One of my favorite summertime pairings is figs with goat cheese. We first had this over at Rob and Maria’s house and try to make it every year. There are a few ways you can make this up and I’ve also done it warmed which is a special kind of delicious.

This week, the mister picked up some chevre at the downtown farmer’s market from Briar Rose Creamery. They are located in Dundee, Oregon, and are kind of new on the scene.

This plain chevre was slightly tangy and plenty barny. I usually love that but I felt like it was missing another note… we puzzled over that for awhile but ultimately decided that it would definitely suffice for our purposes!

These figs were ripe and ready to eat so I just washed them, cut off their stems and sliced them in half.

I love their mysterious insides! And the little seeds when they pop in your mouth are divine!

Then I carefully added little scoops of chevre to each half and finished it off with some balsamic. I had both white balsamic and your standard red. My red was nothing special but I sampled both and decided the white was the perfect note. Something about the flavor combination here just works.

I used just a little dribble, carefully spooned over the chevre for each one. Yum! They were so good! I have a few more left so we’ll do the same tonight.

Do a google search if you’re interested in this — there are lots of variations, some add honey, some choose other kinds of cheese. All delicious! Don’t wait too long — figs are a short season!

I really wanted to do it with fresh goat milk but fresh milk is somewhat tricky to come by. If you have a little extra time on your hands and can drive out into the country, you can get fresh goats milk. We did discover someone inside the city limits selling goat milk from his little herd. We’ll be investigating this further for sure. When we did chevre back in ’08, we drove thirty minutes south of town to a goat farm in Molalla. The milk we got from there was incredible. But, I didn’t have time to drive out there and waited too long to even call and inquire. Then we discovered that one of the local food co-ops sold raw, unpasteurized goat milk from Fern’s Edge Dairy, a dairy outside of Eugene, Oregon. They also make their own cheese and I always snap up their chanterelle-coated chevre when I see it – so fantastic!

The milk was rather pricey – $8/half gallon (Oy!) but was really quite rich and creamy. We bought two gallons and made a double batch following the recipe in Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making. There’s a note at the end of the recipe that states if the curd does not firm up, to add calcium chloride to the milk before the starter. Well. We weren’t going to waste $24 of goat milk for flabby curds! Since we had some on hand we used it. Wow! We had really firm curd. It was totally awesome. I took video, actually, of the curd cutting because I think it’s one of the hardest things to understand when you get into cheesemaking – just what the curd is supposed to look like and what it means when it says to wait for a “clean break.” I need to download my video though and play with it. I’ll do a followup post.

We drained the curds for about 45 minutes before weighing it – 48 ounces! Totally unexpected. Now, that included some whey that still needed to come out but the recipe said the yield would be 1 pound. So…? I’m not sure but I’m going to say that it was the great quality of the milk.

Next, we divided it among the four of us to take home, drain for a few more hours and then salt and age. We had quite a discussion about making a brine verses not. The recipe says that you should not brine if your goat milk does not come from a farm as it will disintegrate. I’m guessing that has to do with pasteurized goat milk? It’s not clear. I’ve decided to salt my curds, let them age for a couple days and then put them in brine. We made a whey/salt brine using the leftover goat whey (you can see a jar of it in the background above) and I plan to use that. But, I’m also going to do a little more research into the brine and make sure this will be okay. Will followup with tasting notes!

All in all, it was actually a really simple recipe. We had a lot of fun and agreed that this would be a good thing to make again. There’s two waiting periods in the recipe where it says to keep the milk at 86-degrees for an hour each time. I just put the lid on and covered it with a towel – seemed to have no problem maintaining the temperature. I think next time we do this we’ll make yogurt during those waiting times. Mmmm… yogurt. It’s been awhile since I’ve made that. So good. Must do that again soon.

Boerenkaas from Willamette Valley Cheese Co, a 2009 favorite

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FUCheese started off the year with a revelatory cheese and beer tasting put on by Saraveza and Steve’s Cheese. It kicked off a true obsession with pairing these two fine items and I spent most of the year trying new combinations and doing my best to spread the beer/cheese love.

In March, we packed up the car and stayed in a yurt in the Rogue River Valley to attend the 5th Annual Oregon Cheese Guild Cheese Festival in Central Point. We had so much fun at the festival and met some awesome people. We also visited Vern and Gianaclis at Pholia Farm which kicked off a love of goats. I still haven’t been brave enough to milk one yet. New Year’s resolution?

Linnea feeds a baby goat at Pholia Farm

In April, we made mascarpone, more yogurt and had some iffy cottage cheese. I also attended a hard cheese class at Kookoolan Farms which convinced me that we needed to get back on that horse and give hard cheeses another try. Did we? No. Another resolution, perhaps.

