Anthony Femia

Hi Anthony. How's your day been?

It has been pretty cruisy actually. Wednesdays we get all our prep done for the week, so doing a deep clean and getting some accounting done.

I have lots of questions. I normally talk to chefs, but I think it's really great to talk to suppliers as well. Lets start with what a cheesemonger actually is.

A cheesemonger is an all-encompassing position when it comes to dairy, right through to cooked cheese products. We are here to educate people, not only on products that they should be eating in season, but also how to cook with those products. Its the understanding of the proteins, the milk, more importantly as well, what the animals are grazing on, whether it's grass or silage, and how that can affect our health. It is also just being there to advocate the raw milk fight as well and the artisan and farmhouse cheese makers, to celebrate them, whether they're making incredible products in Myrtleford or down the coast in Mornington. It's about letting customers know that there's more to life than just triple cream brie and cheddar.

How do you become a cheesemonger? Do you have to study?

You can. We are not fortunate in this country to have those courses, but in the UK there's the Artisan Cheese School where you learn how to become a cheesemonger, which has been pretty good. In America they teach and they also host annual cheesemonger competitions called the Cheesemonger Invitational. A great friend of mine, Adam Moskovitz set that up with the guys behind Neil's Yard Dairy in London, and a few other incredible suppliers of cheese from Europe to educate and create a remarkable cheese scene in America.The cheesemonger world over there is phenomenal. It's where we are with baristas in the coffee industry at the moment, where they're seen as someone prominent in their community and you can make a real career out of it. Then in France, of course, you've got an actual university where you go to study. You become a fromager and an affineur. Its a four-year course that you do straight out of school and you have access to the Medal of France winners and you can do a stage with them or you could start your own cheese shop.

What did you do? What was your pathway?

I worked with some pretty interesting characters in Sydney in a couple of delis up there. A lot of it was self-tuition, reading all the dairy science books that I could get my hands on. I worked with my mum in a food store and watched the way she interacted with customers, and then I take myself on annual trips to Europe to work with cheese makers or spend time with cheesemongers. I was lucky enough to be a part of the World Cheesemonger competition in 2013. I came fourth. Back then it was the best of the best cheesemongers. Now it's turned into a competition where anyone can nominate themselves and enter, but back then it was an incredibly fierce competition and I was winning most of the day. Then I stuffed up on the cutting of the cheese because you had to cut 250 grand portions of products. And in Australia, we don't really sell that large amount. We do more 150, 200.

What were some of the other categories? Is it smelling and tasting?

Yes, there's a blind tasting. Also there were 50 multiple choice questions on dairy science, and I got 50 out of 50, which is great. Those questions also included photos of animals. We had to identify the type of cow, the type of goat, you had to conduct the perfect cheese platter. You had access to a two metre by one and a half metre table of remarkable raw milk cheeses from France. You had to conduct and build the platter, and you had to do a perfect pairing as well. They gave you a cheese a day beforehand that you had to then go to a local market and pick the goods up to create that dish. It was a cold dish. There was a hot dish too. Then you had to do cheese scenery to encourage kids under eight years old to eat cheese. I created a little train track and little cupcakes and these incredible stones where you'd eat the cheese off it and then you'd be able to draw on the stone. Then you had to sculpt cheese, and that was something that I had never done before. I practiced with soap for about a month before the competition because soap bars have a texture like cheese, and instead of wasting cheese, I just went to a chemist and bought a lot of soap, and they looked at me quite weirdly.

What kind of cheese do you use for sculpting?

