ruce and I are old enough to have watched goat cheese morph from a gag-me no-no in the Mad Men sixties to the full-on cliché it is today: crumbled into salads, deep-fried into balls, melted into casseroles.It’s hard to remember how revolutionary that first beet-and-goat-cheese salad was.
Let’s face it. It wasn’t the cheese. It was the goat. That’s what pushed the envelope for most of us.
There are few records documenting the historical provenance of goat cheese versus all the other types of cheese; but given that goats were most likely one of the first animals domesticated in human settlements, right along with dogs, we can make an educated guess that goat cheese has been around for quite a while.
After all, making cheese from the milk of all the right sort of ruminants—cows, sheep, water buffalos, yaks, camels, and (yes) goats—has been part of human culture for millennia. Remnants of cheese have been found encrusted on pottery shards in Egyptian tombs dating from the Bronze Age, about 2300 B.C.E.
But no matter how far back cheese making goes, no matter how much the French morphed it from a homespun craft to a fine art starting in the eighteenth century, goat was the hurdle for many of us in North America. Back when we started deep-frying our first rounds, sometime in the shoulder-pad eighties, much of what passed for chèvre wasn’t (shall we say?) of sterling quality. It was sour and obstreperous, a dull thud.
Back then, I was in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, home to the nation’s finest farmers’ market, ringing the state capitol. It was an event to make any Calvinist proud: obscenely decent (not a shred of trash outside a bin) and in order (everyone walked counterclockwise).
That said, the eighties hadn’t quite made it to the upper Midwest. Madison was still home to the flannel set, exemplified by one group of women farmers who caught my attention every week. Not because one of them had a groomed mustache. Mostly because they waited with blank faces in a perfectly straight line behind a small table offering little tubs of goat cheese, a thing I’d never tasted.
One Saturday, fortified by caffeine, I decided to give it a go. I didn’t know what to expect: a violent Virginia Woolf explosion of fury and goat (We need a table of one’s own!) or simply an overdose of patchouli.
Surprisingly, I got smiles and nods. “Would you like to try a taste?” one asked me, her prairie skirt billowing in the breeze. She proffered a little, flat wooden spoon, like we used to use for ice cream tastes, a mound of stark white cheese atop its bulb.
Seduced by unexpected friendliness, I muttered the expected bit of Scandinavian gratitude (“Yah, sure, OK”) and scraped the cheese off the spoon by running it through my teeth.
She leaned over the table, my culinary instructor. “Now push it against the roof of your mouth.”
I couldn’t. It was bitter and defiant. Here was the outrage I’d expected. In cheese. I squinted.
“Oh, that’s it,” she said. “You like it, don’t you?”
I didn’t know how to tell her these were not tears of joy. There was no refinement, no overtones, no shades of flavor. Instead, it was just stinky and acidic, rough and rustic. We may have been on the cusp of something, but it sure didn’t seem like it.
Truth be told, some people are still on that cusp. They have a similar aversion to goat cheese, mostly because they’ve gone only for the primitive, gritty stuff, tossed willy-nilly into big salads at the forced-fun chain restaurants.
Their distaste may well be biological. Cheese making is a trying, exacting passion, related chemically to winemaking and chocolate making. All are exercises in spoiling edible food. The process is controlled, yes; but what results is nonetheless partially decomposed, or rotted, or fetid, or whatever word you want to use. It’s no wonder then that the Symbolist poet Lèon-Paul Fargue once wrote that Camembert fleure les pieds du bon Dieu, smells like the feet of God—partly because it’s so divine, but mostly because it’s so stinky.
Our aversion to spoilage keeps us safe, healthy, and even alive. But it also puts a line down in our behavior: Don’t go there.
It’s a really good thing we love to cross lines. Cheese—along with wine and chocolate—offers us a safe, tantalizing, vaguely erotic way to overcome a biological limit.
We’re not carrion fowl. The spoiled bits we relish are crafted in heavily controlled environments. How controlled? Let’s look at the primary components of goat milk to understand how goat cheese moves from rustic to sublime.
1. Lactose. It’s the only carb in the mix, a bond between two relatively simpler sugars, glucose and galactose. Goat milk is slightly—but only slightly—lower in lactose than cow milk (about 4.1 percent of the various milk solids, as opposed to about 4.8 percent). Although snapped-apart lactose is a major nutrient (mammal brains run on glucose), its primary purpose in the milk is twofold: pleasure and preservation.
As to pleasure, lactose is sweet. Therefore, we go for it early and often. It makes baby-candy.