Nicole and I hit the road again, this time north to Seattle for the cheese festival at Pike’s Place Market. We went as volunteers and worked at the Peterson tent taking in money and handling out samples. It was a total blast and we may do it again this year. This time we’ll have to walk out of there with more cheese. We were just so overwhelmed after finishing our shift that it was all we could do to visit some of the smaller cheesemakers for samples and then go collapse in the park.

Nico attacks the mimolette @ Seattle Cheese Festival

In the summer, I was too busy camping, BBQ-ing and drinking beer to spend too much time in the kitchen. I got my first paid gig doing a pairing of cheeses and beers. Profits, admittedly, were a bit low because I bought waaay too much really awesome fancy cheese and paired it with incredible (and expensive) beers. It was a total blast, though, and everyone had a great time and – bonus! – we had enough cheese left over to put together a handsome platter for a dinner party of 6 the following weekend. I have done a couple more pairings for groups since then and my portioning is getting more under control.

I also spent a fair bit of my summertime involved in putting together the Portland Cheese Festival. I somehow wrangled my way onto the planning board and met some great people in the process. The festival went off really, really well. Feedback was – and continues to be – incredible. The cheesemakers brought amazing stuff and the location turned out to work pretty good. Hopefully when it comes around again, I’ll be able to get involved and build on what I learned with the last one. You’ll be there, too, right?

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Sadly, this is where an already bumpy year for personal reasons got downright depressing. My father passed away at the end of October after a fierce, year-long battle with cancer. He was a good military man and, really, still too young to go. He loved hearing about the cheese festival and all our adventures with cheese. He was a big cheese fan (also smoked anchovies, hot mustard, oysters and other Scandinavian treats and terrors) and it was really tough to lose him. However, his death opened my eyes to what it means to have people in your life who truly care about you and for that I am so very thankful.

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The end of the year rounded out with more goats, excellent cheese plates and a beer/cheese pairing challenge! My friend Bruce, a die-hard beer nerd and curator of fine brews decided it was time to pull up some beers from his cellar and do a tasting. He asked if I could pair some cheeses with his eclectic collection. Since I couldn’t pre-sample these beers due to their rarity and age, I went off of tasting notes from the brewers and other beer writers and his own recollection of what these tasted like or should taste like.

A 3-decade vertical of Sierra Nevada Celebration – 2009, 1999, 1989! – paired with a pungent and footy Canadian cheese called Charleudix.

The pairings turned out really well and everyone had their favorites. The one pictured above was a huge hit. That cheese was incredibly stinky and I made everyone take a good sniff before I portioned it out. They were scared, for sure. However, it was a wonderful and creamy cheese with a lot of flavor and balanced with the hops notes of the ’99 and ’09 quite well. Poor, old ’89 tasted like it had almost no hops left at all. I couldn’t have asked for a better cap to the year, surrounded by some of my favorite things in life: good beer, great cheese and fantastic friends.

So, to more of that in 2010!

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!

Anna and Darlin’, her top milker.

This summer I had a great time volunteering at the Madison High School City Repair project to build an outdoor classroom with a curving cob wall and a green roof. Anna Gordon was in charge of the site, working through the AmeriCorps program to teach kids and the community about organic gardening and sustainability. Behind Madison, there is now a sizeable fenced community garden and right in the middle is the outdoor classroom for people to take shelter, make plans, dream big and enjoy the fruits of their labor. It’s a really great project and it was so fun. If you ever get a chance to cob, do it — it’s amazing what people can accomplish with this material.

Anyway, one of the days we were all working and talking and I discovered that Anna keeps goats! In the city! For milking! We had helped our friends Leah & Greg put up a chicken coop this summer so I knew that you are allowed up to 3 livestock animals inside the city limits. Beyond that, you need a special permit, which Anna’s household has. She is living on a double lot in Northeast Portland as part of a co-op of nearby households. There are 8 people who help oversee the goats and chickens and the garden. They take turns milking and cleaning out the pen and making sure that the goats are healthy and thriving. Darlin’, Cheyenne and baby Mona are very happy goats.

This past summer, both Cheyenne and Darlin’ had a few kids (the name for baby goats). The girl, Mona, is staying with them until she is weaned. When Mona is ready she’ll go off to a new family to be their milker — a tough decision for a goat keeper! Mona was acting just like a toddler, jumping around, tugging on Anna’s shirt hem for attention and just being a little rascal with the other goats.

Cheyenne & Mona

At some point during the last year, Darlin’ was attacked and injured by a dog who had to jump two fences to get at the goats! They nursed her back to full health and are trying to figure out what can be done about that. So far, the culprit has not been found.

