I finally had a chance to visit Pepe Saya new butter factory in Carinbah, an industrial suburb just South of Sydney Airport. And from the outside, one would have no clue, besides the signs, that this is where arguably the best Australian Cultured Butter is made with love and dedication. Pierre Issa, who I organised a butter research trip to France in September 2017, has been eager to put in action what he learned touring artisan butter makers in Normandy, Brittany and Vendée, from 5kgs/week to 1 tonne a day. What Pierre has designed and implemented is somehow on the upper scale of that with a new 500 kgs churner and about 6 tonnes of butter produced a week. You can see the new 500kgs churner at work, loaded with goodness. But let's start at the beginning of the process! The cream comes from half a dozen dairy farms around the country and once arrived here, it is injected with some culture and kept three weeks to mature before being churned. The cream is kept at 4°C in these vintage vats Pierre found in Queensland. Look at the labels! Interesting history... So, the churning process generates the butter and the buttermilk. Most people we met in France throw it away or feed pigs with it, but not Pepe Saya! So here is the buttermilk storage and packing plant, still being fine tuned Talking about packaging, the butter in sheets - for pastry Chefs - or in 225 grams and one kilo portions are packed manually. But the “piece de resistance” of this new factory is the French machine completely repurposed for Pepe Saya out of a "La Vache Qui Rit" packaging plant. It packs 25 grams portions for Qantas, our national airline, and various restaurants around Australia. A significant proportion of the 225 grams packs are actually salted butter and here is where the magic happens... Pepe Saya has teamed up from day one with sea salt producer extraordinaire Olssons. And then everything goes into the grand fridge kept at 2°Celsius... Don't stay there too long! I hope you have enjoyed my reportage on Pepe Saya new factory. This huge investment is positioning the company to further expansion... and export!
But this a story for another day...
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As we have just returned from an amazing research trip on artisan butter makers in France with the Pepe Saya Butter Company, it seems appropriate to write an in-depth article about what is arguably the most important ingredient in French cuisine and patisserie. We will start with an interview we conducted just a few days after Pierre Issa and myself returned to Sydney during which we talked about the history of Pepe Saya butter making adventures so far, its future directions and obviously how our trip fits into that business model. Pepe Saya does France with Our French Impressions - 10/17, That trip was long in the making as Pierre and I started that conversation 3 years ago! But in June 2017, we meet at the CarriageWorks Farmers Market once more and Pierre gave me the go ahead to do the research and put an itinerary and some costs together. I enrolled the help of my older son who lives in Vendée and had some free time before taking on a job over the summer. I ended up with a list of a dozen artisan butter makers and other establishments of interest in Normandy, Brittany and Vendée. The original itinerary was over 5 days, but a change of airline during the itinerary building meant we had only 4 days and 1200 kms to travel.... I had to rush to talk to everybody in July, as most people would be closed or away during the sacrosaint month of August when most of the country stops. So by the end of July, I had talked to everybody, emailed back with tentative dates and the promise to recontact in September with firm dates and times. During that period, we had several meetings with Pierre, his social media manager Rob Locke and eventually his father-in-law who decided to tag along at his own cost. We firmed up the dates, booked our flights and then I had to book accomodation along the way and make arrangements for a car which would be suitable for 4 people and their luggage... We were going to meet at CDG airport in the afternoon of the 27th of September. I left a week earlier to do a few business things in Paris and spend time with my family in Vendée. First stop: Le Moulin de Ducey - Best Western - Normandie The vagaries of travel! You woukd think that an established airline like Etihad would not run out of fuel on a 7 hour flight between Dubai and Paris... Well this particular flight had to stop in Frankfort for refuelling, which meant we didn't hit the road until 6.00pm and I let you imagine the Parisian traffic at that time. To cut a long story short, between this and a 50 km long patch of heavy rain, it took us 5 hours to cover 350 kms and we arrived at destination 10 mns before the reception was supposed to close for the night! That bed was utterly welcome, I tell you... A quick note for my US and OZ/NZ readers: Best Western Hotels in France are usually an extremely good choice, as when the label established itself decades ago, it chose the best family run hotel in any given big town, or in this case destination as we are only 15 kms from le Mont Saint Michel... DAY 1 - A round trip through the Cotentin peninsulaThis church is very famous amongst people interested in WWII, as rumor has it that a parachutist got stuck on the spire trying to land there and start the liberation of the village. We found a nice market, plenty baguettes and reasonably good coffee, but more on that later... First visit - Ferme Musée du CotentinAfter an hour drive north towards Cherbourg on a nice freeway, we got to this magnificent set of buildings which was once a thriving farm, and now has been converted into a museum to show future generations what it took to milk cows, make butter and cheese and grow pigs for charcuterie with no running water, electricity or machinery! Intense is an understatement... Anne, our guide, is originally from Provence but married a Normand and seems perfectly happy with her life, showing us around, telling us about the history of the place, the gentrification of the owners over the generations, reflected in the evolution of the building from one level for family and animals living together to 18th century 3 level posh architecture. And later on showing us how to make our own butter... Let's make some butter...And now let's find some baguettes and coffee...Second visit - a big fromagerie which makes some butter tooWe arrived a tad late to see the production, as the factory works from 5.00am to 12.00. We did have a chance to watch the 'moulage à la louche" of the camembert, the milk being poured in mould by hand with a ladle, to the tune of 15,000 camemberts a day! They all get sold and eaten, every day! And now time for lunch...Third stop - La Ferme de l'Isle - MoyonThere is very special label in France for cheese and butter and other milk products, and it is "fermier". Let me explain: If you buy a beurre fermier or a camembert fermier, you can be sure that the production of it is entirely integrated in one farm, from the cows in the fields to the processing and packaging "sur place". That's why we are visiting this state of the art "laiterie". The two young daughters of the initial founders - who still live on the property, plus fermier tu meurs - have just spent a cool 2 million euros to modernise the farm and treat a million litres of milk a year! The main production is obviously "lait cru", but also some pasteurised, then a very large quantity of "fromage blanc' a staple of the "goûter" of French children after school, and some "dulce de leche" ou milk jam, "confiture de lait" in French, a delicacy I actually discovered as a teenager in Mexico! A little detour via Avranches - a WWII haut-lieuLunch was a long way away and dinner would be late, as we were going to visit Le Mont Saint-Michel next, so this gorgeous "tarte à la Bourdaloue aux poires" was a welcome "goûter" shared on the parvis de l'Eglise... The Mont-Saint-Michel is the tenth most visited monument in France getting a tenth of the visitors of number one Notre Dame de Paris - the number one is not the Eiffel Tower which is number 4, behind the Sacré-Cœur and Musée d'Orsay - and registered as World Patrimoine with the Unesco since 1979. I had not been in decades and the logistics of going to and from the Mont have been vastly improved to cash on the million visitors a year who come from the World over to visit this iconic place. We arrived quite late at 7.30pm so we had the place more or less to ourselves, the other side of the coin being that the Basilique was closed until 8.30 pm for the last Mass of the day. Having to get up at 6.00 am the next morning we decided to pass, although Pierre and myself were very tempted. We managed to have a reasonable good dinner instead... And then dinner... |
AUTHORBorn in France, well travelled, relocated to Sydney in 1997. Archives
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