Don’t you think goats have Mona Lisa smiles?

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I was out in Bozeman visiting my family and the first thing I did when I got into town was stop in the local Food Co-op and scope out the cheese selection. I bought a bunch of good stuff to share (Humboldt Fog which my brothers loved, a puck of French Prairie brie from Willamette Valley and some dependable 12-month manchego). Then I hunted around for something from Montana. The only thing I could find was the mysteriously named Montana Organic Chevre.

After we feasted on all this good cheese and decided that the chevre was truly awesome, I started poking around online to figure out who was behind this yummy chevre. As it turns out, right outside Bozeman, Montana, in the cute little town of Belgrade, you can find one of Montana’s few cheesemakers. I sent them an email asking for a tour and heard back almost immediately that I could come on out.

Montana Farm Road

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Montana Organic Chevre is produced by Amaltheia Dairy, a family operation owned by Sue and Melvyn Brown with cheese and pigs tended by their son, Nate. From the feed, to the methods, to the product, it’s all organic. Sue and Melvyn own 20 acres and lease another 350 for their herd of goats and pigs. They raise the pigs for their meat which is cured without nitrates by another local business and sold in town. The pigs, of course, get to feast on the delicious and nutritious whey which is a bi-product of the cheesemaking operation.

I convinced my Mom that she needed to come with me to see all the goats plus I would need her help to keep from getting lost. First we stopped off at the creamery which is right on the main drag through Belgrade. It’s a non-descript, no frills operation where they convert over 1,000 gallons of fresh goat milk per week into organic chevre (plain, garlic and chive, spicy pepper and other tasty flavors), plus feta and ricotta. Sadly, they are not yet doing any aging yet – I was hoping to score something good and stinky on my visit.

Then we drove over to the farm about five miles away and met Melvyn, a Brit with a career background in animal husbandry. He met Sue in Guatemala and eventually they made their way to Montana to pursue organic farming as a living.

Wilbur comes rooting for a treat from Melvyn

Melvyn showed us around the farm and introduced us to some goats and a very friendly piggie named Wilbur. They are an all-goat, all-chevre creamery and maintain over 250 milking goats: LaMancha, Alpine & Saanen. They farm their own feed and compost their manure and farm waste. In fact, they are part of a Montana pilot program to make this kind of compost and waste recovery more prevalent and revenue-generating. We talked a little bit about the ups and downs of being a cheesemaker in Montana and how difficult it is to assure all the regulatory agencies that your milk is safe. Melvyn knows of only one other cheesemaker in the state, a fellow doing cow’s milk cheese commercially in western Montana.

Goat pasture with the Bridger Range in the background.

You can find their cheese primarily in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. Sadly, I couldn’t find it around the Portland area. You can learn more about them on their website or their Facebook page. You can also buy fantastic packages of their cheeses – a great gift idea for a chevre lover. See more photos of the dairy (and goats! and pigs!) on my Flickr photostream.

A big thank you to the folks at Amaltheia for letting me come out and a special thanks to Melvyn for being my tour guide. Best of luck to you!

We used this well-documented recipe from Dr. Fankhauser’s great collection of how-tos on cheese and dairy. We used Nancy’s yogurt because it’s local (and delicious) and is also made only with milk and cultures. We also used this handy digital thermometer that my husband bought for using in beer brewing and with his smoker.

You can set it to a temperature and have it alarm you when it reaches that temp and you can have it read either celsius or fahrenheit. Fankhauser’s recipe was noted mostly in celsius and so we set the temp that way. One of our biggest challenges thus far has been keeping an eye on the temperature and not letting the milk get too hot and burn. Having to remember to check back with thermometer in hand has often meant that we’ve missed it when it has gotten too hot. It also helps to maybe not drink so much wine while cheesemaking. (Your mileage may vary.)

It took about an hour to let the milk get to temp — 85-90 C (185-195 F) — on medium heat, stirring periodically to get an accurate temp reading. I think it went a bit faster when I put the lid on (shush) and just went back every ten minutes or so for a temp check.

After cooling the milk and homogenizing the starter, we added it to the milk, stirring to incorporate. Then we transferred the milk/starter into four quart-sized canning jars, which I had sterilized previously. It actually would have had enough for another half-quart so if you have an extra quart or smaller jar at the ready you may get a bit more.

Lastly, we needed to let it incubate for at least three hours at 50 C. You can find on the market special yogurt makers which do just this — keep the culture at the proper temperature for a long period of time. However, Dr. Fankhauser suggests an exceptional method: using a cooler!

We used very hot tap water and brought the water to a temp of around 47 C. Our instructions warned us not to let the temp get above 50 C so we thought this was pretty good. We let it sit for three hours (closed lid, of course) and it had cooled to about 45 C in that time. We were impressed! This may be the solution we need for keeping cheese milk at temp for a long period of time.

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While it was incubating, Nicole and I made a trip to Bob’s Red Mill. Do you know this guy? Have you been? I had a Chinook Book coupon for half off one item and my friend Leah convinced me that I should buy a 25lb bag of white flour and then trade half of it for half of her Bob’s Red Mill 25lb bag of whole wheat flour. This sounded like a great idea at the time (there was wine) and so that’s what I did. Plus I got yeast, steel cut oats, granola and coarse cornmeal. I resisted many, many other interesting things. So, I guess I have some baking to do….

