To appreciate the cultural significance of curds and whey, food writer Lee Tran Lam talks to second-generation cheesemaker Giuseppe Minoia from Sydney’s Vannella Cheese. He grew up in the Italian region known for its creamy knots of burrata.
Burrata, it’s a cheese really close to our heart obviously, because we were born in the land of burrata.Giuseppe Minoia
He charts Australia’s changing attitude to this Italian cheese: two decades ago, his family struggled to give away samples of the creamy curds and now burrata is everywhere – it even accompanies laksa and curries on restaurant menus.
There isn’t a rulebook for making vegan cheese, but being open to multicultural influences helps as Melbourne-based chef Shannon Martinez (Smith + Daughters, Lona Misa) has discovered.
From plant-based Greek Orthodox fasting feta to fermented tofu and African YouTube cooking lessons, Shannon explains how ideas for perfecting dairy-free cheese can come from anywhere. And sometimes, it can be nerve-wracking presenting them to the public.
I think if I had ‘vegan cheese’ written above my stall, I either would have had probably milk thrown at me, or like cow farmers yelling at me and all sorts of stuff... but it was good. It was really good.Shannon Martinez
Lee Tran also talks to Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia, about the health benefits of cheese (it’s a good calcium source!), when we should turn away from the Parmesan and feta, and whether vegan versions are ‘good’ for you.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast is recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Giuseppe Minoia: Burrata, it’s a cheese really close to our heart obviously, because we were born in the land of burrata.
Shannon Martinez: I think if I had vegan cheese written above my stall, I either would’ve had probably milk thrown at me or like cow farmers yelling at me and all sorts of stuff – but it was good. It was really good.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: So yes, enjoy your cheese but remember the serve sizings. And then the other concern is, what do you eat your cheese with? So if cheese is consumed on pizza and you're getting pizzas that are meat lovers’ pizzas and they're dripping with oil, then that's a problem.
Lee Tran Lam: Our love of cheese is so vast, it can be plotted across the planet – whether it’s Gorgonzola in Italy, Oaxaca in Mexico, Cheddar in England, Nablus in Palestine or Gruyere in Switzerland, many places are famous for their wedges, slices and wheels. But depending on people’s religious and ethical beliefs, or tolerance levels, this classic dairy product isn’t something we all reach for.
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you be consuming more tea, less coffee, should you skip the rice, bread, seafood or cheese? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast.
Today’s episode is on cheese.
From Indian paneer to French Roquefort, cheese can add a rich or milky note to your meal. For dessert, we might turn to various cheesecakes, whether they’re Basque, Japanese or via New York, or gawk at the wonders of a cheese plate or trolley.
We’ve long prized this staple: 3200-year-old cheese was discovered in an ancient Egyptian tomb, diarist Samuel Pepys famously buried his Parmesan stash in his garden to protect it from the Great Fire of London in 1666. There’ve been multiple cheese heists around the world, and a restaurateur has just paid a record-breaking $50,000 for one wheel of Cabrales Spanish blue cheese. We have an appetite for washed rinds and stretched curds – but can you go overboard with a cheese board? And what if you don’t eat dairy at all?
To really appreciate the significance of cheese, let’s talk to someone who has hand-stretched it for years.
Giuseppe Minoia: Hi, my name is Giuseppe Minoia and I'm the general manager and cheesemaker at Vannella Cheese in Sydney, Australia.
My father always says that I was born in a cheese factory. So I was born a year after he opened his first cheese factory in a little town 30 km south of Bari, which is on the southeast part of Italy. We come from a place that bases its whole cuisine on cheese. It's where burrata was originated. It's where the nodini were originated.
Dad’s mum used to make cheese from the animals of her own. Mum’s mum, they used to buy milk in from a farmer and make cheese themselves.
Lee Tran Lam: His dad Vito started professionally making cheese at age 16 and half a century later is still stretching curds. Vito moved his family from Italy to Australia when Giuseppe was a teenager and Sydney was quite different to the cheese-appreciating town they’re from.
Giuseppe Minoia: ‘Cause I worked in Italian restaurants, a lot of the chefs will ask me for bocconcini as, “can you please pass me the golf balls from the fridge?” And I was like, “golfballs? What golfballs are you talking about?”
And the golfballs were the bocconcini.
Lee Tran Lam: Giuseppe recalls showcasing their creamy stracciatella and burrata varieties at a Sydney market over 20 years ago.
Giuseppe Minoia: A lot of the comments we were getting back were “oh, it's too rich; oh, it's too fatty”. Back then, my English wasn't the greatest. So I thought that “too rich” was actually a compliment to the cheese, you know?
