Product: Farmhouse goat’s milk and sheep’s milk cheese
Who: The Cameron family
Where: Meredith, Golden Plains Shire, Wadawurrung Country
Angus, you’re the son of founders Sandy and Julie. What products does Meredith make?
We make two main products: a sheep’s milk yoghurt and a goat’s milk chèvre. With the goat chèvre, we cut it into cubes and place it in a jar with herbs and oil. Meredith Dairy Marinated Goat Cheese is a staple in many Australian kitchens. We also make a plain chèvre, one dusted with ash, another with dill, and one with Australian native pepperberries that has a beautiful purple hue. People who have difficulty digesting cow’s milk dairy often find goat and sheep milk much easier to digest.
Tell us about the goat meat.
It’s a high-value product we call Dairy Capretto. It’s unlike any goat meat you will have tasted. It comes from dairy-breed goats with a finer, milder texture and flavour. We raise our young male goats and process them in our on-farm micro-abattoir. The dressed weight is between 7kg and 12kg. We have been working with top chefs like Guy Grossi and Matt Moran, who love it.
What about Meredith Dairy’s green credentials?
Mum and Dad have a love of the land, and Mum is passionate about conservation. She is a bird lover. We have conducted cultural burns on the farm, large parts of the bush are protected by covenants, and there are banks of solar panels on the goat sheds. We recycle cleaning water to irrigate the thousands of trees we have planted on the farm, and we heat hot water – one of the biggest costs in cheese-making – using a wood-chip heater fuelled by the old pines we are replacing with natives.
Where can we get your products?
To learn more about our Dairy Capretto, contact Flinders + Co (flinders.co). You can find our cheeses and yoghurt in food stores, grocers, and supermarkets; there’s a searchable map on our website (meredithdairy.com).