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When we got back, Nicole and I still had about an hour of waiting so we made some cheese plans for the year and looked up some cheese events and plotted total cheese domination. When that was over, we checked on the yogurt. And… no gelling! We panicked a little bit — okay, I panicked — and then started looking up other yogurt recipes. Most called for anywhere from 4 to 24 hours of incubating. We took some of the cooler water out of the cooler, heated up more water and added that — careful not to go over the line of the jar lids — until it was back up to about 47 C and then left it. Another three hours and we had gelling. By bedtime, they all looked really good (about 10 hours by that point). I went ahead and left them until morning. There may have been more gelling after that but I couldn’t tell. I popped them in the fridge and let them cool for a day.

And here’s what it looked like when I took it out for a test run:

Perfect, I say!

It was very tangy, light and really quite delicious! I may try the suggestion of adding 4 Tablespoons of powdered milk prior to heating to get a firmer yogurt. But, really, this yogurt is awesome. You can also save 8 oz of this to use as starter for the next batch which would save a few bucks.

To see more photos of the process and a little more commentary, go to my flickr set here.

No, this isn’t a cheese post but I figure all dairy is game. If you’re looking for something truly delectable to do with all that mint growing in your garden (or overflowing from your neighbor’s garden) then this is the recipe for you. It’s reprinted at Orangette from The Perfect Scoop (scroll down past the cute shoes) and is a simply perfect flavor for summer. I made it last weekend for a BBQ with my neighbors it is, hands-down, my favorite ice cream I’ve made this summer.

Early this spring my sister and her boyfriend came down for a visit from Seattle and we decided to check out Steve’s Cheese for the first time.  Don’t ask me why it took me so long to get over there, but it was years wasted in my opinion.  The cheese and cured meats selection was wide and diverse and the service was exceptionally helpful and knowledgeable.  The cheese platter we ended up with – largely made up of recommendations – was delightful.  I don’t know what other word to use.  We paired the cheese and meat with some bread and vegetables that we had picked up at the farmer’s market so we were truly fulfilling the northwest food geek stereotype.

We had three different cheeses all from the pacific northwest.  They are all well known cheese makers and I’ve run into these cheeses since then at cheese tastings and counters around town.  That said all three are really delicious representations of pacific northwest cheese.  The Willamette Valley Cheese’s Boerenkass (a raw cow milk cheese) was mild, but really full of flavor and went really well with the bread and Fra Mani Sopressata. 

This was the first time that I had tasted Rivers Edge Chevre’s Up in Smoke (goat milk).  This was unbelievably fantastic.  I love goat cheese and I’ve never tasted a goat cheese like this – rich, smoky, creamy.  I’ve had this over and over again since this first tasting.  I liked eating it wrapped in the Iowa applewood smoked durroc ham we got from Steve’s Cheese.

The final cheese was from Estrella Family Creamery.  I first had their cheese after visiting the Ballard farmer’s market so this was not a new cheese maker for us, but it was the first time I tasted their Guapier (cow milk).  This cheese has a layer of ash running through the center separating the morning and evening milking.  There really was a stark difference in taste between the two sides and it made for a fun tasting.  It was a really delicious cheese that was really best – in my opinion – eaten by itself.

This was one of those really great cheese experiences.  The company was fun and casual and into the cheese. And the cheese lived up to the moment with great flavors.

Thom and I did a weekend trip down to Southern Oregon, and stopped at the Rogue Creamery in Central Point. The Creamery has been making cheeses since the 1930s and is now very well-known for its blue cheeses, especially the Rogue River Blue which has won a number of awards and is wrapped in grape leaves and aged for 1 year.

Central Point is a small town in the Rogue River Valley in a part of Oregon that is generally sunnier and warmer than where we live in Portland. Along the Rogue River Valley Highway, also known as Highway 99 and known in Central Point as Front Street, is a very unassuming concrete building which houses the Creamery cheese shop and part of their manufacturing facility.

The cozy little cheese shop has samples of all their signature cheeses. I tried several of their cheddars, a few of their blues and also some of their flavored cheddars including lavendar, garlic and chocolate stout. I was really taken with that last one and we picked up some of that.

They also have a cheese case with cheeses from around the region and the very knowledgeable and friendly cheese ladies gave us samples of anything we wanted. From the cheese case we ended up selecting PondHopper, a cheese from Tumalo Farms in Bend which is a hard, aged goat cheese, unique for the hops that are added while steeping the curds. We also picked up Truffle Tremor from Cypress Grove, another goat cheese (I have a problem) — creamy and infused with the taste of truffles.

In looking at all the cheeses, chatting with the ladies, choosing some pear wine and some crackers and debating the merits of purchasing an insulated bag (we did), we totally forgot to swing back around and pick up some butter!

Doesn’t that look like the most wonderful butter in the whole world? I guess we’ll have to go back.

Check out a few more photos of the cheese shop on my flickr. You will find Rogue Creamery cheeses in reputable cheese shops all over Oregon, at Whole Foods, New Seasons, etc. and on their website which also has some great photos of their cheesemaking process.