Miette, which is a really hard round orange ball of a cheese from the north of France. You can do beautiful flowers on that. They gave us a wedge of Comte to sculpt, and then this little semi-hard Tomme cheese that I just did little florets with. Then from there I thought, I really want to make a go of this and I applied for a Churchill fellowship, which I won in that same year and went away in 2015 to the Centre of France to a guy named Ivan Larcher, who's now here in Castlemaine, Victoria at Long Paddock. Hes known around the world as the figurehead when it comes to the science behind cheese making; a lot of the new world cheeses, whether it's Jasper Hill in Vermont, in America, Neil's Yard Dairy in London, he has helped help them resuscitate old recipes that a lot of the territorial cheese makers are now using in France as well. A lot of cheese makers there utilize his skillsets. I spent a few weeks with him, went to Neil's Yard in London, spent a month and a half there working in the caves and going to different cheese makers around England. And then spent six weeks with Jasper Hill in Vermont, in America, and some time with the University of Vermont and Harvard learning about microbiology and cheese rinds. That was fascinating. There was a professor there, Rachel Dutton. She worked with David Chang on a lot of his ferments. They had a documentary about her, and she had just discovered a unique connection between bacteria on the rinds of washed rind cheeses and barnacles in the deep sea. They couldn't find out how they were linked, but the DNA matched. It was quite interesting because you'd automatically assume it's the water that we're using to wash the cheeses. But it wasn't, it's just the DNA. It was interesting for her and for us cheesemongers who like to delve in science, that's pretty phenomenal.

I feel as though you packed a whole degree into that time. How long was that?

It was about 12 – 14 weeks from memory. Then I came back and opened Maker and Monger three weeks later. I had to digest the knowledge and then get into entrepreneur mode.

I read that Maker and Monger, the idea, was born at the Builder's Arms.

Yes, I left Spring Street Grocer. I'd been working there from the very beginning of design phase. Back then that was just an empty office space, and the owner of the European didn't want a 7-Eleven to go into that space and tarnish the look of that beautiful Paris end of Spring Street. I went one night to the European, it was my farewell. I was moving to Brooklyn to go work in cheese over there in America. I went with a great and knowledgeable man, Richard Thomas, who a lot of the cheese makers were taught by. He developed quite a lot of cheeses here in our country and helped train a lot of chefs to make cheese in their kitchens.

We brought our own cheese and the manager at the European was quite shocked that someone would bring their own food to a restaurant and went to kick us out. And Con Christopoulos, the owner of that group heard who it was out there and came and said hello to Richard. And then he sat with us with a bottle of burgundy and an actual cheese plate to put our cheeses on and proceeded to tell us about this project he had next door. He didn't know what he wanted to do, whether it was a gelato bar, grocer, and he had this underground thing. I met with him the next day, cancelled my flights and then the rest is history. I helped design and build and run that pretty cool underground space.

It was so cool. You go down the spiral staircase and I know this is the chapel of cheese, but that was, what was that?

It was like St. James subway back in time. 1950s, just real cool Art Deco. The bricks that we had sourced for the walls were amazing. And the architect Kristin Green was phenomenal with her creativity. Unfortunately, it's now more of an event space and they sell cheese upstairs, but back then it was a great time to be in Melbourne in food because a lot of great chefs were coming downstairs to discover things, and I could then wholesale to them.In particular, the guys at Cumulus and Cutler and Co and, and, and their knowledge through their weekly staff training gave me the confidence to say, okay, there are people out there who want to learn more. It's not just DAffinois or St Agur. People want to know seasonality and flavour.

Did I read that you're also in the guild?

Guilde de Fromage. Yeah. So I'm still the youngest ever to be inducted.

So that's really going back to the Mason days, isn't it?

It's a funny guild. we're not sure exactly what it is.

How many people are in it?

Oh, I couldn't tell you. But they're getting more and more popular in America. Over here, it's kind of a political thing now. Its who's friends with a certain person who has the permission to induct people. So there are some great people who haven't been inducted.

Have you got a secret handshake?

There's cool robes. The one I want to be inducted into, and I never will, is the Brie de Meaux where you actually wear the same size as a Brie de Meaux on your head. It is maybe a 60 centimetre brie hat. And you wear the red cloak and, and you become the protector of brie.

Are you the garde et jure? What does that mean?