I worked out after [laughs] that “too rich” wasn't actually a compliment. It was actually people not liking the product.
Now, these days, you cannot go to two restaurants next to each other that don't have burrata or stracciatella on the menu. It's changed so much. Yeah, it's incredible.
Lee Tran Lam: Giuseppe’s dad really helped introduce wider Sydney to these Italian specialties.
Giuseppe Minoia: He really introduced – especially burrata and stracciatella. Dad was a pioneer back then.
Burrata, it’s a cheese really close to our heart obviously, because we were born in the land of burrata.
Lee Tran Lam: Making burrata is a process that takes several days and it begins as early as 4am. Here, Giuseppe describes the final stage of making the cheese.
Giuseppe Minoia: We mould the curds, once it’s stretched, into about 50-60g bocconcini. We put one of those bocconcini in our hands, we stretch it all around our palm while it's hot, while it's 75°. We fill it up with stracciatella and we tie a knot on top. That's our burrata.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s made entirely by hand because the thin silken skin that burrata is known for – the part that envelopes the creamy wobbly stracciatella cheese – is so delicate. And around summer, demand truly peaks for what they do.
Giuseppe Minoia: Between November and February, we're making at least 10,000-11,000 burratas a day.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s quite amazing considering that they literally could not give it away 20 or so years ago.
Giuseppe Minoia: We struggled to give out burrata for samples back then. Back then, no jokes, back then, we used to take burrata samples out to restaurants and we used to get it, you know, [unenthusiastically] “oh”.
Yeah, the Italians used to like it, but then a lot of Italians chefs were like, “if I put this in the menu, who's gonna get it?”
Lee Tran Lam: I first encountered burrata in a Sydney cafe over a decade ago. It was so unusual that the cafe workers clapped when I ordered it, because so few people had tried it before. Nowadays, burrata is so prevalent there’ve been articles that question its dominance on menus.
In the Australian Financial Review’s food issue in June, Jill Dupleix wrote: “The first time you spear the snowy-white ball of fresh cheese with your knife and unleash its creamy heart all over your heirloom tomatoes, it’s love at first sight. The 300th time, not so much.”
Then there’s Tammie Teclemariam’s viral column for New York’s Grub Street in July that called burrata “a big fat blob of boring”.
I think like avocado toast, burrata is now a fixture on our menus. And what fascinates me is how multipurpose and multicultural this cheese has become.
Giuseppe Minoia: Some of the restaurants that use our burrata are restaurants that I would have never thought you could sell fresh cheese burrata to. So burrata’s gone in a lot of Asian cuisine restaurants. There was one and they were selling burrata with a laksa. A lot of Indian cuisine restaurants, they use it in their curries.
Lee Tran Lam: Giuseppe’s niece has recently joined him to mould and knot burrata in the factory. They’re part of a long tradition of cheesemaking. But when you’re creating vegan alternatives – where do you start? Let’s talk to a chef who has been experimenting with dairy-free varieties for years.
Shannon Martinez: My name is Shannon Martinez, owner of Smith + Daughters and Smith + Deli in Melbourne, also exec chef of Lona Misa at Ovolo hotels in South Yarra, Melbourne, and Alibi in the Ovolo hotel at Woolloomooloo in Sydney. All the food I make is 100 per cent vegan.
So before I actually started making my own vegan cheese, my first experience with vegan cheese was when I introduced the, I guess, somewhat famous vegan parma at the East Brunswick Club in the early 2000s. When we're talking vegan food, early 2000s to now is like a century. The first cheese I used was a brand called Cheezly. It was really the only cheese I could find actually at the time and it came packaged in the most unappetising way – like you know how you can buy dog food in those logs? It's like that, so it was like a log of air quotes ‘cheese’, but it had the texture of putty with like grit in it. You would have to grate it – if you could even get it to grate into shreds, you were lucky. Otherwise you would just grate at and in the inside of the grater, it just started reforming on the inside [laughs]. It definitely didn't melt properly. It definitely didn't taste like cheese.
But I was really new to the vegan game back then, obviously it was my first – it was my entry into it. So I didn't really know any different, but I knew it wasn't good.
Lee Tran Lam: So when did Shannon start experimenting with vegan versions of Roquefort and other traditional varieties?
Shannon Martinez: A while ago. I think it was maybe about ten years ago when I first started playing around with blue cheeses and, you know, inoculating them with the right moulds.
