Bittern artisan cheesemakers Melinda and Shane Voss are in love – with cheese.
“We just love cheese,” Shane says. Melinda explains, “It started in 2021. I was in corporate project work that dried up because of COVID-19 and, as foodies, we’d always made our own cheeses. I started my training in 2020. We got into the hard cheeses and started a nano-sized operation at our home in Rowville. We loved it so much and it started to grow, so we moved down to the peninsula, built a new commercial kitchen, were licensed again in October, and we’ve been up and running since then.”
“We still wanted to be artisan,” Shane says, “but it had to be enough to supply who we wanted to supply – like all the wineries – and we wanted to make great cows’ milk cheese.” Melinda wanted to call it ‘The Tuffet Emporium’ (tuffet as in curds and whey), but ‘oops,’ she spelt it incorrectly on the ASIC forms.
When the documents turned up, “I’d made up a word,” she says. In honour of the new word, ‘truffet’, they do make a truffle cheese, and the list of other cheeses they make is long and delicious; Asiago, Butterkäse, Creamy Jax, French Coulommiers – are you getting hungry yet? – Greek-style fetta, Haloumi style with mint, and on it goes. They even make a cheese just for themselves, which they’re ageing ‘to see what happens’.
Because of the milk that we use and the cultures that are put into it, it has a really creamy, bouncy texture that goes well with everything
Melinda’s favourite is Creamy Jax, which started out as a Monterey Jax; an American-style cheese. She says, “Because of the milk that we use and the cultures that are put into it, it has a really creamy, bouncy texture that goes well with everything.” Shane loves the Asiago pepper from the Parmesan family. He calls it a ‘salt and pepper cheese’ because the pepper has no heat.
Melinda and Shane are passionate about artisan cheese (as opposed to commercial cheese). It’s handmade, seeing the curds and whey all through the process, even stirring the cheese by hand, though their vat has an automatic stirrer used only at the beginning to heat the milk. Then, it’s all stirred manually, which explains their big muscles. It’s a physically strenuous job – 200 litres of milk or over 25 kilos. It’s then lifted out (sometimes mixed with other ingredients), put into hoops, and matured.
The compensation, in the end, is getting to eat it. “There’s never a shortage of cheese,” Shane laughs. “It’s one of the joys of life to walk out to the cool room and say, ‘That will do today.’ Whenever we go to a family event, we’re always asked to bring the cheese platter.”
They’re also passionate about local produce. They source their milk from Gippsland Jersey cows. Shane says, “We want to be as sustainable as we can. We went to meet the people that run the business. They’re very heavy into mental health. They pay the farmers well. It’s not cheap by any stretch. I think it was voted the best milk in Victoria. If you want A class 100 percent best cheese – it starts with the milk. So we went and found the best milk.”
Melinda and Shane do special events such as weddings. They even make a unique wheel of cheese for the occasion with four kinds of cheese hosting ingredients like garlic, chilli and gin; separate when made but fused together. “It’s just us, so we can do whatever we like,” says Shane. “We’re doing whiskey cheese, using Chief’s Son single malt whisky from Somerville.
We want to collaborate with other businesses because the peninsula is a special place.” They’ve made red wine cheese, beer cheese and gin cheese with gin botanicals all commissioned by local producers. Melinda and Shane love selling at markets on the peninsula and have made many connections and a loyal following of customers. They note that when customers come to their market stall, the first question they ask is, ‘Where are you based?’
Melinda advises the best way to keep cheese is to seal it, preferably in glass, Tupperware, or beeswax paper, keep it in the fridge, and take it out of the fridge 45 minutes before you eat it at room temperature. She advises following the use-by date for soft cheese. Hard cheese will keep longer. If you’re not sure, grate what’s left of the cheese and use it for cooking and don’t forget to use the rind for Bolognese sauce and soups, especially Parmesan.
Cheese, like wine, is a living food and will keep maturing in your fridge. Shane remarks that, “like wine, cheese has subtle flavours, best appreciated when the cheese is warm and without crackers.”
Melinda and Shane’s excitement and enthusiasm are catching, but what do they see in their future? Shane says, “This is as big as we want to get. We don’t want to be in Coles and Woolworths. We would actively say no. We just don’t want to. It’s not our journey. We want to be artisan. True to what we do. Our cheese is for platters and joy.”