That's kind of like the guard and jury of cheese quality. So there's certain levels. So there's, there's the Maitre Fromager, which is the number one, but that's more of a boys club. For me it was about more access to studies that you could get your hands on and read and also the community. For me the better community is the Slow Food Cheese Festival, the one that's held every two years in Piemonte in Italy, they're the advocates for raw milk and farmhouse products. Thats when everybody from around the world who are passionate about protecting indigenous products, they get together. Those dinners are remarkable, listening to people talk about different ways of pasture grazing, different animals, cultures that they use in their milk maturation methods for certain cheeses, you really walk away very motivated to then come home and talk to your local cheese makers and go, Hey, this is what I'm seeing overseas. How about you try experimenting? It's all about keeping journals as a cheese maker. There's no written formula every day. It changes. There are so many variables, like the sunshine, rain, how tall the grass is. If it's too tall, there's no nutrients left. Are the cows eating close to their patties? Is the dairy clean? Because if the dairy's got cow crap in there, the half hour between milking and waiting that half an hour beforehand, whatever the cow's breathing or eating, that comes through in the milk. So if you've got a dirty parlour and your cows are walking around in cow patties, chances are 99% of the time that flavour will tarnish your milk. It's little things like that that you pick up at these great conversations with these people that you bring back here. They don't teach that at TAFE or farming colleges.

This is a controversial question, perhaps. Where do you stand on the whole Parmesan debate?

The protection of the name? I see the pros and cons, because I'm an artisan and farmhouse advocate, I like it because it forces our cheese makers to come up with something that's unique to them and their terroir. And we have a few cheese makers who have done that and the restaurants support them, but they don't have access to supermarkets. So then on the other hand, you've got the big industrial players, the big co-ops like dairy farmers, Parmalat et cetera, who, who make that Millel parmesan and pecorino. We're talking millions of dollars there that they export to either Asia, Abu Dhabi or across Australia and to all the supermarkets and make a consistent product. How do you tell someone that could be a fifth or six generation farmer who's supplying milk at a great price to those cheese makers, hey, sorry, theyre not going to make parmesan any more? Who do you play devil's advocate to? Do you play it to the farmers who are trying to make a go and make something interesting? Or the ones who don't want to supply milk to less than a dollar a litre products and want to make a commodity product? In every industry you have commodity dealers and you also have artisans and the commodity ones, usually the ones who invest in research and developments, you want to encourage them to survive. But I still think they should change names. The one that they should definitely change is Pecorino. Pecorino is sheep, and over here we make cow's milk pecorino. And it's very misleading. If youve got a cow's milk allergy, which a lot of people do, they think it's lactose, but it's actually a cow's milk protein and they're eating local made pecorino, it's a very frustrating and dangerous dice that they roll. I guess, getting off the soapbox, that's the only one I would change. As long as we don't call it Parmigiano Reggiano, which is protected.

I saw that a local cheese maker has just won the Artisan Prize, a blue cheese at Berrys Creek.

Barry won Supreme Specialist/Artisan Cheesemaker at the International Cheese and Dairy Awards. And yes, first time, I think in 140 years that someone outside of Europe has won that and hats off to them, especially his Riverine blue, the buffalo, he draws the milk from his neighbour. Buffalo milk is the hardest milk to use to make blue cheese because the fat globules are quite large. It's more susceptible to rancid notes. It's so easy to spoil buffalo milk when adding blue cultures and then oxidizing the cheese on the inside to develop a blue mould. He just did it by chance because he makes incredible cow's milk blues. But he wanted to trial this because his neighbour had excess milk and he hit a home run. And for us at Maker and Monger, we're super proud of that because for eight years now, that and Colston Bassett Stilton have never left our counter. For me, those are the two best blues in the world. You have your Roquefort, you've got your Rogue River Special Reserve. But for me, Colson Bassett Stilton from Nottinghamshire in England and Riverine Blue from Barry are the two best blues available in Australia. We've been saying that for so long here. It was a proud moment for us. I saw the sales go up this weekend because a whole bunch of new people wanted to try blue cheese, which is great because as kids, we grew up with Blue Castello and tongue sandwiches. That was my lunch. So you're either a Danish blue fan where your mouth is just coated with absolute brutal salt and spice, or you are a Castello fan where it's very creamy with a slight tang. There was no in-between. And if you were a Danish blue kid, you never had blue again because it was a very bad experience. But if you're Castello, you wanted to experience different cheeses. Berrys Creek Riverine sits in its own category because it's a natural kind of blue. The flavour of the milk grows as a cheese ages, and then they spike to develop the blue mould. Buffalo milk gives you this incredible raw almond flavour. There's a hint of nuts, a hint of sweetness, and then you balance it with that syrupy blue flavour, it's perfect. And hats off to them, they deserve that. And I know a lot of great cheese makers that enter that competition from around Europe that deserve to win every year. Like the perfect Gruyere and Gruyere Alpage, they're phenomenal alpine cheeses. But to see the Aussies do that, it's fantastic. And it should give other cheese makers confidence to, to follow his mould. He just does blue cheeses. In our country, we have cheese makers who try to be the farmer, the animal husbandry, the cheesemaker, the cheese farm gate, farmer's market. And they think they need to make 10 or 12 different styles of cheeses. But Barry, it's just blue cheese, send it out to the distributors and watch it grow. We need to specialize in just one style. And it's just given them the confidence to do that.

