Say cheese: Milk Made by Bruny Island’s Haddow is a delight
Nick Haddow’s book is much more than a recipe collection: it’s about facts, inspiration, travel … and sharing.
Milk Made by Nick Haddow (Hardie Grant)
Take the milk of a cow, goat or sheep. A yak, for that matter. Apply heat, bacteria, salt, pressure, time, humidity, tradition, cultural considerations, in combinations as diverse as the world itself. And what happens next is truly amazing. The more you know about cheese, the more intoxicating the subject. Nick Haddow knows a lot about cheese, which probably made writing this book quite difficult. Where to start? And, more important, where to stop?
The book
There is so much to like about Milk Made. The tone. The bountiful information on such an interesting subject. The fact it’s Australian. Something less obvious is the lack of prescription. You may expect Haddow, one of the country’s best cheesemakers and someone highly knowledgeable on the subject of fromage generally, to be a bit of a cheese snob. A pedant, even. He may have earned the right. But no, more often than not with the recipes in a book that is really Haddow’s life in cheese documented, he uses expressions such as “any hard cheese will do”. I like that. I also like that this is so much more than a recipe collection; Milk Made is about facts, inspiration, travel, role models, benchmarks and sharing.
The author
Before he set up Bruny Island Cheese in Tasmania in 2003, Haddow had been in and around food most of his adult life: as a chef, an affineur (someone who manages cheese once it leaves the maker’s hands) and a cheesemaker. His love of food that is not just cheese-related permeates this title (he has collaborated on several food books and television series with his friend the cook, farmer and author Matthew Evans). His next project is to farm his own herd. For someone of such diverse skills, Haddow also expresses himself in an easy, engaging and highly readable style. If only the same could be said of more of the foods books produced in this country.
The recipes
Put bacteria and milk together and you have grist for the Haddow mill. Fresh, matured, cooked, raw, soft, hard, Milk Made has a use for it. Having once, in a Lebanese restaurant, eaten a memorable yoghurt soup, our eye fell immediately on something similar: yoghurt soup with chicken and rice (and chickpeas). It’s a straightforward affair if you have good chicken stock in the freezer and the recipe is easy to follow. Whisk yoghurt with an egg yolk and some flour, add hot stock and keep whisking, add cooked chicken and basmati rice. The twist is a spicy/garlicky drizzle of buttery oil and a garnish of fresh mint and oregano.
The result
It’s all in the stock, of course. Garbage in, garbage out. My Sunday afternoon stock-making had not been in vain. The recipe, as the author notes, is a meal in itself, light and with a subtle acidity. Degree of difficulty out of 10? I’d say about two. Degree of deliciousness? About seven. Next time I would be inclined to poach the chicken thighs in stock and shred the meat rather than dice and cook. And I reckon you could play around with the drizzle/garnish until the cows came home. But from making ricotta to cooking aligot, the totally indulgent combination of semi-hard cheese, potato and butter from France’s Auvergne, I can see Milk Made becoming a reference book as much as a cookbook. And I like that, too.
