Kiwi cheese Scrubs up well with TV doctors
Look out Tinseltown: an Oamaru cheese company is making waves with its whey, and has revealed its flagship blue-vein cheese was a favourite with a recently deceased Hollywood icon.
Whitestone Cheese, which is celebrating 30 years in business, became a fixture at the Playboy Mansion after founder Hugh Hefner developed a taste for its soft, buttery texture.
Chief executive Simon Berry said the cheese had a global reach, with supplies found in Fiji, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Qatar, as well as Hollywood.
‘‘He had these big parties got our cheese through a Angeles cafe,’’ Berry said.
‘‘We caught word from our distributor that Hugh had acquired a taste for it, he was actually requesting Windsor Blue for his parties so all of the celebrities were exposed to it there.
‘‘That was through our distributor in LA. She had connections with Fox Studios and into Hollywood, we were supplying into an artisan cafe that the stars would visit often.’’
The production crew and cast of hit noughties TV comedy Scrubs were among the patrons and became big fans of Windsor Blue.
The cheese featured in their season wrap parties.
In fact, they liked it so much so that when the cafe ran out the company’s founder, Simon’s father Bob Berry, flew out to California and delivered it to them personally.
Simon Berry said Hefner would be turning in his grave if he knew he’d be missing out on the company’s newest blue-cheese venture, the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere.
Berry said he and Whitestone’s head cheese-maker, Chris Moran, had spent months searching for mould to use for a new blue-vein cheese – even going on a ‘‘culture bio-prospecting’’ trip across the deep south – but had no luck.
They looked in limestone caves, similar to those found in Bath and Stilton in England, where some of the most famous producers of blue-vein cheese are based.
After the team came up short, members of the company’s lab team tracked down what they were looking for in the Mackenzie District.
‘‘It (the type of mould they had sought) was brought in after it was and Los found in some silage,’’ Berry said.
The blue mould was named 45 South Blue, given Oamaru’s geographical coordinates, and the new cheese would be called ‘‘Shenley Station Blue’’ after the farm it was found on, he said.
They were inspired by the story behind the discovery of the bluevein process hundreds of years ago when a French shepherd out in the hills stashed his cheese in a limestone cave.
‘‘He came back a week or so later and pulled the cheese out and it had blue mould on it,’’ Berry said.
A limestone environment, cave and is the ideal Whitestone replicates its humidity in the factory.
It was rather Kiwi that the mould was found in silage and thus had a connection to farming, the nation’s biggest industry, he said.
The discovery of a new type of cheese was a big win for the company, which was founded by Bob Berry in a bid to diversify the family farming business following the introduction of Rogernomics.
The company has grown from one part-time employee in a mechanic’s shop to 75 fulltime staff across the country, and now operates in a 1500 square metre factory. and temperature