It's so European, isn't it? I lived in France for a year and I had fantastic friends who took me to the Roquefort caves. When I first tasted it, it was just too much for me. Its brebis, obviously, ewes milk and it's super salty and it's pretty strong. Now I think it's the queen of blue cheeses, although I want to try Riverine. But my friends would say, you cant consider yourself French until you can eat Roquefort and they would mix it with butter and do everything to get me to like it. Then suddenly I was a total convert.

The Larousse Cookbook has a famous recipe, 50% Roquefort, 50% butter and you mash that together. If you're using a hundred grams of each, you then do 30 ml nip of cognac, fold that through. Then spring onion, depending if you're in Victoria or New South Wales, just the white parts or those long green onions, dice that up, fold that through, and that's how you have it. We sell that here. We call it the Roquefort dip. That Larousse cookbook has been fascinating to learn the basics of cheese in recipes and how to introduce people to Roquefort because it's a big slap in the face. The texture is incredible. That's second to none. How it just melts on the tongue. You can't recreate that in with any other milk other than sheep's milk. Especially the sheep of that region are a noble sheep of France. And then you've got the Manech sheep of the Basque, which is up there as well with the black or red faces. So their milk is highly priced.

Have you been to the Roquefort caves?

Not yet. I was meant to, but I had a nasty bout of listeria.

Oh no, not from a cheese?

Yeah. I went with Ivan one day to taste with these cheese makers, their new creations. And there was one cheese there that he wanted me to do a sensory evaluation on. He didn't want to touch it. I tasted it and basically the body organs almost shut down. We had to drive and we were in regional Auvergne, there weren't any chemists. We went to a supermarket to try and get lemonade to help encourage gas and then vomit. But the only lemonade they had in the supermarket was all loaded with alcohol as well. We raced back to the farm and got this gel that becomes a clay in your stomach. It's in a little like a toothpaste tube. So that's all I ate for three days was this gel to help solidify the stomach, to stop the gases from going through the body and into the other organs.

Who would've thought cheese tasting would be fraught with peril.

In very regional parts of France where they still use no temperature control, it's under the house, it's wooden. Wood is safer than plastic, but very old wooden utensils with no knowledge for health requirements. There are certain things that will still scare you and harm you and that was an interesting one , my life almost ended before my career began, I guess.

That's alarming.

You do a lot ofcheesemonger wanderings around the world. Where are some places you've been?

