A growing number of Geelong residents are making cheese and smallgoods in their homes. Luke Voogt speaks with some of the home producers leading the charge.
An underground society of homemade cheese and smallgoods producers is springing up across Geelong, but it’s nothing new for Tony Poje.
The Lara grandfather and Croatian expat has been curing meats at home for as long as he can remember.
“It’s a family tradition, you know, we’ve been doing it all our lives,” the 66-year-old told the Independent.
Tony won the Lara Food and Wine Festival’s Hamstar competition for the second time last month with his delicious and tender prosciutto.
“It takes about eight months to cure it – I just hang it up in the carport,” he said.
“It felt great to win, I went into a fair bit of preparation to make it.”
But disappointingly, for Tony and hundreds of others, the coronavirus caused the cancellation of this year’s festival.
“We go every year – it was a big letdown,” he said.
Tony learnt the art of curing meat while growing up on his family’s farm in Croatia, before they migrated to Australia in 1970 when he was 16.
The family would slaughter a pig every winter and cure the meat, he said.
“I just followed my dad, from father to son.”
Now he purchases his meat wholesale from Siketa Meats in Bell Park to make his award-winning prosciutto.
Some day he might pass his skills onto his three daughters and grandkids, who congratulated him on his most recent Hamstar win, he said.
“If they want to learn, why not?”
For 35 years, Tony has worked at a local wire mill and some of his workmates were also making smallgoods, he said
But across Geelong, many like Debbie Baldwinson have only recently taken up the hobby of producing food from home.
The retired Navy cook and restaurant chef has been making cheese for the past three years in her East Geelong kitchen.
“This is the best Stilton I’ve made to date,” the 63-year-old said, as she pulled it out of her ‘cheese cave’, which is like a small fridge but slightly warmer, along with dozens of other cheeses.
“Once you start doing it it’s a little bit addictive. When you make homemade cheese it’s really hard to go back to shop-bought.”
The “beautiful” blue stilton, according to judges, was one of Debbie’s three category-winning products in the Lara Food and Wine Festival’s Cheese Champion.
The others were a farmhouse green peppercorn and a Lancaster with “a creamy texture, good body and excellent colouring”.
But Debbie also makes feta, brie and any other cheese she can think of using organic unhomogenised goats’ and cows’ milk from East Fruit Market.
“I had enough cheese before even this virus came out to last me for 12 months because it just gets better with age,” she said.
“I’ll definitely be able to keep making cheese so long as they don’t buy up all my good milk!
“There are obviously other cheesemakers in the area because often when I go there it’s gone.”
Her culinary creativity stems from decades as a chef – a career that began when she joined the Navy 1976, followed by a working holiday in England in 1981-82.
“It has to be very clean and sterilised – my husband won’t even walk into the kitchen when I’m [making cheese],” she said.
More recently she and her husband travelled to a farm in Portugal where a family making sheep’s milk cheese further inspired her.
While “a bit down in the dumps” due to cancelling a holiday in France this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, she was excited about learning to make new foods at home.
“We make our own sausages as well and we’re looking at doing a smallgoods course to do salami,” she said.
“I actually got another friend into making cheese about 12 months ago.”
The friend, a former accountant, had already been making sauces and pickles, she said.
Now was the “perfect” time for locals to learn to how to make smallgoods, cheese and more at home, according to Lara Food and Wine Festival’s Gail Thomas.
“I think people are becoming more interested in it at the moment – particularly now some people are looking at becoming more self-sufficient,” she said.
“You can’t buy any more vegetable seeds at Bunnings – they’ve all sold out!”
Many Geelong locals would be unaware of the growing community of homemade producers, Gail said.
This years’ Cheese Champion “revealed some real stars of the milky whey”, Gail said, a sentiment echoed by competition judge Janet Clayton.
“I’m sure there are other people out there who have no idea that there are some really talented locals making cheese at home,” Janet said.
“We had really good entries and some of the cheeses were absolutely magnificent. A couple of people who make cheese could do it commercially with no problem.”
Janet supplies cheese-making supplies and equipment across Australia through her business Cheeselinks, which was weathering the pandemic, she said.
“We are continuing to supply to home cheesemakers. I’m doing about eight orders at the moment that are going around Australia.”