But that natural sweet we crave can be a problem. Lactose on its own will cause any attempts at making cheese to falter for two reasons: (1) Lactose impedes structural development, and (2) it provides fodder for bad bugs that can make the cheese sour or even inedible. So to craft controlled spoilage, lactose itself must be controlled.
Fortunately, it is by nature—from almost the moment the milk is produced. It comes with bacteria in tow that instantly begin to break it down and turn it into lactic acid. Thus, the milk quickly becomes too acidic for many bad bugs.
Which is probably why we got to drinking milk in the first place millennia ago: It’s a high-nutrition, glucose-rich food that our ancestors could keep on the hut’s shelf for a few days—or that we can keep in the fridge for a few weeks.
We keep it because we crave it. And we crave it because of the sugars, which are really just an excuse to get us to ingest …
2. The fat. Although the individual fat molecules are small in goat milk, these globules are still the largest bits in the mix.
Making cheese is all about building a structure that will hold these tasty globules in place. They can clump together—some fat may skim the rim of high-quality, high-fat goat yogurt, for example—but they cannot build a lasting, cohesive structure on their own. Both whipped cream and butter of all animal varieties are notoriously unstable at room temperature: Whipped cream can break, the water oozing out of suspension; and butter becomes spreadable, even runny, hardly a good candidate for cheese. Goat cream makes an even less stable whipped cream than cow cream, what with the smaller molecules—among other things.
That said, the fat is the main reason we as infants drink milk. We may want milk for the glucose, but we need it for the fat—which is the major source of the milk’s vitamins. The fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K ride on the globules’ backs, as it were. Fat is also the primary ingredient our bodies use to build both nervous system tissue and the walls of every single cell in us.
Still, goat cheese is not about nutrition. A good cheese maker knows that he or she really needs all that luscious fat to carry forward …
3. The flavor compounds. These are intensified on the palate by the fat, but they’re originally brought into the milk by whatever the herd has been eating: wildflowers, thistles, hay, grass, etc. Better feed (not just dried silage, but living plants) results in better milk, which results in better cheese.
These bits and remnants of botanical flavors give the goat cheese its primary characteristics (along with the introduced bacterial cultures—which we’ll get to down the line). Since goats have a more varied diet than cows, any cheese made from goat milk will by necessity have a wider array of flavor compounds remaining in the curds, which are made from …
4. The casein. You’ve probably made a very rudimentary cheese without even knowing it: the skin on chocolate pudding. Chocolate is slightly acidic—and therefore causes the casein to coagulate into a thin, soft layer on top of pudding.
In a sense, casein is the very essence of cheese. The four types of protein molecules we call casein are all made up of loose, wiggly protein strands roped together by a barrette of calcium molecules. (Thus, casein is the primary source of milk’s calcium.)
But here’s the rub: Casein can’t form any sort of structure on its own because all four varieties are negatively charged. They’re naturally sticky—all those wiggly protein strands would love to knot together—but they cannot get near each other, just like the negative ends of two magnets cannot come in contact.
That’s why milk will not coagulate in the presence of heat. In fact, it’s the only edible protein source that won’t. Think about it: Meat proteins coagulate in a hot oven. Throw a rib roast in there, and the proteins begin to line up, build structures, and the meat turns from raw to rare to (blech) medium-rare. Same with eggs: A frying pan, a little heat, and voilà, scrambled eggs.
Not milk. You can boil it almost to nothing and it will not coagulate. Yet getting the proteins to do so is the main problem when you’re making cheese. Or to put it in ridiculously scientific lingo, you have to morph the casein into neutrally charged particles that can stick together, not pull apart. Once you do that, you’ve got curds—the casein sticky, coagulating around the fat and flavor compounds, which are now trapped inside almost by accident.
Casein is actually one of two protein structures in milk. The other is …
5. The whey. A.k.a. every other protein that’s not a calcium-corseted casein.
Whey is a reference to both the proteins beyond casein and the watery mess left over when the curds fall out of suspension. Little Miss Muffet didn’t sit on her tuffet just eating her curds and whey. She sat there eating her curds and whey and the water the whey is suspended in.
Curiously, the whey will coagulate in the presence of heat. It can’t when you boil milk because it lives in the same house as the don’t-touch-me casein. However, remove the casein (you do so when it becomes curds), and the whey will act like every other protein structure, coagulating as the water boils off. This is essentially how you make ricotta, a whey cheese.
All that said, the whey bits of protein are smaller than casein. Some whey proteins are only a single protein chain long. So they easily slip out of the milk and through any structure the casein is building because they’re dissolved in milk’s major component, which is …
6. Water. And here’s how making cheese is just about like every other form of cooking and baking. Shove a roast in the oven, and you’re dehydrating the meat, even if you want it rare. Put some muffin batter in a tin, and you’re dehydrating it a bit so that the escaping steam creates tiny air pockets in the tightening batter, thus getting it to rise to that puffy, dry, crunchy top.
