Even Goat Cheese Gets the Blues

Westfield Farm

28 Worcester Road

Hubbardston, Mass. 01452

(508) 928-5110

Billed when shipped. Prices do not include shipping and handling. Out of hundreds of American farmstead and specialty cheeses entered in this year’s American Cheese Society Festival, Westfield Farm’s Hubbardston blue won Best of Show. Pretty amazing considering 15 years ago, when Westfield’s Letty and Bob Kilmoyer started making goat cheese, the craft was so new in this country that the couple had to learn from books and by trial and error. “It took us about three years of experimentation just to make the regular goat cheese,” says Letty. “We gave away a lot of cheese.”

Today there are more than 100 farmstead cheesemakers in America, handcrafting goat cheese into cylinders, disks, drums, buttons, domes and cones. The cheeses are then marinated in oils, dusted with ash and studded with peppercorns, garlic, even lavender.

The Kilmoyers, who now have a herd of 65 Nubian and Saanen goats on their 20-acre farm near Boston, have taken the process one step further: They’ve inoculated the surface of their fresh goat Capri with blue mold. “We liked blue cheese,” says Letty, “and goats’ milk cheese is what we were making.”

Some of their blue goat cheese is sold fresh, but they also let some of it age. Usually, as cheese ages the flavor becomes stronger, but with the blue goat, the process is the reverse.

The fresh blue Classic ($3.95 for 7 ounces) is tangy with good blue flavor. Milder with a softer texture, more like Brie is the aged Hubbardston ($2.59 for 5 ounces)--the blue that won the blue.