All the food I've always done is replicating the originals and trying to use those methods but changing out the ingredients and sometimes you have great success and a whole lot of times you do not have great success. So then when it works, it's time to go out for a drink! [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: There are many ways to make dairy-free cheese: you can use soy, nuts, coconut, seaweed, chickpeas, tapioca, carrots, potatoes, nutritional yeast, peas and even starch water, although Shannon is less convinced by the latter ingredient.
Shannon Martinez: I've had some, a few really great cheese moments though and we recently put a stracciatella on the menu. You know, if I wasn't a vegan restaurant, there's no way I would touch stracciatella, because I'm just so over it. But for vegans, I really like to be able to figure out how I can give it to them so they're not sort of missing out on the party.
Lee Tran Lam: Despite being clearly adept at making vegan cheeses, she was a bit nervous about presenting her dairy-free Roquefort at Melbourne’s Fromage A Trois festival one year.
Shannon Martinez: Vegans weren't going to be going there, because why would they? It's not like I had my core people around me. So I took a different approach with it and rather than going the vegan route, I actually went the allergy route or I went the route of intolerances and things like that. So for example, someone that's pregnant – a lot of the time they can't eat things like Roquefort and stuff, so I thought – you know some people the minute you say the word ‘vegan’, the defenses go up. They instantly hate it before they even try it. I really wanted to at least get it to have a chance, a fighting chance, before they decided what they thought. So that was definitely the right way to approach the whole situation and the response was really great. And then once they liked it the whole vegan thing just slipped into the conversation very easily.
I think if I had “vegan cheese” written above my stall, I either would’ve had probably milk thrown at me or like cow farmers yelling at me and all sorts of stuff – but it was good. It was really good.
Lee Tran Lam: Getting that fermented funk or sharpness into a plant-based cheese can be tricky.
Shannon Martinez: Vegan cheeses kind of lack that real punch and something like fermented tofu in such small quantities can really bring up that umami flavor and that's why I think it's really important in vegan cooking to really understand food from all over the world.
I actually watched this video of this guy in Africa. And it was really interesting, right, because he's obviously using ingredients that are easily accessible to him and he did this really cool thing where he blended okra with flax and you know how okra has that really snotty stretch? I'm like, this is genius! Because his final product, the stretch on the cheese was really impressive.
Lee Tran Lam: Considering the diversity of the world’s cuisines and cultures can be rewarding when you’re looking for plant-based alternatives.
Shannon Martinez: Accidental vegan products are always a winner. And you’ve got to look to cultures that will change the way they eat at certain times of the year for whatever reason. So obviously in the Jewish areas in Melbourne, they make kosher versions of stuff. So they've got a vegan Viennetta, but you know you can only get it in Caulfield which is, you know, a very large Jewish community.
But these things exist because they're catering to a large group of people and it's not because they're vegan, but it's because they're either Hasidic Jews and they can't eat certain things like they can't have dairy and whatever mixed together. So that's where you find the real bangers a lot of the time, too.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s similar to how Shannon came across amazing vegan Greek cheeses created for Greek Orthodox fasting periods, where you need to abstain from dairy products.
Shannon Martinez: The first time I saw that I was going to my local deli and I saw fasting feta and I asked them what that was all about. And they said, “oh, it's because we can't eat this sort of stuff right now, so we have to have this.” I was like, “show me the ingredients!” And I was like, “ha, interesting!” and that was like, “all right, who else does this sort of thing?” I need to start going to the Arabic markets more or the Jewish areas more, stock up on their supermarkets, see what's up.
‘Cause I'm writing my next book at the moment, an Italian one, and I wanted to be able to include a ricotta in there that was a really doable one for people at home and that's just made purely with soy milk and an acid. So I used like a champagne vinegar. But with the addition of things like lactic acid and stuff like that, you can really help get that flavour across the line, using the rennets and things like that to help get the curds to hold. Understanding what these ingredients do in real cheeses and trying and sneak them back in, any way you can, is really important.
Lee Tran Lam: So what about the nutritional qualities of cheese – whether it’s produced the traditional way or if it’s entirely vegan? Let’s talk to an expert who can help us figure it out.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I'm Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, currently the program director of nutrition and food sciences here at the University of South Australia. I'm also an accredited practicing dietitian. I've had almost over 30 years in the area of nutrition.
I have always loved cheese [laughs]. Growing up, cheese played a big role in what we ate around the family table and not surprisingly, given my background is Greek, it was always almost feta cheese. And so it would always either be in the salad, our horiatiki salad. It would always be as a slab on the table to eat with bread. And then as my parents got more attuned to trying the Western food that was around, they also started buying what they called “the yellow cheese”. Then the cheddar cheeses started coming into our diet as well. I got to high school and university, I was exposed to different types of cheeses, like your Bries and your Camemberts and your blue cheese and all of those. The love affair with cheese just continues. I don't think there is a cheese that I don't like. And I guess I'm lucky that I don't have a lactose intolerance problem – although most people with lactose intolerance should be all right with cheese, because most of the lactose has been digested out by the bacteria.
