Cheesemakers Judy and Vanessa Bradley are quietly chuffed with their success at the recent Sydney Royal Cheese and Dairy Produce Show. The mother and daughter team brought home two gold medals, for their tomme, a hard, French-style cheese made with sheep's milk, and for their sheep's milk yoghurt, and were also runners-up with their marinated estrella, a creamy cheese. Not a bad effort, particularly considering they only got a commercial licence three years ago, and neither has taken a cheesemaking lesson.
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Judy Bradley has been on the land for 38 years, and runs 2000 merino sheep on the family property in Windellama, about an hour and 40 minutes northeast of Canberra. But it was her daughter Vanessa, then just 16, who first became interested in dairy sheep.
She bought a few ewes and started milking them, then had a go at making cheese. Her mother says while cheesemaking might seem an unusual teenage hobby, she was not surprised when Vanessa took it up. ''She was never going to be an average, run-of-the-mill person,'' she says.
It seems she has a knack for it. Nine years later, the pair has close to 200 dairy sheep, including the east friesian and awassi varieties, and Judy Bradley milks the ewes morning and evening, while her daughter makes cheese.
Most of Thistledown Creamery's products are made using the milk from sheep reared on site. ''It's really hard work, and it's expensive to run a sheep dairy,'' Vanessa Bradley says.
The average ewe gives just a litre of milk a day, so it's a time-intensive business too, but Judy Bradley is convinced the results are worth it. She drinks the sheep's milk, which is often suitable for people who cannot tolerate cow's milk, but when the Bradleys started a decade ago, they were the only sheep dairy in NSW - perhaps, they suggest, because of the hard work for small production.
Lack of expertise in the region meant Vanessa Bradley taught herself almost entirely by trial and error. She sought advice from cheesemakers in the United States, but just kept trying until she got it right. They've only made cheese commercially for one season - and have almost sold out, with milking starting again next month.
It is clearly a passion. To make a hard cheese called ''Flicka'', the milk is first heated to pasteurise it, then she adds culture and lets it sit for half an hour, then rennet, to separate curds and whey.
The whey is diced into small pieces the size of a grain of rice, then stirred for an hour, and heated from 35 degrees up to about 50. After letting the solids settle, she drains away the whey, cuts the curds and ''jams [them] into a mould''. After the cheese sets, she puts it aside to age. She does all this on her own, in a tiny cheesemaking facility and coolroom next to the farm house.
Vanessa Bradley says sheep's milk has a much lower water content than cow's milk, which is what makes it creamy. ''It's a big, big difference, you don't have to stir it as much, it doesn't need quite as much salt, it doesn't need to be pressed quite as much as cow's [cheese],'' she says.
It's a quiet time of year, when the ewes are dry, so they have not been at their usual market stalls in Canberra and Bondi. It's small scale, but as Judy Bradley says, they never intended to compete with the big, commercial cow dairies.
''When we decided we were making cheese, we were making sheep's milk cheese, and if people want it all the time they can go to Coles and Woolies.''
Larissa Nicholson is a staff feature writer.
