About
Across the road from the Fonterra Bridge Street site, you'll find our Eltham Cheese Bar. We look forward to sharing with you a great selection of cheeses from blues, whites, yellows, cheddars, offcuts, and crumbles at factory prices!
South Taranaki dairy history.
Surrounded by rich green pastures beneath Mount Taranaki and across the coastal plains to the south and west, the South Taranaki region has a proud dairy history.
Driving through the district, you can still spot the remains of small cheese and butter dairies, along with old milk and cream collection sites. Almost every village once had its own little dairy serving the surrounding farms.
Photographed is one of the very first creamery/dairies in Taranaki in the late 1800’s.
Our store today.
Still in operation and now with a more modern touch, the dairy on Bridge Street in Eltham has been making cheese for over 100 years. Using traditional methods, it continues to produce a range of hand-crafted specialty cheeses to suit every taste and culinary use.
The Eltham Cheese Bar offers a wonderful selection of specialty cheeses, along with cheese offcuts, condiments, and merchandise to enjoy alongside your cheese.
Handcrafting a large variety of specialty cheeses
Making cheese for over 100 years
The Bridge Street Dairy is a community icon employing families from the surrounding South and Central Taranaki districts.
Innovation on site is alive and well with new specialty cheeses frequently created. Our cheese is a true reflection of the Taranaki landscape, coming directly from pastures grown on volcanic soils under the maunga and on surrounding coastal plains.
Our cheese makers use their hands to craft our delicious cheeses.
The Process
Fresh milk is delivered to the dairy each morning, this rich, creamy milk fills our cheese vats where we add the starter cultures and adjuncts that are grown right here on site, giving the regional flavours loved by customers in NZ and offshore.
Next the cheese makers set the milk into a curd, and this is hand cut to create the curds and whey. The curds and whey are warmed and stirred until the desired texture is achieved for each cheese type we make.
1. Forming the cheeses
Next the cheese makers drain off the whey and hand fill the curds into baskets or hoops to help form the shape and size of the young cheeses.
All the cheeses are dry salted or brined. Our blue cheeses are also pierced to allow the blue mould to grow throughout the whole cheese helping to create the delicious Eltham blue flavours we are known for.
2. The Magic of Maturation
All cheese needs time to mature, this is when the starter cultures and moulds have time to work inside the cheese creating the textures and flavours for each style made.
All of our cheeses are turned by hand and looked after throughout the maturation process by our cheese team. Blue cheese needs to age for about 1.5-2 months in a cool, damp cave-like environment, this helps the moulds to grow breaking down the protein and cream giving rich, sweet and picante flavours. Deep blue-green veining starts to track throughout the cheese and thick velvety rinds grow on our Kikorangi and Bridge Street blue cheeses.
White mould cheeses like Camembert and Brie like a slightly warmer and wetter environment than blue cheese and after only 9 days they are covered in fluffy white moulds developing creamy, mild and milky flavours with a hint of mushroom coming from the rind.
Washed rind cheeses have their rinds smeared daily with a special salt and bacterial solution this helps the sticky rinds form an orangey colour and typical yeasty, earthy flavours with a sometimes, pungent odour.
The firmer cheeses we make (Havarti, Gouda, Fiery Delight) mature slowly over 2-3 months in a drier, environment and these do not form a rind. While our natural rind firm cheeses (Sheep cheese and Taranaki Tomme) grow a grey mouldy rind that needs to brushed by hand to create an even appearance. This natural rind on the cheese also plays a big part in creating the flavour, these cheeses are generally aged for 3-4 months.
Crumbly Feta cheese is matured for 4-6 weeks in a salty whey-brine; while Haloumi cheese is cooked in hot water which creates its firm texture ready for slicing and frying or grilling, giving the typical squeak in the mouth when consumed.
3. Presenting for Sale
Most of our cheeses are cut into smaller portions then wrapped in special paper, foil or web so that they retain their appearance and delicious flavours. They are labelled and sent to the stores for our consumers to purchase and enjoy on a cheese board or in cooking.
All our cheese making and packing processes follow strict food safety programmes giving the customer assurance that our cheeses of the highest quality.
