From Rio, with love

Mônica Senna Salerno is from Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. She’s also lived in Italy and in Perth, Australia, and she’s one of those people who could have made her home anywhere in the world.

Her city-of-choice is Hamilton, and she finds much pleasure in living in a smaller place, enjoying the green Waikato landscape, and its welcoming people. “People say good morning to you in the street, even if they don’t know you. It is so easy here, I feel safe, and everybody is honest. You can put your guard down. I like that.”

Better still, when she needs to pick up fresh goat’s milk for the cheeses she makes with friend and business partner Jenny Oldham, she drives just 12km to a goat farm at Puketaha, where the pair has developed a great working relationship. “Where else would I be able to do something like that?”

Ewe’s milk is proving more difficult to source in the Waikato. “We’re just waiting for some smart guy to start producing good quality sheep’s milk here.”

Mônica and her husband, Marco Polo, came to New Zealand 15 years ago when Mônica took a job as a scientist at AgResearch in Hamilton, her specialty being muscle growth and development. Although she settled in happily, Mônica missed some of the excellent goat and sheep milk cheeses she’d enjoyed in her past life. So she and Jenny, a scientist colleague and fellow cheese-lover, began making cheese as a hobby. In 2011, the hobby became a part-time business, which they named Cilantro Cheese. A few months after forming Cilantro, the pair boldly entered their chèvre – a delicious fresh, creamy-textured goat’s cheese – in the NZ Champions of Cheese Awards.

To their delight, their entry was named the 2012 Champion Goat Cheese, praised by the judges for its citrus tang and silky texture. Cilantro Cheese has now found a market niche for its artisan goat and sheep milk products. Cow’s milk cheese may come in the future. Everything is handmade in small batches, and Cilantro prides itself on its fresh, bright flavours.

In the process, Mônica has fully reinvented herself as a made-in-the-Waikato cheesemaker. She has recently finished her day-job as a scientist to work fulltime at Cilantro’s small-but-perfectly-formed cheesery on Hamilton’s Ruakura Campus. She and Jenny are now want to do bigger volumes of their cheeses. “But they will still be handmade,” says Mônica. We love the quality of what we do.”

www.cilantrocheese.co.nz