So You Want To Be A Cheesemaker?

Hooping curds, rising before dawn to watch milk solidify or travelling to Piedmont for a cheese festival. The life of a cheesemaker is a labour of love thats as rewarding as it is challenging.

- ​​​​​​​kris Lloyd

Next year I will be celebrating my 20th year as a cheesemaker. In the mid ’90s, I was working as a corporate consultant, and if you had told me at the time that for the next two decades I would be waking up at dawn each day, driving to the Adelaide Hills, donning my whites and hairnet and watching milk solidify, I’d have laughed out loud.

“Why would I want to do that?” I’d have scoffed. “I don’t know anything about cheese,” might have been the next thing, or “I like eating it but I could never make it.”

But when an opportunity came up at Woodside Cheese Wrights, I went with my gut. Ever since I was a little Greek girl in pigtails, my grandmother cultivated in me a respect and appreciation for good, homemade food. Maybe that was what possessed me to start this journey. Or perhaps I just needed something different.

But the road was no Milky Way. Early mornings, milk shortages, isolation (not only in the factory but in the industry, too), a lack of information or education – all of these things presented serious challenges. The internet was in its infancy then and there was only one textbook I could find, which outlined how to make industrialised cheese – not the specialty handmade cheese I was interested in.

And then there were the warnings. I distinctly recall my first encounter with Australia’s resident Cheese Guru, Will Studd, author of Chalk and Cheese