The chickens seems really happy to hang out with the goats and apparently they are really great egg layers. Anna and the co-op members all play with turning the goats milk into cheese. Her twin sister, Nori, did six months in Italy on a goat dairy farm so she definitely knows the ropes. Back when we were working on the cob project, I remember her saying that these are the most pampered goats she’s ever worked with. I bet!

Darlin’ says, “Hello!”

Only miniature goats are allowed within the city limits and these goats are miniature Lamancha goats. Just like the Lamancha goats we visited last year when we got our goat milk, these guys are super friendly and sweet and very curious. Anna was very gracious and sent me home with a quart of fresh goat milk — feta, do you think?

For more info about livestock in the city of Portland you can contact the Multnomah County Environmental Health Services Department. I also really liked all the information available at the awesomely named Goat Justice League website based in Seattle which gives you the basics on how to keep goats healthy and happy in the city. Lastly, the Urban Farm Store seems to be a nexus of information and classes about urban livestock — from ducks and chickens to bees to composting and gardening. Check them out!

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I love that there are so many people right now interested in these sorts of things. I don’t know if it’s a reaction to our service economy or if it’s just a strong desire to know how things work and why but I can’t help but think it’s a good thing. I think every generation kind of tries to make sense of their world and that manifests in a different way. We are both privileged to live in such an easy time and deprived by being so removed from our food sources and the essence of what makes our lives possible. And we’re also a weird generation who seems to be reacting to the extreme commodification of everything by saying, “I don’t like that. I’ll do it myself.” From my point of view, there is a lot of simple satisfaction and joy in exploring these things. What I like most about cheese is that it’s so much fun – it’s science, it’s seasons, it’s animals, it’s people and everything comes together in a tasty little package that becomes sublime when shared with friends alongside beer and wine. Am I right?

You can see more photos of Anna and the goats on my Flickr stream.

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UPDATE 11.20.2009! The Oregonian did a story today on Anna’s cohousing group. Check it out!

I probably won’t post every time I make another batch of yogurt as it’s so easy and I have a feeling that I have a lot of yogurt making in my future. But, for this batch, we took the yogurt making another step further by using a starter from our last batch.

For our first foray into yogurt making, we followed Dr. Fankhauser’s wonderful recipe, with great results. We used an organic whole milk and Nancy’s yogurt. Nancy’s is an Oregon brand, made in Springfield since the 1960s. It’s my preferred yogurt and I buy a lot of it every year. The first thing I did with our delicious batch after sampling it was to portion out 8 oz. of it into an ice-cube tray to freeze and serve as the starter the next batch. After frozen, I put them in a plastic baggie where they’ve been sitting for over a month.

The day before I was going to make yogurt, I transferred the cubes to a covered bowl in the fridge and let them thaw out. I considered all the whole milk options at my local New Seasons and decided to give Alpenrose a try. They are also a local, Portland metro, dairy who has been in the milk business for over 90 years. In addition to that, they have a wonderful grounds where they have built a replica “frontier town” for kids and families to play in, they have a baseball field and a velodrome where I’ve been a few times for bike races. They are an icon of an era gone by where big companies have a distinct role in the community and a desire to create a legacy that they can be proud of. And, it’s pretty good milk, too!

To make a short story long, I used the yogurt from the previous set as starter and everything proceeded as usual. I took better notes this time and wrote down the time it took to heat the milk to the right temperature — medium heat for 1 hour to 185-F — and let it incubate overnight, at least 12 hours. It gelled really well, perhaps even better than last time. The flavor is somewhat less intense and less tangy than the last batch. I attribute this mostly to the starter but it could be the milk as well. I’m debating saving another 8 oz from this batch and seeing how it goes. Perhaps next time we can do a comparison taste test with an all-fresh batch and one made using previous starter.

Check out this great article that Linnea sent me about making your own yogurt at the NYTimes. It has a really nice explanation of the bacteria and activity in yogurt and how your culture can really affect the taste of your yogurt.

Kookoolan Farms is in Yamhill, Oregon, about an hours drive from Portland. It’s quite the bucolic agricultural area which is becoming well known for some excellent wineries as well as barley, wheat and dairy farming. The owners at Kookoolan have dairy cows and raise chickens for eggs and meat. They have a little store there where you can buy cheesemaking supplies, raw cow’s milk and farm fresh eggs. I think all of their cheese supplies are sourced from New England Cheesemaking Supply.

The class was taught by Mary Rosenblum, who has been making her own cheeses for over 30 years. The focus was on cheddar. You may recall in the Cheddar Incident of Aught Eight that our first go at a hard cheese didn’t turn out so well. We’ve all been talking about trying again but just trying to follow along in books and figure it out has been sort of… frustrating? Entertaining? Mixed? So, I was really excited about the opportunity to watch someone make cheese who knows what they are doing!

