Fifty Fifty cheese a winning combo

“I put everything into my cheese and let the cheese do the talking,” he told Dairy News.

And his Fifty-Fifty cheese is the talk of the town after scooping the Puhoi Valley champion of champions award for local artisan cheese at the NZ Specialty Cheese awards this month.

Alferink’s Fifty Fifty cheese is made from a blend of cow and sheep milk, the first of its kind in NZ; the cheese is made at Mercer Cheese, Onewhero, Waikato.

The master judge, the Australian cheese guru Russell Smith, was impressed with Fifty Fifty by Mercer Cheese, describing it as “a beautifully aged gouda, with complex sweet and savoury flavours coming from the combination of cow and sheep milk”.

Mercer Cheese gets it sheep milk from Spring Sheep on the Central Plateau, buying about 15,000L a year.

Its cow milk (150,000L/year) comes from a neighbouring farm; the farmer supplies 20% of his milk to Mercer and the rest goes to Fonterra.

Alferink says he first tried a cow/sheep milk cheese three years ago. Then after securing a deal with Spring Sheep for regular supply of sheep milk he made his first commercial batch of Fifty Fifty cheese in November 2015.

He points out that despite the name Fifty Fifty the cheese is made up of two-thirds cow milk and one-third sheep milk; sheep milk has double the protein of cow milk.

“To make it easy for consumers we have named it Fifty Fifty; a lot of them ask about the name,” he says.

Fifty Fifty cheese is sold at the Mercer Cheese store, Mercer and at Farro Fresh outlets nationwide.

Alferink says people are interested in sheep milk cheese, “a nice and sweet cheese, pleasant to eat. Sheep milk also matures well,” he adds.

Alferink is not a newcomer to the specialty cheese wining circle. He won his first champion of champions award in 2009 with Mercer Extra Mature with Cumin cow cheese, and two years later won with his 50/50 Gouda cheese. In 2015, he won the Champion Artisan Cheese Award for Mercer Mature Cumin and last year for the Extra Mature Gouda.

Alferink doesn’t quite remember how many times he has won the champion cheese awards.

“It’s not on my mind; for me it’s all about making the best cheese. I told the awards function that I don’t say much… I put everything into my cheese, even my words. Cheese has to speak for itself; it needs to have a character.”

At age 65 Alferink is semi-retired and attributes the success of his Fifty Fifty sheep/cow milk cheese to cheesemaker Thomas Fredrickson, “a fantastic cheesemaker with a dairy background and an eye for detail”.

Fredrickson, from Kaipo Flats, spent 10 years milking cows and also had a stint as an AB technician; he has been making cheese for about eight months under the guidance of Alferink.

They are looking at new products -- ricotta and halumi. Alferink says they made 32kg of ricotta from 600L of whey, a by-product from cheese making that’s usually sprayed on paddocks.

“We are keen to sell ricotta in bulk to restaurants, rather than marketing it,” he says.

Mercer Cheese also makes Truffle Cheese, which won a gold medal at this month’s awards.