Glorious goat's cheese, French farm-style. Camille Mortaud missed the cheeses he grew up with back home in France, especially the goat’s cheese. So he decided to make his own, starting from scratch. Inspired by his success in the gourmet market, he’s now also making a European-style cultured butter with local Jersey cream.

Camille Mortaud grew up in a small village near Poitiers, not so far from Paris. Like many others in the area, his mother kept goats and made her own cheese “the old-fashioned way”, as Camille puts it. “ We used to milk goats by hand and set the milk with whey from the batch before, adding a couple of drops of rennet and using the old metal hoops.”

Camille trained as a mechanic and was sent to Vanuatu to do his military service. It was there he met his wife Jocelyn, who is half Australian. The family now live on his brother in law’s property just outside Gympie in Queensland – with six children at the time of filming and a seventh on the way. It was seeing the goats at Gay and Bill Carter’s dairy just down the road that got Camille thinking about goat’s cheese and ten years ago, he began experimenting.

It wasn’t easy – getting the right amount of milk and the quality he needed. Then he had to start from scratch with the whey. These days though, in his converted refrigeration truck unit, Camille is making both fresh and matured goat’s cheese plus a soft semi-matured cow’s milk cheese and his own European-style cultured butter. He is also experimenting with a half-and-half goat and cow milk cheese to be called “Tango”. His products can be found in several gourmet delis and restaurants around the country. He also sells directly at the Eumundi markets (Wednesdays and Saturdays) and the New Farm growers’ markets in Brisbane, held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month.

The cheese-making process is simple. The milk is set into a curd overnight (it takes 24 hours) with the addition of a lactic culture and rennet. The curd is then placed in a series of cheese ‘hoops’ or moulds (Camille’s come from France) and left to drain. After another day the fresh curd is ready to eat.

The cheese that is left to mature is salted and placed on towelling cloths (actually nappies!). This keeps moisture in the cheeses and accelerates the maturing process.

To serve cheese, make sure it is at room temperature. To store and keep the product ageing, wrap it and keep it in an airtight container. The ideal temperature for storage is between 10 and 15 degrees. Any colder and it will slow down the maturing process.

The type of soft cheeses Camille makes are at their most ideal point when they have formed an oozing cream under the rind but still have a slightly harder, creamy core. This will eventually also turn to cream – also delicious. The rind will eventually start to mature too – divine as well (especially for those who like stinky cheese!)

Camille uses Jersey cow cream which he cultures overnight (by adding a starter culture, a bit like making yoghurt) before churning. This acidifies the cream and produces lactic acid which assists in separating out the buttermilk in the churning process. This gives the butter a longer storage life. It is the milk proteins that spoil or ferment butter. Cultured cream also adds a unique, slightly tangy flavour to the butter. With the natural lactic bacteria, it’s a very healthy product. Camille uses unrefined sea salt to salt the butter although he sells both salted and unsalted butter.

The churning process (in an electric churn imported from France) essentially removes the buttermilk from the butter. The butter is then washed thoroughly with iced water to remove any further milk protein and harden the butter. The whole procedure takes under half an hour and requires 20 litres of cream will yield 10kg of butter and 7/8 litres of buttermilk.

While he is required by law to pasteurise his cheese and butter, Camille is a strong believer in raw milk dairy products. He is convinced that the living bacteria in raw milk actively work to keep the cheese pure and that pasteurised products are effectively “dead” – in flavour and character. Cheese producers, he says, cannot work with contaminated milk anyway and would be quick to notice any impurities. But Australian law currently forbids the sale of raw milk cheeses. Like many others in the artisan cheese industry, Camille is hopeful that one day things will change. “I can understand why the government wants pasteurisation,” he says, “because some people don’t know how to work with raw milk. But raw milk products have so much more character.”

Bill Carter, from whom Camille gets some of his milk, is the head of the Raw Milk Goatkeepers’ Association and has dispensation to sell raw milk under certain conditions.