So it is with cheese making. From the get-go, you’re pulling water out of the milk—all the way to the last stages: aging it for years, the cheese continuing to dehydrate, concentrating the flavors, building firmer structures, creating a more intense experience from those coagulated curds.
Think back to that rudimentary cheese called pudding skin. Yes, some of the casein clumps in the presence of the slightly acidic chocolate. But the skin will form only if you don’t cover the pudding. Stick a piece of plastic wrap right on top of the pudding, and it won’t form a skin because there’s too much water, the casein not dehydrating enough to form any structure.
OK, before we get further into the specifics of the cheese-making craft, let’s start by putting into practice what we just learned, making our own simple goat cheese that forms the rich elegance of this classic dish from India.
To know more about making cheese, try this vegetarian dish (the name means something like “green-leaf cheese”). You’ll make a rudimentary cheese from goat milk to create a stove-top casserole with spinach and a simple curry blend. Try this some weekend for a fun, creative project.
8 cups (2 L) whole goat milk (do not use low-fat)
¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons (105 ml) lemon juice, divided
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
4 tablespoons (55 g) clarified goat butter (see this page)
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
3 medium garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons minced, peeled fresh ginger
2 pounds (910 g) fresh spinach, any woody stems removed, the leaves washed (but not dried), then
chopped (and thus still wet)
1 cup (240 ml) reduced-sodium vegetable broth
½ cup (120 ml) regular or low-fat goat yogurt
½ teaspoon salt
1. Pour the milk into a medium saucepan and bring it to a low simmer over medium-high heat (thereby continuing the process of breaking down the lactose into lactic acid; see this page).
2. The second the milk starts to rise in the pan, stir in the ¼ cup (60 ml) lemon juice. Take the saucepan off the heat and set it aside for 15 minutes. At this point, you’re curdling the milk, shifting the charge on some of that casein from negative to neutral because of the presence of the acid. We’ll get to more specifics on the why and how in a bit. For now, suffice it to say that the mixture won’t set like cheese but will begin to form simple curds. If in doubt, give it another 5 minutes.
3. When the curds have separated from the watery whey (in other words, when you have clumps of cheesy, milky solids in a cloudy liquid), line a large colander with kitchen-grade cheesecloth. Pour the curds and whey into the colander, catching the curds and letting the whey (and all that water) drain away. Strain in the sink for 1 hour.
4. Gather up the cheesecloth and gently squeeze the curds into a block or a mal-shaped mound. Work with even, delicate pressure so as not to break them up but to help them form into a solid mass, squeezing out a little of the excess moisture. Put the mound, still in its cheesecloth, in a cleaned sink, set a cutting board on top of it, and then weight it down with a 28-ounce (800-g) can of diced tomatoes or some such. Leave it be for 3 to 4 hours.
5. Meanwhile, make the curry powder by toasting the cumin seeds, caraway seeds, fennel seeds, and red pepper flakes in a dry skillet until lightly browned and very aromatic, about 2 minutes, tossing occasionally. Cool for 10 minutes or so, then grind in a spice grinder or a small coffee grinder to a fine powder.
If you’ve used a coffee grinder to make the simple curry powder, you’ll need to clean it out to get rid of various spice oils. Fill it with raw white rice to a depth of about ½ inch (1.2 cm); whir that into a powder. Wipe out the rice powder with a dry paper towel and do that again, this time wiping down the inside of the grinder with a damp paper towel. You should now have removed most of the spice oils.
6. Remove the weight and the cutting board from on top of the cheese; unwrap the block. It should be somewhat firm, but not concrete. Use a sharp knife to cut it into 1-inch (2.5-cm) cubes.
7. Now you’re ready to cook: Melt the butter in a high-sided sauté pan over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring often, for about 3 minutes, or just until softened. Stir in the garlic, ginger, and the toasted spice powder; cook for 20 seconds or so.
8. Put the chopped spinach in the skillet, working in batches if you find there’s too much to fit comfortably. Toss the spinach over the heat until it wilts enough that you can add more. Tongs work best here. Once all the spinach is in the skillet and wilted, pour in the broth and bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 5 minutes, tossing once in a while.
9. Stir in the yogurt, salt, and the remaining 3 tablespoons (45 ml) lemon juice. Cover and continue simmering slowly until the spinach is very soft, almost puree-able, and the sauce has thickened considerably, about 15 minutes.
10. Very gently stir in the homemade cheese cubes. Cover, reduce the heat even further, and cook for about 5 minutes, just until heated through.
