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Introducing Drysdale Cheeses, the first commercial goat cheese manufacturer on the Bellarine Peninsula. Registered in December 2005, Drysdale Cheeses concentrates on a range of hand made cheeses, manufactured from the high quality milk from its herd of Saanen goats.
The goats live on the Scotchmans Road property in Bellarine, where they are milked daily. Drysdale Cheeses are a registered dairy herd and all of the animals are pure bred.
Their diet comprises of pasture, tree cuttings, hay and goat "muesli", a home recipe. They also love their daily offerings of fruit and vegetable scraps from the fruit shop in Drysdale -especially watermelon!! Extra essential minerals and vitamins are administered via seaweed meal and salt licks.
Although Drysdale Cheeses is not certified organic, they follow permaculture farming principles and adopt ethical animal treatment. They do not milk animals that are heavily pregnant and newborn kids will stay with their mums for those first few days of all-important colostrum (first milk). Each doe only kids once every two years, allowing for their optimal health.
The milk is then transported to the cheese making room at Drysdale. The basic method for making cheese requires pasteurisation in this country, although a small group of speciality cheese makers are working to allow raw milk cheese to be made legal in Australia soon.
After pasteurisation, cheese making cultures are added to the milk for flavour ripening and then an enzyme (rennet) is added to coagulate the milk, thus producing curds and whey.
These cheese making procedures use only vegetarian rennet. Different varieties of cheese will then require different temperatures and different treatments. The cheeses are made in small batches and require careful ageing and draining, and so may be unavailable from time to time.
Drysdale Cheeses are only available locally, from selected restaurants and providers.