The most magical for me will always be Comte, the Jura Mountains. That for me is the most special cheese, because that's the last of the AOC or protected cheeses in France that hasn't had any industrial influence. Roquefort, for example, is going through what Champagne went through, where they're trying to extend the parameters, Camembert as well. They're now starting to tighten Camembert rules again because they loosened it and allowed other milk. It used to be a hundred percent Normandy cow milk, and now they could use Friesian. It could also come from outside of Normandy. So Camembert became the most popular, yet most bastardized cheese in the world. But Comte has stood the test of time and the day I went, it was snowing in in March, so it shouldn't have been snowing. And it was just beautiful going up that mountain up to the Fort Saint Antoine of Marcel Petite. It's this old war fort that was built during the Prussian wars that Marcel Petite himself took over in the 1950s and transformed it into a cheese maturation facility. And that image of that cave is on every wheel of Comte when I started in cheese in Sydney and had to sit in this bloody cold room that the owner of the business said was 10 degrees but when I bought a hygrometer, it was actually 4 degrees, and I used to have to stand in there and sell cheese to people. That was my first proper cheese job. I stayed because I wanted to learn and grow in cheese. And the only thing that got me through was when wedges of Comte would come in with that image of the fort on the Comte and I thought, one day I'm going to go there. I won a scholarship. I got Best Cheesemonger in Sydney in 2007 I think it was. And that got me a two-week trip to Melbourne to Holy Goat. I absolutely loved that. Then I moved to Melbourne and thought, you know what? I'm going to start traveling for cheese. And I was invited, because you weren't allowed to just visit Marcel Petite back then and I built a relationship with them to the point where we pick a Reservation. We're the only cheesemonger in the country that has the opportunity to go to Marcel Petite every year and pick a flavour profile. The affineur, or trieur, Jose, who's been there for 32 years, there's him and Claude who are the master affineurs, and then there's all these people training under them, and Jose's dad taught him. Its a career spent in this fascinating cave.

What does an affineur do?

First they learn the tongue, or palate, and then they learn the hearing. They get a little trieur, which is like a little hammer and a taster, and they bang on the Comte, and learn the acoustics of what a good Comte sounds like and what a cracked Comte sounds like.And then it's the tasting, andseeing where that is at its age, what the cows were grazing on. When I went there, I drew on a little sensory tongue, the parts of the tongue I wanted to hit and then wrote French names for things like nuttiness, sweetness, honey. The caves are like the great halls of the Lord of the Rings. Jose just ran through these giant halls. There are 200,000 wheels in there and he just started picking batches of cheese that he knew would have that type of flavour. It was incredible. For me, I didn't know how he did it because the sign of a healthy maturation room is ammonia, very bad ammonia. You see it on a video and you think, wow, that's romantic, but you go there and your eyes are stinging because healthy cheeses give off gas carbon dioxide, so it becomes ammonia. I don't know how the hell he did it, that he could taste things while still smelling that. Obviously he's adjusted to it. It took me three days of going back to the cave to then appreciate what flavours he picks. His role every month is to pick six wheels for us that will have that flavour, take the two months of travel on the ship to get to us and still have that flavour profile. The age of the cheese becomes inconsequential because we could sometimes get a 10 month old Comte, 18 month, 24 month. It's just going to always have that creamy texture and the flavour that we want.

I am definitely coming back and trying that. I love Comte, I just love the butteryness. It's almost like shortbread. I love that.

Theres a myth of the old Comte, this is the Coca-Cola effect of things. People talking about three year old Comte, but the eight affineurs over there in the Jura, no one's ripening their cheeses beyond 24 months. If you get a three year Comte, you're paying premium for something that's been rejected a long time ago and just sat in someone's cool room. But there's this huge wholesale facility there in Rungis in Paris. It's this remarkable wholesale shed where cheese, as far as the eye can see, kilometres worth. And there's a shed in there that has Comte that they've taken from all the different affineurs that have been sitting there for up to three years. It goes from a $5 a kilo cheese to $200 a kilo by the time it hits a deli counter in in Australia. And you think, I need to try that three year old and you taste it and it's changed completely. It's dense, it's caramelized, it's got the calcium crystal crunch. It's what a great Gouda is. But then people think that's incredible. It's like truffle oil. People who have grown up on truffle oil have never experienced a fresh truffle. They think truffle oil is like a luxury product, but it's a chemical made in a lab with zero truffle in it.

Illusions shattered. Now, you've mentioned seasonality a few times. Tell me about that.

