1 July 2008
On top is a millimetre or so of cream, set seductively firm by being left a couple of hours in the fridge. Underneath this gentle, forgiving crust lies the yoghurt itself, a spongy, virginal white mass, the texture of marshmallow meringue. There’s the nuances of fresh pasture, a hint of cashew or is it almond? Underlying it all is the hint of sweetness, a mellow, trance-inducing flavour of unbelievably fresh milk. Welcome to the yoghurt of Billawarra dairy, made with one of the finest milks in the land.
To make a living running a dairy in Australia you need to have 300 cows. That’s modern thinking, anyway. But Billawarra has only two or three cows in milk at any one time. Come in February or August, and you’ll find none.
Maureen Rowe and Annie Nutter are the dairy delights of Western Australia. When I visited their modest dairy just outside Denmark in the south of the State, their cows (Topsy and Tulip) were being hand milked, the mere daily production of 22 litres (dairy cows in the rest of the country average 19 litres each; in Europe I’ve heard of them giving 39 litres a day) made into relatively simple fresher style cheese or yoghurt.
Billawarra is the benchmark Australian dairy. Forget throughput, output, and cost benefit analysis; I’d pay $20 a litre for this milk. It’s at least as good as a Leeuwin Estate Chardonnay, without the shelf life. But you can’t buy this milk, as they don’t have a license to sell it fresh. Billawarra do, however, make yoghurt and some fresh cheeses with it that they sell.
Each morning “the girls” line up to be milked. On my visit, Tulip joined the queue even though she’s supposed to be dried out. She keeps producing a couple of litres a day, just enough for Maureen and Annie’s coffee, and a couple of tubs of thick-cream topped yoghurt ready for the weekend market. Libby is the real worker, producing most of the herd’s production. If you can call three a herd. Daisy is a short legged Dexter, an Irish breed, and her milk is naturally lower in fat. In the pan (she’s too short for a full sized bucket, dear thing) it looks a slightly greener hue than her paddock pals.
What’s that, you don’t like milk?
I blame former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. A generation that grew up with free milk that had been sitting in the sun outside the school tuckshop might be afraid to drink a glass of milk these days. Particularly one with a layer of cream on the top, the marvellous, least adulterated milk, the unhomogenised version - the type you used to get delivered in a glass bottle at the front door.
I was the same. That warm, powerfully flavoured milk could have put me off dairy. I never liked a glass of milk, unadorned and cold, before that, and I can still taste the warm, sun ripened little bottles we were forced to drink at school now, some 30 years later. But if you want to know about pure food, if you want to get back to basics, to find the true flavour of things, milk is the perfect place to start.
Luckily, there is a rise in good milk in Australia. Yes, believe it or not, against the odds some truly awesome producers have emerged from the, ahem, haystack. Billawarra is so small, only Albany residents who visit the Saturday farmers’ market can try their wares, and even then, not the milk itself just the products made from it. But in Tasmania there’s Real Milk from Pyengana (home of the nation’s best cheddar), and Elgaar farm’s milk from it’s biodynamic herd of Jersey cows. City slickers in Sydney can find most types, including Barambah from Queensland and Country Valley Organic Dairy milk from specialist shops. Perth is drinking Ravenhills, and big brands such as Parmalat have widely available organic milk you can find in most decent supermarkets. One taste of this and you’ll know the real taste of milk isn’t impossible to find.