The first rule of Cheese Club is don't talk about Cheese Club (Part One)

Not a High Street, Northcote reference, but a richly pleasured Bridge Road, Richmond story with added dairy goodness and a joyfully cultured experience. More to follow in coming days.

Woo hoo! Sunday I got a voicemail message from the Richmond Hill cheese folks telling me Cheese Club had my stuff. I'd tell you more, but the first rule of Cheese Club is "don't talk about Cheese Club".

A scant handful of hours more than a day later and I can cheerfully report on three of said lumpettes of milk's leap towards immortality.

The first was Buche Chevre de Poitou (above), a white mould, surface ripened (ie Camembert ripened-style) French goat's milk cheese. Being a chunky slice off a largish piece, you can see the dramatic range of textures in the photo. The inside was crumbly, slightly buttery but balanced with a fruit tartness, while the outside was more liquid and pungent. Lovely, slight outer crusting.
The second was a local Victorian goat milk cheese (above), but this time a blue moulder - Red Hill Dairy Mountain Goat Blue. Tart, earthy but with a clear, honest, goaty flavour. More crumbly than buttery, it's on the vaguely harder side of a blue cheese. Lovely, but definitely a piccolo cheese rather than a lardy-arse basso profundo.

Tonight's last cheese (below) starts with a totally different epistemology, so it's unfair to compare it to the others. But as cheeses go, WHOA!!!! It's Cambray Sheep Cheese Farmhouse Gold from Nannup (that can't be a real name...) in WA, and is a cooked curd cheese. It's pretty intense and mostly hard cheese with a bit of age, and which your better class of conmen could do a quick thimble-and-pea trick with an older gruyere. It's not obviously a sheep milk cheese but is more obviously a bloody marvelous after dinner keeper. The four year old tried some and his eyes opened wide - it's going to be hard to get him to accept a cheese slice tomorow.


In the next few days, I'll post about the other three cheeses. Oh yeah.... That'll be so hard...