In autumn and winter, you crave meatier products, you crave filling foods. Autumn is always duck or game winter. We go for slow roasts like lamb, pork, etc. It's the same with cheese. A great washed rind like Epoisse from Burgundy, Langres which is from Champagne or Pont LEveque from Normandy. You go for those in the colder months because you're also drinking the wines in those colder months that match, whether it's a Languedoc Syrah, a very gentle cold climate Pinot from Victoria. You need those meaty umami flavours to match those wines. People don't really eat goats cheese in winter unless they're doing a salad. They ask for goats curd so they can do their roasted beetroot, or citrus and fennel salads. And then you do a little quenelle, whether it's labne or curd. Then things like triple cream Bries are very popular in summer because people have parties and gatherings. We try and teach people when to eat certain cheeses. Also in winter we're a bit more relaxed with our bodies, so we tend to drink more. And that means maybe more dessert wine as well. That's when blue cheeses are super popular too, because people love blue cheese. The spice of blue and the sweetness of the dessert wine, it just works magically, like a Roquefort with Sauternes is still the best pairing ever. That's what we do. We are lucky here to be right in the middle of the fruit and veg hall of the market, so we see what's in season. Its tough at the moment because with the climate change we're seeing tomatoes ripening now towards the end of January rather than November, so we're seeing people making more tomato salads around there. Mozzarella sales are up around that time, ricotta sales are up. Figs go all the way through to autumn now, which is crazy, so people are loving blue cheese and figs and honeycomb once they have those heavier dishes. I teach my staff to be aware of what's around us, where the citrus are kicking in to do those citrus salads with shaved Pecorino or great honeycomb harvested from our friends at Backyard Honey. As soon as that fresh honeycomb comes in, we pair that with the Parmigiano Reggiano that we do. We crack open wedges of Cravero Parmesan and having that, which is such a sweet cheese compared to the other parmesans, which are quite bitey with that richness and sweetness of a honeycomb, it's such an incredible pairing. It's so simple, yet so fascinating, because every taste bud in your tongue starts dancing. It shows people just how great two raw products can be when put together.

It's a lot of fun opening people's eyes here at the counter to remarkable things like Tomme cheeses, the Pyrenees cheeses, the goats and sheeps. They work incredibly well with those gentle reds. So in autumn, when people are doing duck and pinot nights, they're coming for those type of cheeses, it's pretty cool.

Is there a perfect cheeseboard or would you advocate more for doing a single really good cheese with a honeycomb or that kind of style?

There is a perfect cheeseboard, but it all comes down to what wine you want to pick and whether you want it to be a pairing. For me, I always pick one wine and two incredibly well paired cheeses that go with that and two different textures. Lately it's been about tasting Chablis that we've had at the shop for two years and we've held, so 2018, 2019 Chablis and that minerality is there. The hint of the secondary flavours and tertiary flavours that develop in the bottle, little vanilla notes. Comte and beautiful Camembert go incredibly well. And we just do those two for dinner parties. I've been lucky enough to open up a couple of really cool bottles with the staff with some Languedoc Syrah, which is quite fleshy with deep purple plum flavours. Then we pick two great cheeses with that and we try and tell customers this is what you want. In terms of the ultimate cheeseboard, probably to give people a more direct answer, if you're doing a pre-dinner cheese platter, the perfect cheese plate is something soft from the Loire Valley, whether it's a Chabichou, or a semi-hard from the Pyrenees, a chabrin, a goat's milk semi-hard Tomme, then the Comte. Those three with a any of the Loire Valley whites or just a crisp Chenin Blanc, it's perfect because you've got the salinity or the notes of salinity in the wine, you've got hints of salt in the cheese, but they're all front of palate cheeses and they get your palate going. They get the saliva going. Whatever you have afterwards, you know you're going to eat because your appetite's going.You've got all that sort of sweetness, the hint of salt, a little bit of umami from the Comte, but everything else is acid and sweet and savoury and it gets you hungry. Thats the perfect pre-dinner or pre-lunch cheese plate. Triple cream Bries have their place, but that's more for a celebration. I wouldn't serve that before a dinner because it's a bloody addictive cheese and you're going to eat a handful of crackers or bread with it and you fill yourself up with the carbs. By the time dinner comes out, you're too full. With these cheeses like these goats and the Pyrenees and the Comte, you don't need anything other than fresh fruit. They don't need a morsel of fruit toast or bread or biscuits. It's just a slice of pear in winter or you barbecued white peaches in summer. It's perfect.

