Hobbitt Farm Goat's Cheese

Australian Gourmet Traveller Wine – Feb/Mar 2004

Mike Corbett loves his goats so much he used to give them names. Now he has too many to do so, but he still enjoys plenty of affectionate cuddles from them. The admiration is clearly mutual, for when they are not basking happily in the sun on his Snowy Mountains property, they are lining up willingly at the dairy waiting to be milked. The milk produced by Mike’s 60 goats is transformed into a range of cheese sold under the Hobbitt Farm label.

A genuine farmhouse product, Mike does everything himself from tending the goats to wrapping and labelling the cheese. Only the radio playing as he milks, and the occasional company of foreign visitors (who swap their labour for board and lodgings in the country), serve as a distraction for this dedicated cheesemaker. Mike, a former Sydney high school teacher, began experimenting with cheesemaking in 1985, shortly after spending some time on a farm in France which made chevre (goat’s cheese). Inspired by the lifestyle and the ambience, he came back to Australia and started making his own cheese using bought goat’s milk.

Soon after, he acquired a six-week old kid which had the run of his backyard in Sydney. Keen to give up teaching as a profession, he bought his 40ha Hobbitt Farm property near Jindabyne in 1986 and moved to it permanently a year later. There was an ulterior motive for the move: Mike was hooked on skiing, and after taking numerous high school pupils on trips to the Snowy Mountains, he couldn’t wait to put down roots in the area. “I was looking for a way to combine skiing and working on the land,” he said. “It’s been a long slow curve, not only a learning curve but a financial curve as well.”

For the first six years or so, he had to undertake building work to keep his cash flow going, and until 1994 all his milking was done by hand. Skiing is still a passion, and his work as an instructor during winter - when the goats are dried up - still supplements his income, as does the money he earns from organising skiing trips. The trips, ranging from day trips to weekend and five-day excursions, include cross-country skiing at Charlottes Pass or the Snowy River Valley, with a picnic of local produce including smoked meats and, of course, Hobbitt Farm cheese.

Mike gets occasional help in the dairy from visiting backpackers, some of whom have come from cheesemaking operations in Switzerland, Germany and Spain. It’s a great way of bouncing ideas off each other. “The German said the view across the valley was the best of any cheese factory he’d ever worked in,” he said, pointing to the sweeping view from the dairy and farmhouse across a landscape dotted with snowgums and rocky outcrops to the Alps in the distance. From a small, rustic building in this glorious setting, Mike produces about 70kg of cheese a week, the figure rising to 100kg a week in spring when the goats produce more milk. They are given a rest in July and August when they are kidding. Many consumers are still not used to the idea of cheese being a seasonal product, and even retailers insist on a consistent supply of product, an expectation which can be difficult to meet.

At the top of the Hobbitt Farm range is the Snowy Mts Chevre, a delicate nutty-tasting cheese which can be used on a cheese platter, in salads, quiches or wrapped in pastry. Chef Cameron McDougall at grapefoodwine, a restaurant in the Madew Winery on the outskirts of Canberra, uses it atop a tart with leek, baby spinach and Roma tomato. Mike also does a chevre marinated in olive oil with sundried tomatoes, olives, rosemary and garlic; quark, a fresh curd which is appreciated by Europeans; a full-flavoured cracked pepper cheese which is an ideal companion for a Shiraz on a cold night; a fresh curd cheese rolled in mountain pepper; and cheese rolled in black ash, a traditional method which gives a subtle dryness to the finish.

The products are distributed by the Essential Ingredient and United Foods. There is also chevre bavarois, a herb cheese flavoured with garlic and dill, which is nicely complemented by a crisp chardonnay. The recipe for the garlic and dill cheese came from a Bavarian cheese factory where Mike did a stint in 1990. Mike has dabbled with Australian native ingredients and at one stage produced a cheese using roast wattleseed. But, he found, “the more exotic the thing is, the more you’ve got to talk people into trying it. You end up an envangelist, not a cheesemaker”.

His favourite cheese is a Brie-style white-mould matured cheese, known as affine, which has the extra “kick of flavour” that he appreciates. While many cheese aficionados rave over cheeses produced from spring milk, Mike prefers the end-of-season cheese which he says is creamier. Mike sells his matured cheese only at the farm gate, where he has a loyal following for it, but doesn’t promote it more widely because he says Australians in general tend not to appreciate the “strong bucky flavour” of matured cheese that the French favour. Even with this strong flavour, it should never smell off or have a sour taste, some of the faults that have given goat’s cheese a bad name in the past.

Mike does not believe the breed of goat is important to the taste of the cheese - “the big factor is the cheesemaker”. It is more important that the goats are selected to suit their environment. “You breed the goat for better productivity ... a more amenable goat ... a Swiss goat’s got the best chance here. Anglo Nubians would give me more cheese per litre because they’re higher in butterfat but they’d die in this weather. They’d be terrors up here; they’d be sitting in front of the fire.” Mike’s Saanen and Toggenburg goats, both Swiss breeds, are “good hardy goats for the mountains” and are not too perturbed by the snow which sometimes falls on the property. They have a free run of the farm, where they dine on rose briar and blackberry bushes. Mike is also contemplating growing bamboo, which he thinks will appeal to them.

“The cheesemaking operations in France and Germany might have 200 goats which go straight into a pen after milking,” he said. “Here it’s a very natural set-up. Natural’s a much abused word but they (the goats) cooperate very well.” Under the current regulations governing cheesemaking, Mike was obliged to install machinery to pasteurise the milk used in his cheeses. This change in the mid-1990s provided a lot of headaches at first. “I lost batch after batch. I wasn’t getting the same texture. I wasn’t getting good coagulation,” he said.

By altering his culture, he achieved a product that he was happy with, and his efforts were rewarded soon after at Sydney’s 1996 Royal Easter Show, when he was awarded champion goat cheese and most successful exhibitor in the goat’s cheese section. Describing himself as “always a bit of a cheese freak and a foodie”, Mike enjoys nothing better than to curl up in front of the fire with a glass of wine in his hand, his goats grazing outside and the Snowy Mountains visible from his veranda. “I really love it. It’s got to be better than selling used cars, hasn’t it.”

Hobbitt Farm, Lot 61, Barry Way, 11km south of Jindabyne, NSW. Open by appointment: (02) 6457 8171.

© Christine Salins

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