The class was completely full with around 25 people. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the class — I was fairly certain that it wouldn’t be too hands-on as the cheesemaking process doesn’t really lend itself to a bunch of people all cooking at once. I would call it a lecture style class. There’s a small kitchen and Mary faced us, cooking up two gallons of raw cow’s milk and explaining the process as she went.

She also explained lots of things about milk: what’s in milk, what happens as it converts to cheese, what the ingredients are and how they work together. It was a ton of information but her style is really easy and it was no problem to follow along.

At various times she had us come up to the pot and get a good look at what was happening, showing us a “clean break” and she put out plates of curds in their various stages so we could get a feel for the texture. I took gobs of notes and discovered a few things that we maybe could have done a little better with our cheddar.

For one, we let our milk get way too hot. According to Mary, mesophilic culture will die at 102-degrees. I don’t recall exactly how hot our milk got but it did sort of shoot up in temperature, as milk will do, and stayed quite hot. I have a feeling that we did let it get too hot and that may have had an effect on the culture and the taste.

Another issue has to do with our nifty little press that we made. It’s made out of solid maple and is pretty great. However, the base of it is grooved to allow the whey to flow away from the cheese along the bottom. It makes an adorable pattern like this:

And when you flip your cheese in the press, then you get a doubled-up pattern like this on both sides:

It’s lovely! It’s also a great place for moisture to hang out and mold to develop. Big no-no. We can do the initial pressing as-is but for the long pressing we should bandage the sides (take a strip of muslin the size of the edge of the cheese and wrap it around) and put something flat and smooth on the bottom.

Mary had a lovely little stainless steel tray that she put under her cheese. The tray had a lip that allowed whey to continue to flow away. She also had a stainless steel round that she slipped under the follower. What this does is create smooth surfaces on the top, bottom and sides of the cheese.

One other little component we were missing was Lipase powder. Mary recommended always using it. We didn’t have any on hand, and I believe it was listed as optional in our book. Well, lipase is an enzyme which aids the cheese in fermentation and also adds a lot of flavor and character to the cheese — two things which our cheddar lacked. I bought sharp Lipase powder (they also had mild) at Kookoolan and I’m pretty excited to give this a try. It was $7, and I think I could get dozens of cheeses from the bottle. So, by eliminating the major issues and adding lipase I think we can go a lot further in realizing our cheddar dream.

Mary also put together a big sampling of cheddars for us to try along with wine. She told us a little about each one and talked about the processes which go into them to make them distinctive from one another. It was a lot of information but I really think it was a good class, especially for someone who has already dabbled a bit in cheesemaking. Mary also writes a blog cataloging her life on her own little farm in Happy Valley, check it out.

Vern and Gianaclis Caldwell, along with their daughters, have created a truly wonderful farm and make some fantastically delicious cheese (Wimer Winter being my personal favorite). They are so obviously excited by what they do and so willing to share their joy and knowledge that I found myself getting more and more excited and motivated to get back into the kitchen and try my hand at some more home cheese making.

The whole morning was filled with goats.  Their herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats filled the barn, there were newborn and preganant goats to look at, little baby goats to feed, milking and aging rooms to see, and always Vern, Gianaclis or one of their creamery family members was there to answer questions.  They so easily opened up their farm and discussed their philosophies on goat rearing and cheese making that it was very hard to even think about leaving.

Another highlight for me was the tour that Vern gave us of the solar and hydro-electric systems they use to power their farm.  The conscious choice they’ve made to live off-the-grid is truly inspiring and has proven to be a complete success for them.  The time and energy that went into the planning and construction of their farm is evident in every aspect of the operation.  Their website does a much better job than I in documenting the planning and construction so I strongly recommend you visit their website and take the time to look through the construction photo album.

I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Vern and Gianaclis for opening up the farm and to encourage you to stop in and check it out for yourself if you are in the Rogue River area.  The cheeses are worth the stop, in and of themselves, but I promise you’ll come away with a warm spot in your heart for goats and Pholia Farms.

It’s a quick read covering the travels of two New Yorkers — the author and her fiance — as they cross the U.S. exploring the entire goat world in a quest to discover if they could run their own goat farm. They visit livestock auctions and explore the largely ethnic world of goat meat. They visit goat dairy farms and cheesemaking operations and see a few goat shows where the fanciest and most lovingly cared for goats get to strut their stuff with their owners. The book is full of history and anecdotes about these curious animals and also touches on the current state of small farms and agriculture in the U.S. Totally recommended reading and you can also check out their website where they blog occasionally about life on the farm and if you dip way into their archives you can read blog posts and see photos from the places they visited and the people they met.

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.