Say (Goat) Cheese : Alternative Dairy Product Is Bringing a Smile to Growing Numbers

Back in 1979, Laura Chenel had a big problem with her small farm in Santa Rosa: What to do with all the goat milk her herd was producing?

Cheese, she decided. Or, rather, chevre--a soft, tangy, fresh cheese made from goat milk that had long been produced in France.

Heading to the source, Chenel apprenticed herself to four farmstead goat cheese producers in France, then returned to Sonoma County to ply her new trade, opening her own plant in 1981. Her cheese is credited with sparking a culinary revolution nationwide.

Thanks to Chenel’s pioneering example, Northern California a decade later is home to a gaggle of mom-and-pop goat cheese makers who are satisfying an increasingly hungry market for French-style chevre, Italian-style Mozzarella and other cheeses made from goat milk. Of perhaps 100 producers nationwide, at least 10 are in California.

Gerd Stern, an East Coast importer and self-described “cheesemonger,” calls California’s goat cheese makers “the spearhead of a movement.”

“The goat cheese market is tiny, tiny, tiny,” added Stern, who also is president of the American Cheese Society, a trade group. “But the growth is remarkable.”

The hand-crafted products--which command far higher prices than do most cow cheeses--have won myriad prizes at food tastings and prominent places in food store cases throughout the West, alongside varieties from big French-owned plants in Wisconsin and California.

At gourmet hangouts such as Postrio in San Francisco and Spago, California goat cheeses get blended into pasta sauces, sprinkled on designer pizzas or tossed in salads. One Healdsburg restaurant even serves a goat cheese won-ton soup.

Chenel, whose business grew so fast that she had to sell her time-consuming herd and buy milk from other farmers, is so well known in food circles that her chevre warrants a reference by name on the menu at the tony Michael’s restaurants in Santa Monica and New York.

Although goat milk has long been regarded as a healthful alternative for people with allergies to cow milk, America has been slower to develop a taste for goat cheese. Yet restaurateurs and clients who have taken to the pungent stuff sing the praises of the farmers behind this cottage industry.

“What they’re doing is so interesting and spectacular and exists nowhere else in the world,” said John Ash, proprietor of the John Ash & Co. restaurant in Santa Rosa. “I hope we don’t get Velveeta-ized.”

Compared to cow milk cheeses, goat cheese has taken barely a slice of the overall market. Domestic producers made about 6 billion pounds of cow cheeses in 1990, whereas probably only about 1.8 million pounds of goat cheeses were made domestically. (The United States also imports about 1.5 million pounds of French goat cheese a year.)

At an average wholesale price of about $5 a pound, domestically produced cheeses--ranging from soft, mild fresh cheeses, often flavored with herbs and spices, to tangy, crumbly aged varieties--have a market of less than $10 million. (A goat produces only about one gallon of milk a day, compared to 10 for a cow. That, along with rising prices for feed and supplies, helps account for the higher price.)

The rough estimates come from a preliminary survey by the American Dairy Goat Product Assn., a fledgling trade group that will be based in Spindale, N.C.--once it gets organized.

“Everybody talks about a goat cheese industry,” said Mary Konnersman, owner of Cypress Grove Chevre in the Humboldt County coastal town of McKinleyville. “It’s really just a bunch of small individuals feeling stuck.

“We’re trying to get an industry going,” added Konnersman, one of those behind the trade group effort.

In the past, Konnersman said, goat cheese makers have viewed with distrust any effort aimed at fostering cooperation. Recently, though, producers have come to realize that reliable statistics and marketing information might make it easier to compete with the giant French producers, led by Couturier, and more recent imports from Israel that are sold at lower prices.

Chic as it might be, goat cheese has its origins in a far-from-glamorous business that thrives on relentlessly hard work and long hours. In addition to feeding and milking the goats, farmstead producers also hand-ladle the cheese and often do all their own marketing, distribution and mail order sales. A typical farm has only two employees, and many farmers must supplement their income by working at other jobs.

Given the wearing, dawn-to-dusk lifestyle, producers come and go. Most of the survivors stick with it because they love the goats and want to make their living from the land.

Rachel Helm, owner of the two-acre Me Gusta Farm in Sebastopol, began as a hobby farmer.

At full production, she now churns out 600 five-ounce, French-style goat cheeses in six varieties a week, using only the milk from her 12 adult goats. Since the cheese is 100% “estate produced,” she qualifies to sell her goods at farmers markets, her only sales outlet now that her prices have gotten too high ($4 for five ounces) for most restaurants and food stores. This way she avoids paying a distributor’s costs.

Helm, a graduate of Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, chalks some of this up to fate: “I’m a Capricorn--the sign of the goat.”

In Bodega, Patricia and Javier Salmon make cheese from their herd’s milk using a recipe supplied by Javier’s Peruvian father. Their shoestring operation makes and sells 300 pounds of Bodega goat cheese a week, primarily to health food stores.

Patty also works as a neonatal nurse, and Javier works as a construction company engineer.

In their rural pocket of Sonoma County, they recently had to fight off neighbors’ efforts to zone the area for a housing development. The battle helped discourage them from too much growth.

“We’re at a juncture of deciding how big to be,” Patty said. “We’ve decided to stay small. Small is beautiful.”

For years, Jennifer Bice and Steven Schack competed against each other in livestock shows before going into business together and, ultimately, marrying. Goats graze tranquilly at their rustic Redwood Hill Farm in Sebastopol.

Bice and Schack live in the modest farmhouse where Jennifer and her nine siblings grew up helping with the family’s goat business. The shelves in the dining room are filled with dozens of awards and ceramic, crystal and wooden goats.

Unlike farmstead producers, they truck milk to another company’s plant, where it is turned into yogurt and Mozzarella, Ricotta and marinated goat cheeses. The products are marketed in eight Western states and Hawaii.

Schack and others contend that small U.S. operations are at a disadvantage compared to the French producers, which have economies of scale and higher market share in their favor. Moreover, the recession has cut into purchases of some of the handcrafted goat cheese lines.

For some goat farmers, the rugged lifestyle and the often unfavorable economics eventually take their toll. Janis Eckert-Twohy, whose organic Yerba Santa Goat Dairy produces Alpine chevre in Lakeport near Clear Lake, says she is “burning out.”

“From a financial point of view, we’d be better off if we didn’t have the dairy and just worked our jobs,” said Eckert-Twohy, 45. But, as she gazes from her rustic farmhouse at grazing deer and acres of walnut orchards, she adds with a sigh: “But it’s the lifestyle.”