pay me. Feeling stunned at my good fortune I stuttered out “Uhh do you want to know anything else about me?”
To which she responded, “Yes: what size shoe do you wear? I’ll have gumboots for you.”
Orange is a very pretty town that I had only visited once before for a roller derby boot camp. I remember that three people were hospitalised and someone ate all my cereal. Neither of those things seemed like a good basis for what to expect when moving to Orange, which has been steadily growing its reputation as a food and wine destination for bourgie gourmands from Canberra and Sydney. That makes me a slightly poorer version of the target market, but as I was willing to spend what money I had very irresponsibly I knew I’d fit right in. And, as I gave up roller derby years ago, I was also willing to bet there’d be fewer hospitalisations and cereal-based thefts. A family friend had called his niece who was willing to have me sleep in the spare room, so long as I didn’t mind having a 3 year old housemate. Having had almost nothing to do with small children I was blissfully unaware that I would be required to listen to the songs of Frozen almost daily so I readily agreed.
It was happening: I was moving to Orange to try my hand at cheesemaking.
The cheese factory sits on the Molong Highway inside a large building that also hosts a cafe/produce shop, an independent brewery, and a chilled foods distribution company. Walking through the site early in the morning requires navigating a throng of forklifts to a small, white construction sitting within the high ceilings of the warehouse space.
You first enter a small anteroom which serves as an office/storage space for accountant/office manager/delivery driver Jill (aka SJ’s mum), and then a staffroom and locker room. This space also function as an airlock between the factory and the outside world. The factory has a positive air pressure system which pushes air out when doors are opened, rather than sucking air in.
The air pressure system in the factory means that no nasty bits of dirt or dust are sucked inside which keeps things nice and clean but it DOES require you to check that the other door is closed before entering or exiting. I only messed it up once, but fortunately only opened it a crack so it wasn’t a disaster. Good thing it was a cheese factory airlock and not a submarine or we would have really been in trouble.
When I’d previously imagined cheesemakers my mind had wandered into apple-cheeked Swiss milkmaids territory, but the reality is something a little more industrial: white factory uniforms, hairnets and, of course, the promised gumboots. When stepping into the factory there’s a shallow trough sunk into the floor which is filled with a chlorine sanitising solution. Each time you step in you need to splishy-splash your gumboots which is an important cleaning procedure that also appeals to my puddle-jumping tendencies: a rare combination of cleaning and joy that would definitely improve the cleanliness of my house if it happened more often. After the puddle-jumping-sorry-boot-sanitizing comes the surgical scrub — fans of medical dramas will be familiar — before donning a full length rubber apron. Fans of serial killer dramas will be familiar with those and fans of Dexter will be familiar with both.
The factory is divided up into the imaginatively named ‘make room’ and ‘pack room’ along with 4 large cool rooms which are named after the cheeses that are stored within. I imagine the goats cheese coven who rejected me must have suitably witchy names for the rooms in their little factory. Which is actually entirely appropriate: witches and cheese have a long-standing history. For perhaps thousands of years women were excellent cheesemakers, and as we know, alongside the histories of women doing things well there is generally a history of men feeling threatened by their excellence and retaliating with violence. So as women made great cheese, men also accused them of witchcraft. If a cow stopped giving milk, or the curds were wrong, or the cheese went sour it was obviously the fault of a woman: I wonder if she floats?
The mysterious witchy ways of cheesemaking were about to give way to some serious science, and a helluva lot of hand sanitising.
To be continued…
