Greener pastures found in goat cheese
By Emily Green
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Laura Chenel, the Sonoma cheese maker, introduced California to fresh, French-style goat cheeses more than 20 years ago.
Associated Press
Today there is a network of California goat-cheese makers stretching from the Oregon border to Ojai.
Jan Twohy, co-owner of Yerba Santa Dairy in Lakeport, Calif., gives a ride to an injured goat. Twohy and her husband, Chris, produce a rare goat cheese, a hard aged cheese called Alpine shepard.
The appearance of Chenel's local cheeses created a sensation, one captured in the 1982 "Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook" from the Berkeley restaurant.
In 1993, Chenel's business had grown so much, she took over a large cow dairy on the Napa-Sonoma border. There she keeps a herd of 500 goats and runs a dairy that imports additional milk from goat farms all over the state.
Jennifer Bice arrived in Sonoma County from Los Angeles in the 1960s as a 10-year-old and was desperate to have farm animals.
"We wanted cows, pigs and ducks," says Bice. "It was the goats that stuck." By the 1970s, Bice was engaged to Steven Schack, an Angeleno who majored in psychology at Sonoma State University.
Once married, Bice and Schack took over her parents' farm in Sebastopol, formed Redwood Hill goat dairy and produced goat milk for the health food market. By the 1980s, they graduated to yogurt, and in the 1990s, to cheese.
Redwood Hill appears distinctly Swiss in style. Laid out over a series of ledges down a Sonoma County hillside, goats caper in a series of parallel pens.
The scent of fresh milk suffuses the place. It is pumped next door, to a cheese room, where after being pasteurized, it will be curdled by the addition of a lactic bacteria. Whey, the water part of the milk carrying much of the lactose, will then be drained, leaving loose fresh curds. This will be ladled into molds, allowed to drain some more, then fashioned into a number of cheeses.
Schack introduced their cheeses locally by selling them at farmers markets about 10 years ago, but he died suddenly three years ago. Mostly it is now sold through high-end supermarkets and specialty shops.
If Bice and Schack led their generation in goat marketing, Laura Chenel, a neighbor of Bice's from Sebastopol, pioneered the cheese-making in California. After studying anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley, and acquiring goats along the way, Chenel found herself with milk, and began making cheese in her kitchen.
By 1979, she had gone to France to study French farmhouse cheese-making. Here she saw goat cheese hand-made as it had been for centuries. The milk was curdled by adding some of the previous day's whey. Barely formed, unsalted curds were then brought to the table in special perforated drainers set in pitchers, called faisselles.
Laura Chenel's Chevre in 1981 developed a specialty line that included fresh cheeses in olive oil, fresh logs of the spreadable chevre and the mold-ripened discs, ash-coated variants.
If fromage de chevre was still an exotic curiosity when this bunch got their goats in the late 1970s, goat milk wasn't. From the 1940s, the Central Valley had at least two dozen goat dairies. Big ones. Laurelwood Acres Dairy in Ripon had more than 1,000 goats in the 1950s and funneled the milk to a health food industry.
Most of the goat cheese makers happened into it accidentally.
"A lot of the people got goats because they liked them," says John Bruhn, director of the Dairy Research and Information Center at University of California, Davis. "Suddenly they had milk, and more goats, and they said, 'What can I do with this?' "