Lee Tran Lam: Perhaps it’s inevitable that Dr Evangeline loves cheese so much because she literally grew up with it.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: The suburb we lived in here in Adelaide had quite a lot of Greek people in it. So there was a Greek deli and the supermarket was also owned by Greeks and so they also had different types of feta. We'd always have the cheese and the olives in ice-cream containers in the fridge. So [laughs] you had to know which ice-cream container had the feta in it and which ice-cream container had the olives in.
And then my parents would also have a go at making their own cheese and they’d make a harder cheese out of the feta and let it dry out even more, which would then be used to put on top of macaroni and pasta.
So we'd have bundles of the feta hanging and drying out for as long as it could. Yeah, just in the kitchen and then it would be hung outside in the laundry, which was an outdoor laundry.
Lee Tran Lam: So if you were to ask Dr Evangeline whether cheese is good for you, is it something she can answer simply or is it one of those ‘it depends’ scenarios?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: A few years ago, we would say it depends, but more recently the evidence space has changed. The National Heart Foundation actually changed their recommendation around full-fat dairy products. So up to that point, it was always eat low-fat dairy products. But certainly having a low-fat cheese wasn't the same experience as having a full-fat dairy cheese. The National Heart Foundation did a review of the evidence and found that mostly consuming full-fat dairy had a neutral effect for people who didn't have any risk factors for heart disease or didn't have heart disease at the time, so that really changed the cheese board, I guess.
Lee Tran Lam: When people think about what could be unhealthy about eating cheese, they might be concerned about saturated fat. Is that something they should be worried about?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: Well, look all the cheese has a component of saturated fat in it because it's made from milk, be it from cow’s, goat or sheep. But the saturated fat importantly in cheese becomes fermented. So just to go back – cheese is a fermented product, so we need bacteria in there to make lactic acid to cause the cheese to be the way it is. And whilst it's also breaking down the lactose in the milk, it's also changing the fats and the protein in there and it appears from the early research that these fermented fats may actually provide us with some health benefits in certainly reducing inflammation. You may get some cardiovascular benefits as well.
Yes, cheese does have salt in it and salt is a major risk factor for the development of high blood pressure. But most people get their salt from added salt in ultra processed foods – things like potato crisps, two-minute noodles, biscuits, processed cakes, all that sort of stuff.
So if you're not eating a lot of that more recent Westernised processed food, the salt level in cheese wouldn't be a problem. But these recommendations are for healthy people. So if someone did have a problem and they did need to lose weight and their blood pressure was high, it might be recommended that they look at how much cheese they're consuming. And we've got to remember that it fits into a diet. So if you're eating kilos of cheese, then it's probably going to be a problem. But if you're eating within the dietary guidelines, it should be okay.
Lee Tran Lam: What about the calories in cheese, should that make us think twice about reaching for a slice of Parmesan or feta?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: Cheese is very energy dense and that's why it was produced because it was a way of extending the shelf life of milk to provide a calorie-rich product for people many many years ago, when there wasn't the constant supply of food. So that was its advantage hundreds of years ago and why it probably continued to be so successful.
But these days, we have obesity, so yes – calories are a concern, but I think if people remember that one glass of milk is about the same as 40g of cheese, you can keep that into perspective. So yes, enjoy your cheese, but remember the serve sizings.
And then the other concern is what do you eat your cheese with? So if cheese is consumed on pizza and you're getting pizzas that are meat lovers’ pizzas and they're dripping with oil, then that's a problem. If you're putting loads of cheese on your pasta, or on your potatoes, or in your hamburgers – then that's a problem. So, it's about looking at the overall diet and I know we're focusing on cheese and for good reason and not just picking on one food and going, “well I've got to cut out cheese, that's the problem”. It might be the wine that goes with it. It might be the chips that are going with it.
Lee Tran Lam: So if you're having a leafy salad with a bit of shaved Parmesan on top, it’s a different story.
Sometimes it can be tricky working out which cheeses are quote unquote ‘better’ for you – I’d always assumed rich creamy wedges of Camembert or Brie were fattier than, say, a hard cheddar, but the opposite is actually true. Does that mean I should be switching these cheeses for a high-protein cottage cheese or a lighter ricotta?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I'm a really firm believer in eating foods that you like, so if you really like that nice creamy cheese and that's what you look forward to at the end of the week with a glass of wine or beer or whatever it is, going “okay, I'm going to pick that good quality one, I'm going to not have as much but I'm really going to enjoy it and I'm going to have the dried fruit that goes alongside it and do it that way”.
