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Big cheeses honour small producer

A boutique goat's milk cheese has taken out the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) champion new cheese award

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A boutique goat's milk cheese has taken out the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) champion new cheese award at the Cuisine NZ Champions of Cheese Awards.

Pukeatua Peak's Maungatautari pipped 14 other entries to win this category before going on to take out the supreme award for smaller cheesemakers at the event.

NZFSA standards director Carol Barnao says New Zealand is a proud dairying nation with a long history in cheesemaking and sponsoring this award is an opportunity for NZFSA to celebrate the industry's inventiveness.

"Internationally we are recognised for our quality dairy products and it is exciting to see our cheesemakers constantly striving to produce new and exciting products."

The story behind the Pukeatua Peak cheeses is a tale of Kiwi ingenuity.

Fiona and Jeff Graham, who make the award-winning hard cheese, only turned their hands to cheesemaking last year when the co-op they had been supplying goat's milk to for the past decade was unable to take all the milk their 400 dairy goats were producing. In response the Grahams decided to create their own cheeses with the surplus.

"A unique selling point to our cheese is that it is produced from a biological farming system, which people really love."

After less than a year of producing their hand-crafted products in collaboration with an experienced cheesemaker, they have developed five goat's milk cheeses: feta, haloumi, camembert, blue cheese and the award winning Maungatautari.

"Although we have had great response to our cheeses wherever we have sold them, it was still a surprise for us newcomers to take out the supreme award," Fiona says. "We were anticipating that our cheeses might take home a few medals, but getting medals for each of them and also winning the top prize for Maungatautari was incredible."

More than 430 cheeses were entered in the 2010 Cuisine NZ Champions of Cheese Awards. The hundreds of cheeses in the Cuisine NZ Champions of Cheese Awards were judged in 19 categories all honouring the excellence in the diverse range of cheese New Zealand now produces.