By Austin Coe Butler
It’s remarkable that you can walk into an American grocery store and buy goat cheese. Until even just recently, you wouldn’t be able to find chèvre in a Cub or artisanal goat’s cheeses made here in the US in a shop like ours. And much of this is owed to the hard work of a few people who started to make goat cheeses back in the 70s.
Enter the American “Goat Ladies.”
The “Goat Ladies” refers to a group of women who came to goat cheese making usually by traveling abroad to western Europe or were inspired by the back to the land movement. Mary Keehn of Cyprus Grove, Laura Chenel, Allison Hooper of Vermont Creamery, Chantal Plasse, Paula Lambert, and Judy Schad of Capriole all are included in this movement of “Goat Ladies.” These women learned from and inspired each other at a time when travel to France or knowledge of goat’s cheesemaking and herd management wasn’t widely available. In 1976 Shad was a PhD candidate in Renaissance Literature at the University of Louisville when she and her husband, Larry, in search of a more sustainable life (and more room to garden), moved their kids to the small town of Greenville, Indiana. On their new farm overlooking the Ohio River, Judy had plenty of room to grow vegetables and acres of flower gardens. She also kept a few goats, but her kids weren’t fond of goat milk. And just like cheesemakers for centuries, Judy fell into cheesemaking out of abundance and necessity.
Now, over thirty years since founding Capriole in 1988, Judy and her team make almost a dozen bright, playful cheeses. We carry two of them, the stunning ash-ripened Sofia and Wabash Cannonball, and both abound with bright, citrusy goat zing. If you’ve come to the counter, odds are we’ve sent you home with a piece of Sofia, or you were captivated by the brainy sphere of a Wabash Cannonball. Sofia is inspired by classic Loire Valley goat’s cheeses and is a gorgeous ingot of goat’s cheese with an ash rind and another layer of ash running horizontally through it, creating a striking visual contrast and appeal against the bone white goat cheese. Wabash Cannonballs, with their brainy, geotrich appearance, are singular in their appearance and have also been dusted in ash.
Ash is common in cheeses like Valençay and Morbier. It has been used for centuries and was likely first used as a way to protect the rind of cheese from insects or prevent the premature formation of a rind, as in Morbier. For fresh goat cheeses in particular, which tend to be lactic set cheeses, their delicate, crumbly texture is too fragile for common preservation techniques like washing, brushing, or oiling to be applied. Particularly in the Loire Valley, which is regarded as region producing some of the best goat’s cheeses, an abundance of grape vine clippings that were incinerated provided a the cinders, although nowadays cheesemakers use food grade vegetable ash or activate charcoal is used.
While the use of ash may have began as a preservation method though, overtime it was found to encourage beneficial surface mold to bloom and ripen the cheese. Ashing makes the surface of goat’s cheese less acidic (more basic), which creates an ideal environment for beneficial molds like Penicilium candidum and Geotrichum to bloom and thrive, and these molds have a big impact on flavor. Those beautiful, gooey cream lines on your piece of Sofia or Wabash Cannonball that run and drip from a baguette or cracker? All the result of molds and bacteria breaking down the proteins in cheese through their metabolism. Without them, these cheeses would be much more similar to the cakey, crumbly chèvre that tops your salads or beets.
Judy and her team no longer manage the goats. Judy still keeps some of her favorites around. Now all the time that went into managing the herd and its health goes into the cheese! Capriole is a clever play on the Latin capra, or goat, and also the leap or caper performed in classical dance or horseback riding. These leaps are also seen in these playful, gregarious goats gamboling across the fields and jumping off one another and into trees. It’s a reminder that, in Clifton Fadiman’s words, cheese is “milk’s leap at immortality.”