I don't want to offend anyone that likes ricotta – it's a great cheese, but it's completely different and it has different texture and a different situation in which you're going to use it. So you know, pick the ones you enjoy and have them, but remembering the serves that are needed.
Lee Tran Lam: And that recommended daily serving size is 40g of cheese – which is about two slices of cheddar.
Now, I remember growing up bombarded with ads about milk and cheese and how they were a great way to get your calcium. Is that actually true, or is that all marketing?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: So anything that's made from milk is a good source of calcium. Cheese is, as is yogurt – whichever way people choose to get their calcium from the dairy group is fine.
I'm just going to point out here that cream and ice-cream aren't considered dairy. [Laughs] It always disappoints people, because it doesn't have the calcium in it and then you've got to be careful about plant-based cheeses, because if they're made with things like coconut fat or palm oil or other different ingredients, it's not going to have calcium in it. So we are talking about animal-derived dairy products here and they are a good source of calcium. And particularly for people that might have lactose intolerance or don't like drinking milk, cheese is a great option for them, as is yoghurt.
Lee Tran Lam: So why does getting enough calcium matter so much?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: Because osteoporosis is a significant problem in our society particularly when we couple it up with the low levels of physical activity people do, the risk of osteoporosis is really quite high.
And I particularly encourage young people to make sure they eat lots of dairy – often dairy’s avoided, because they see it as an easy way to reduce their energy intake, but you stop putting calcium in your bones around the early twenties; so it's sort of like the bank is only open until you reach about your early twenties, and then that's it. That's all you have, people might then ask, “well why bother eating it later?” You still need to keep eating it later because calcium is actually a really important nutrient that we need in the everyday running of our body.
The body really tightly regulates it, and so if the calcium levels drop in your blood, the body goes, okay, we need more calcium. Is it coming from the diet? No, we're going to withdraw some from the bones and what you want to do is stop any withdrawals from the bone and have calcium as a daily thing.
Lee Tran Lam: But for people who avoid dairy for a variety of reasons, what’s their best approach to getting their calcium fix?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: There are religious, cultural and ethical, environmental reasons why people choose not to consume dairy and it's an interesting question, because many populations have existed for a long period of time without eating dairy, right, and not getting osteoporosis – particularly with Asian cultures because dairy wasn't a large part of their diet. But what they did eat a lot of were grains and cereals and green foods.
Now people go, “oh yeah, you can get all your calcium from parsley”. Yeah, but you need to eat a cup of parsley to get the equivalent of a serve of you know cheese, and rightly who eats that many green leafy vegetables right? And people go, “oh okay, or they say oh look, you've got to eat almonds” and so you go, “okay, but you've got to eat a cup of almonds. Who eats that many almonds on a daily basis?” And that's why dairy’s so easy. So taking a step back, soy milk now has calcium added to it. So most of the plant-based milks that you see in the supermarket do have calcium added to them.
So if you are choosing those milks, make sure they're supplemented with calcium.
Lee Tran Lam: So what about vegan cheeses? Well, Dr Evangeline points out because they’re made with such different ingredients, the nutritional quality will vary a lot – a nut-based cheese will have a better protein and fat profile than one made from coconut fat or palm oil.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: The type of fat in them might be problematic – if you've got risk factors for heart disease, you wouldn't want to be eating a lot of those that are made with either palm oil or coconut fat.
Lee Tran Lam: So when you’re presented with a cheese board, should you apply a lot of restraint or just appreciate it, because how often are you eating a cheese board anyway?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: When a cheese board appears, my eyes light up [laughs]. I mean it's easy to really go get into a cheeseboard and enjoy it, isn't it? I guess you've got to think about, “okay, is this going to be the dessert?”
It's, once again, that balancing everything. So I would go, “look, maybe we should make that the dessert for the evening as well and have some dried fruit on there and quince paste or guava paste or whatever it is alongside and make that the dessert”. It's sort of like at Easter, where I say: “look, you're going to eat chocolate at Easter, just make that your dessert.”
So if there's a cheese board, make that your dessert, enjoy it and then go okay, maybe tomorrow morning's breakfast can be a little bit leaner.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford, Joel Supple and Caroline Gates, for their contributions and guidance. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That, we’re turning to coastlines and waterways and casting our net on seafood. Follow on your favourite podcast app and feel free to spread the word and tell people about the show.
