It’s a ritual that’s been played out for centuries … across the hillside villages of Sicily, people troop to the door of the local farmer-cheesemaker to collect fresh-cooked hot ricotta for lunch.
The scene repeats itself in a somewhat surprising location, with Italians from all over Melbourne flocking to the city’s industrial heartland every Sunday for an authentic taste of the old country.
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Men, women and children armed with an array of saucepans, bowls and buckets line up at the Alba Cheese factory shop in Tullamarine waiting for the next batch of ricotta to “flower”.
As the proteins rise to the top of the simmering whey and clump together they are scooped steaming into receptacles customers have brought from home.
“It’s a tradition – first church for Mass and then here for cheese,” says Gina Agliozzo, of Avondale Heights, as she joins a cheerful, chatty queue.
The story of Alba Cheese begins in Sortino, a Sicilian village with a population of just 9000 people. It was there on a dairy farm owned by their father that brothers Mario and Gaetano Bongiorno first learned to make fine Italian cheese.
They discovered on migrating to Australia in the 1960s that this was not a terribly useful skill in a country where Kraft processed cheese dominated the household market.
Like many new migrants they first found employment as labourers, before being able to return to their craft in one of the first Italian cheese-making companies established in Melbourne.
By the late 1970s, the two men were ready to strike out on their own and they bought three lots in Assembly Drive, Tullamarine.
Their factory opened in 1982: the obvious name for the business founded by the Brothers Good Morning – as Bongiorno translates – was Alba, meaning dawn.
And true to the business name, for the next 30 years Mario and Gaetano would be at work well before the first light broke, getting up at 2am to be at work by 3am and often working until 7pm – seven days a week.
“I brought up our three boys by myself and there were times I felt like a widow,” says Gaetano’s wife, Lena, who is also Alba’s office manager.
But the work has paid off. Today Alba Cheese occupies five lots and produces 30 award-winning cheese products, from the finest ricotta and feta to stretch curd cheeses like bocconcini, mozzarella and haloumi through to matured pecorino and parmesan.
“The point of difference between this company and, say, one like Bonlac is that here things are still done manually,” Lena says.
“Nothing is done by machinery. It’s still made the old-fashioned way.”
“We have our own farms as well. We have a truck that picks up milk from the farms each day, carries it down, puts it in our tank. We take it out of the tank and produce cheese out of it.
“We don’t take cream out of it, we don’t separate cream and water, so it all goes into our cheese.”
Alba Cheese churns through 60,000 litres of milk a day, enough to make 5-6 tonnes of mozzarella and 2.5 tonnes of ricotta – the much-loved by-product of the cheese-making process.
Some of the products like the dried salt-crusted ricotta salata actually have a waiting list of customers.
As Lena explains: “We simply cannot make enough of that because it has to be made from ricotta that is left over. And, well, we never have ricotta left over. So sometimes – because people are so demanding of it – we actually do a whole ricotta production just to make that product.” And it’s not just for the local market. Increasingly, Alba is making its name abroad.
Production has increased by almost one third in the past 18 months, thanks largely to a growing Asian appetite for dairy products in general.
During the recent (March 2014) International Food and Beverage Trade Week almost one third of the South East Asian delegates elected to visit Alba Cheese and that’s already translated into new business.
“Four years ago they didn’t know what bocconcini was, now they can’t get enough of it,” Lena says with a laugh.
But the success of Alba goes way beyond this factory and its 66 permanent employees.
A whole community of Italian wholesale businesses has grown up around the cheese factory, turning Assembly Drive into one of the best food and grocery shopping destinations in Melbourne.
Blessed, indeed, are the cheese-makers.
