Slow Food Perth member and cheesemaker James Dorey reports on a ‘blind’ milk tasting at the 2009 Mundaring truffle festival.
THE winter showers had moved on, and it was warm and sunny as I entered the Slow Food Perth marquee at the Mundaring truffle festival. A pleasant aroma of leaf-mould and damp earth greeted my nostrils. I was introduced to my co-panellists: Daran Thompson of Avon Valley Dairy; Sophie Zalokar, chef and food writer; olive oil maven Jill James; Anthony Georgeff, editor of Spice magazine; and Matt O’Donoghue of Abstract Gourmet, and with no further ado, was presented with six samples of milk.
Judging of milk can be a little daunting, compared with wine, for example. Humans are mostly composed of water, and I believe we are ‘wired’ to make fine distinctions of flavour and aroma a bit more easily with aqueous solutions than with fats. The flavour and body of milk is evaluated in much the same way as wine, with a lot of the emphasis being on the back of the palate. Since milk is essentially an emulsion of water, proteins, sugars and fat, we have to be a bit careful not to let it ’swamp’ our taste-buds if we want to make an objective comparison, so spitting, unattractive as it might be, is more or less essential.
Aroma is harder to detect. As a cheesemaker, I would typically stick my head into the man-hole in the bulk container of raw milk and sniff a good lungful of the concentrated vapours from several thousand litres of milk. This is enough to give me a good idea of the stage in the animals’ lactation cycle, what they have had for breakfast, or if Ermintrude has mastitis. With the packaged product we don’t have that luxury, so I had to spend some time warming up the samples with my hands before I could get any impression at all of the aromas.
So, adopting my best poker-face, I name the samples here. But of course this tasting was conducted ‘blind’ – the only way to be sure that preconceptions won’t lead us to imagine characteristics that aren’t there. I used a very informal score sheet, allocating points out of 30, with 10 each for aroma, flavour and body. All the offerings were full-cream milk.
First up was a sample from Margaret River Creameries. This was an excellent flavour profile, good body and generous cream content: 23 points.
Next was Bannister Downs’ full cream milk: As well as a pleasantly fresh ‘nuttiness’ in flavour, there was also a barely marginal ‘weed’ characteristic, but not to any extent that I could regard as a defect – especially at a time when many dairies are using winter feed. Body was excellent, with well-integrated cream content. 24.5 points.
My third sample was from Ravenhill dairy. This was a surprise: what was obviously an excellent milk had been ’scalded’ in pasteurisation. I later heard someone describe it as ‘like the milk she had as a child’. She was obviously given more custard than I was… Anyway, that aside, it had an unctuous mouthfeel from a generous fat content. 19 points. If I were judging the product again, I might be less forgiving of the processing lapse, but since I make a policy of only altering my score with the sample in front of me, I’ll let it stand.
Number four turned out to be a surprisingly disappointing offering from Harvey Fresh. It gave the impression of having been over-worked during separation or pasteurisation, or even perhaps some dilution by flushing with water: flat and insipid. Given the normally high standard of the initial product, I can only hope this was a bad bottle or batch.
The fifth sample was an obviously generic, thoroughly homogenised product marketed under the Coles label. No surprises here: nothing to offend anybody, but nothing to get excited about either. Aroma was nearly absent. 15 points.
My final sample turned out to be another generic offering, but of a somewhat better standard, sold under the Browne’s label. I have no reason to suppose the milk from the cow was vastly different from the preceding sample, but Peter’s and Browne’s seem to have made an attempt to leave some of the flavour and aroma in the milk. 17 points.
It is enlightening to check out the products of these dairies at a time when no-one is scrambling for awards from the Dairy Industry Association of Australia or the various Royal Shows. Most (I believe) take special pains to make sure of their quality control for those events, so we wouldn’t get the kind of processing faults we see here. Where this session stands out is that everybody was able to try the products out for themselves without preconceptions arising from what is said on the label – or indeed from anything that might be said by someone like me.