Delicious. Would you suggest that people only buy enough that they're going to use on the night?

Definitely.

I was going to ask you about keeping cheeses, but maybe we shouldn't be keeping cheeses at home.

If you're struggling like all of us having really busy lives these days, sometimes a lot of people only shop once a week. So if you are going to buy enough cheese to linger through the week, what you want is to purchase from people who sell cheese in cheese paper and cut to order If you're buying pre-wrapped, glad wrapped cheese, it has already suffocated. It has already oxidized as well. And you're spending big money these days on quality cheese. So you want to make it a hundred percent. What we recommend with our customers when we wrap in the paper, if they're only going to serve, say two people tonight, cut a portion and serve that and keep the rest of it in the paper in your vegetable crisper. Keeping cheese wrapped in cheese paper in a paper bag in the vegetable crisper where all your greens are, there's a lot of moisture and cheese wants moisture. It's a living organism. It doesn't want to dry out. The myth of putting it in the drawer where the butter is in the door, that's great for butter because that's a dry cold. But for cheeses there needs to be moisture. If you want to really geek out, you can get yourself a little Tupperware container, put a damp Chux cloth on the bottom, one of those little wooden sushi mats that you can get from the $2 shop, a little sugar cube, punch a hole in the lid, put that in your fridge. And that keeps around 80, 85% relative humidity, around six, seven degrees if your, if your fridge is about two degrees.And that's a cool environment to maintain cheese for up to three to four weeks. Every time you pull your cheese out of the fridge, if it's a hard cheese, you just get a flat blade knife and you just scrape the faces just to get rid of oxidization. No matter how great your conditions are, there will always be a hint of oxidization cheese. It doesn't go off, it just dries. So you just quickly do a little shave and then you serve it. The myth of serving cheese after one hour at room temperature? No, because all those hard cheeses which are high in butter fat, they sweat. So the ideal temperature is about eight degrees, which is about 10 minutes out the fridge. I've seen restaurants leave the cheese out for so long and then serve it to customers.When you describe a cheese to them, all they taste is salt and spice. All that sweat on the cheese, that's the flavour that I was telling you about. When people are at home, just five to 10 minutes out the fridge and then serve. Comte is one of those alpine cheeses that will sweat straight away. Half an hour, an hour at room temp of 18 degrees, by the time you eat it, it's a mushy texture and the flavour's dissipated. If you keep care of your cheese – I keep wedges of Parmigiana and wedges of Comte in my fridge at home for up to two months. I'm a bit lazy at the end of the day. I don't want to cut a portion, I cut a big block or I just take whatever big block is there and wrap it up in cheese paper, take it home, and then cut what I need.

Cheese maintenance is second nature. We spend an hour and a half every morning trimming our cheeses here at the shop to make sure that they're always in pristine condition for our customers.

Do you think about cheese 24/7?

I think about cheese and Maker and Monger, 24/7. It has cost me a few relationships in the past, I guess. But, like anything you're passionate about, there's always ideas. You could be watching a TV show, reading a book, looking at some artwork or just driving and you see something, or you hear something on the radio and you go, hang on, that's just sparked this idea in my head. I want to run with that. I have a little notepad and I'll always write little notes or I'll ring one of the staff up. I hope they don't mind when I bother them and just say, Hey, I reckon we should try this. To tune off at home, I try not to watch cooking shows, but inevitably I do. I love it because it gives me an idea for a dish that we can then recommend to customers to add some dairy element they would never have thought of. I love that. And that's why I think, yeah, 24/7.

Maker and Monger,Prahran Market, Stall 98/163 Commercial Rd, South Yarra