Goat’s Cheese Isn’t Kid Stuff

In the ‘70s, foodies discovered Brie, the soft, ripe, cream-colored cheese that oozed out of a rind, which people didn’t know whether to eat or ball up discreetly in cocktail napkins.

No such problem exists with chevre, the cheese of choice among upscale ‘80s palates. A creamy, slightly tart and tangy cheese, chevre (pronounced chev-aruh) is made of goat’s milk and comes in 60 or more shapes and gastronomical variations, most of them rindless.

Those who run trendy eateries and food boutiques across Los Angeles say the chevre revolution--which started in France--has indeed arrived.

“I keep upping my order every week, and every week I keep running out,” says Dawn Litwak, who runs the cheese department at Trader Joe’s Markets in Sherman Oaks.

Litwak now stocks different kinds of chevre, and the list keeps growing, right along with demand. Litwak says customer requests have just about doubled in the past year.

At L’Express restaurant in Sherman Oaks, manager Michelle Sawtelle says popular goat-cheese dishes include chevre wrapped in spinach leaves, chevre with lamb sausage on designer pizzas and chevre in a cream sauce over pastas. The natty cheese has been a great success since it debuted on the menu eight months ago, she says.

Contrasted with regular cheese, “it’s lower in fat, and people like that; they also like the sharp flavor,” Sawtelle says.

Goat cheese contains 82 calories an ounce, contrasted with 99 calories for cream cheese and 114 calories for Cheddar.

It used to be that chevre came solely from France; Montrachet and Boucheron are two well-known names. But, in the mid-1970s, Laurie Chenel, a vegetarian from Santa Rosa, started a veritable cottage industry in chevre at a small Northern California plant and now produces more than 60,000 pounds of goat cheese annually.

Chenel, who is given credit for introducing home-grown chevre to America, is also co-author of “Chevre: The Goat Cheese Cookbook.” Experts rank her chevres on a par with the leading French varieties.

Chevre mavens say the cheese tastes best when freshly opened, and turns tangy and dry after a week in the fridge. A sampling must include fromage blanc (light, creamy-textured and mild); discs (young, fresh cheeses in round, flat shapes that come plain or coated with herbs) and cabecou (button-like, one-ounce cheeses cured two to three weeks, then marinated in olive oil and herbs).