Goat Cheese:
New Kids on the Block
This article first appeared in the Wine Spectator.

At the 1986 International Fancy Food Show many of the people who walked by The Coach Farm's goat cheese display exclaimed, "Goat cheese? Yuck!" At the 1993 show, however, the goat cheeses of this Pine Plains, N.Y., dairy were named Outstanding Product Line from among the venue's thousands of food products. The American Cheese Society's choices for "best American cheese" each of the last two years--Capriole's Wabash Cannonball and Westfield Farm's Bluebonnet--were goat cheeses.
You've come a long way, baby, er, kid.

The American goat cheese craze can be traced to Laura Chenel who, in 1980, took her fresh, sweet, French-style cheeses to Chez Panisse, Alice Waters' Berkeley, Calif., restaurant-cum-gastronomic shrine. Soon after, American goat cheese was catapulted, side by side with California cuisine, into the culinary stratosphere.

Chenel's cheeses, like the vast majority of American goat cheeses, differ from the goat cheeses many Americans have experienced in France. Most French goat cheeses are strong-smelling ("goaty"), aged cheeses. But, according to Judy Schad who makes Capriole's, up to 85 percent of American goat cheeses are mild and fresh, only a week or two old. In fact, chèvre, the French term for goat, has come to mean mild, fresh goat cheese in the United States.

Fresh American goat cheese comes in numerous shapes. The familiar log, bûche, or Montrachet (a French trademark) may be plain or ash-coated. In small operations the logs are shaped by hand, but in larger, more mechanized companies they may be machine extruded. Another common shape is the button, which may be plain, or dusted with herbs (such as dill or herbes de Provence, a mix of herbs common to southern France) or cracked black pepper. Sometimes, these buttons are aged in olive oil and called cabecou or cabichou. Other formats include chabis (barrel-shaped cheese), discs, cones and bricks. Whipped cheeses are often packaged in tubs (great for bagels).

Most of the fresh cheeses are meant to be consumed quickly, within a matter of days or weeks; though exactly how long is a matter of some dispute. Miles Cahn insists that his Coach Farm fresh cheeses go from the goat to the retailer in three days and that the retailer sell them within a week. "These cheeses are alive, so we package them in perforated paper from France and transport them in perforated boxes so they can breathe," he says. "The vacuum-packed cheeses are dead."

On the other hand, Chenel vacuum- packs her fresh cheeses and feels that if handled properly they can hold nicely for up to three months. Schad comes down somewhere in the middle. "I think that under optimum conditions vacuum-packed cheeses will do fine for three weeks," she says. "After that, flavor changes begin to occur."

Fresh goat cheese should have a clean, acidic edge and a lemony aroma that Schad likens to Sauvignon Blanc (a wine that many think is the ultimate match for fresh goat cheese, incidentally). If the wrapping is puffed up, sirens should go off. Other warning signs are ammonialike smells; herb coatings that don't look fresh; and briny, bitter or unclean flavors.

Ripened goat cheese, which represents perhaps 10 percent of America's total goat cheese production, is aged for about four weeks--just long enough for a skin to develop, as with Brie or Camembert. This brief aging evaporates moisture, giving the cheese a pleasantly chalky texture and a tangier, more concentrated flavor than that of fresh cheese. Popular forms for ripened goat cheese include logs, wheels, bricks and pyramids. Outstanding examples are Chenel's Crottin and Taupinière, and various sizes from The Coach Farm, some with green peppercorns or caraway seeds.

Even lower in moisture and more concentrated in flavor is aged goat cheese. It makes up only about 5 percent of all goat cheese produced in the United States because it requires six months or so of aging, necessitating storage space most goat cheese purveyors don't have. And, it's more complicated to produce. "We make four aged cheeses and, after 17 years, two of them are still a struggle," Chenel says.

But when they work, they work superbly. At The Coach Farm, I had some of Cahn's four-month-old private reserve, which, unfortunately, he doesn't sell. It was nutty, piquant and delicious. Cahn likes it with a glass of Côtes du Rhône. Most aged American goat cheese is sold in "tommes" or rounds weighing about three or four pounds each.

While the goat cheese phenomenon has drawn large French companies, like Bongrain, to America to mass-produce goat cheese, virtually all American-made artisanal goat cheese comes from a cottage industry of small-scale producers--most of them women. Many cheesemakers started with goat-raising as a hobby and, with lots of milk on hand, making cheese seemed a logical enterprise. (The term "farmstead cheese" denotes that made from the milk of the cheesemaker's own animals.) These limited-quantity manufacturers yield distinctive, hand-crafted (and hard-to-get) products.

Douglass Newbold and Peggy King have been making goat cheese in suburban Philadelphia since the mid-1970s. Newbold has 12 goats and makes 100 pounds of her Greystone Chevratel fresh goat cheese a week, packaged in 1.25-pound bricks. King makes about 50 pounds of her Walnut Bank cheese each week, from the milk of eight goats.

King makes her feta, as well as smaller amounts of Gouda and cheddar, from raw milk, which is the exception rather than the rule in the United States today, although some producers may have started out that way. U.S. federal law allows the use of unpasteurized milk if the resultant cheese is aged at least 60 days. Some believe that French goat cheeses have an advantage because the majority of them are made with raw milk. But Cahn calls such a belief "a mystique that many don't agree with, and neither do I."
 
How to Get It

Most artisanal American goat cheese is made in small amounts and has limited distribution--usually to upscale food markets, cheese shops and restaurants. Check with such places in your area or call the following producers to inquire about their retail outlets.

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