Dayana aims to become a big cheese in adopted city

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy meets a Venezuelan woman producing her native cheese in Galway who is getting hugely-positive reaction to the product

When Dayana Maltese came to Galway on holidays in late 2004 to visit her sister who was married to an Irishman, she fell in love with the place. So she stayed.

But there was one gaping void in Dayana’s life here – Venezuelan cheese. The South American country is renowned for its grassland and different regions produce different varieties of cheese. What she yearned for was the fresh, semi-hard cheese from the South West, her own place.

Now, Dayana has solved the problem by setting up a company to produce this Venezuelan cheese – using milk from Galway cows. Next week, the fledgling Sabanero Cheese brand will be among the cheeses representing Ireland at the UK and Ireland Artisan Cheese Awards in England. The Association of Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers, Cáis, invited her to take part in this important annual event.

Dayana, a marketing graduate, worked with “blue-chip company”, Daimler Chrysler in Venezuela before relocating to Ireland. She was good at her job and enjoyed it, but work had become increasingly stressful and she was constantly on call.

On her first visit to Ireland, she had no roaming facility on her mobile phone, so she was out of touch. Dayana had finally got a chance for downtime – and she liked it.

She decided to stay and set up a business, something less stressful than her previous high-powered job.

She opened a dry-cleaning outlet in Renmore, which soon became two.

But, her cheese issues continued. Dayana simply couldn’t find an Irish variety that compared to the artisan cheeses of Venezuela.

And she tried lots.

“It’s something between mozzarella and feta,” she says, as she describes the taste and texture she sought. Dayana also wanted something that agreed with her digestive system. She had been reared on fresh cheeses in Venezuela and found that the mature and hard varieties here didn’t suit her; “cheddar and blue cheese weren’t my cup of tea”, she says simply.

Feta was better, but too acidic, because it’s matured in vinegar, she explains.

Nothing compared to the taste of home.  So Dayana decided to recreate it.  She sold her dry-cleaning shops and started exploring what was needed.

As a child, she had spent all her holidays on her grandfather’s farm where the family milked cows and made cheese, so she knew the process. And she consulted with family members to make sure her memory was correct.

Her biggest problem was finding a breed of cow in Ireland that would give her a similar cheese.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.