The sun has just peeked over the horizon, and I am struggling to keep my eyes open as I make my way through fog and down winding roads into the sprawling farmland of Ashfield. It’s not yet 6 a.m. As I turn into Sangha Farm, owners Maribeth and Derek Ritchie are already making their way to the barn where two dozen goats are huddled, all eager for attention, several impatient to be milked.
Everyone knows the lineup. After balancing on her hind legs to give Derek a good morning kiss, Bennie—a large, black goat with floppy ears and an in-charge attitude as the first goat on the farm—is the first into the milking room. She staggers up the ramp onto a platform and goes straight at the bowl of grain strategically placed at the other end. Derek closes two wooden panels around her neck to keep her in place while he milks her, though Bennie shows no sign of trying to abandon the bowl before every grain has been eaten.
After an iodine solution kills any bacteria on her udders, the milking begins. Derek keeps his hands wrapped around Bennie’s teats, alternating between them as he pinches the milk down and squirts it into the metal bucket below.
An hour later, after seven other goats have been milked, Derek and Maribeth return to the house to feed their children breakfast and get ready for their day, which Derek will spend in the field and Maribeth in the cheese room. After a second milking at five p.m., there will be about six gallons of milk from the day to be pasteurized and turned into chevre, a fancy French word for a simple treat: fresh goat cheese.
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The light, airy texture and cool tart flavor of fresh ch?vre makes it a summertime favorite for cheese enthusiasts. Goat’s milk, with its high fat content, yields cheese that is creamy, tart and, well, goaty. It’s also widely believed that goat’s milk cheese is actually healthier than cheese made from cow’s milk. Especially during the warmer months, you’ll find it served over fresh greens, spread on sandwiches or dipped in chocolate. My favorite way of eating it is to buy a loaf of freshly baked bread and an herb-flavored cheese to dip it in.
The good news is that the Pioneer Valley has plenty of goat cheese. While our neighbor to the north, Vermont, has long captivated the attention of cheese aficionados, local dairy farms in Western Mass. have started to turn heads. Locally made goat cheese is a focal point on the menu at the best restaurants and available at every farmers’ market and grocery store in the area.
Margaret Christie, of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), a group that helps connect farmers with markets for their products, attributes the rising interest in local goat cheese to the national movement to buy locally made food. Good food and food made near by excite people, she says.
At Sangha Farm, Maribeth can’t make cheese fast enough to meet the demand for her product.
Bistro Les Gras in Northampton is one of her biggest customers. Chef David Martinez says he often uses chevre on his menu during the summer months for its flavor, which he calls “bright and lively.” One unique dish he has concocted from local goat cheese is a chevre-flavored ice cream that he serves over a chilled peach soup.
When buying goat cheese to enjoy at home, Martinez says he suggests staying away from ch?vre that appears overly white or has a yellow tinge and opting instead for a creamy, natural color. He recommends pairing the cheese with fresh tomatoes.
“People are looking up to Vermont for cheese,” he says, as he tends to the Bistro’s stand at the Tuesday Market. “And I think they should keep their eyes here.”
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Derek and Maribeth bought their first goat not with the intention of becoming cheesemakers, but because it was cheaper to feed their two young children milk from the goat than to buy milk at the store. Six years later, cheesemaking has become a full-time occupation for Maribeth.
Inside the barn, the small cheese room is a cross between a kitchen and a science laboratory. On one side, curds wrapped in a cotton cloth are hanging from a metal rack while whey drains into bowls below. A metal vat with four gallons of freshly pasteurized milk is cooling in the sink, where it will ripen into a layer of yogurt-like curds submerged in yellowish whey. On the stove, two gallons of milk from the morning are being pasteurized.
In the refrigerator are Maribeth’s special creations: chocolate-covered chevre truffles. The balls of goat cheese, which have been frozen and coated in a layer of Swiss chocolate, sell out at nearly every market she brings them to.
Once the milk is harvested in the morning and evening, a meticulous regimen of cooling and heating must be followed. Within two hours, the temperature must drop from 102 degrees, the temperature just after milking, to below 45 degrees. While the goats are still chomping on grain, Derek and Maribeth strain the milk for debris and chill it on ice. A few hours later, after the kids have been fed, Maribeth brings the milk into the cheese room to be pasteurized, a two-hour process.
When the milk has cooled again from the 145 degrees it reaches during pasteurization, Maribeth adds cultures that will coagulate it. A day later, she slices into the now-thick curds with her knife and scoops them into cheesecloths to be hung overnight.
Next comes the fun. Maribeth takes down the cheese, which has now reached the right consistency, salts it, and empties it into a bowl. She dices fresh chives from the farm, adds garlic powder, and stirs it all together. The result is chive and garlic chevre, one of her most popular varieties, to be sold tomorrow at the Ashfield market. From one gallon of milk there is almost enough chevre to fill six of the four-ounce containers she sells her Tava brand cheese in.
Maribeth’s cheesemaking operation is carried on under strict regulations. Learning the rules and gaining the necessary certification was an arduous task when she began making cheese commercially three years ago. Christie, at CISA, stresses the difficulty of getting into artisanal cheesemaking. Jurisdiction overlaps between agencies, and often the regulations themselves are unclear. “Government makes it harder for local farmers,” she says, creating a “hurdle at the front end.”
The equipment can also be expensive. Maribeth’s small four-gallon pasteurizer cost her $7,000.
Maribeth is now making upwards of 50 pounds of cheese per week. In addition to fresh ch?vre, she makes goat’s milk feta and plans to experiment with brie. Her small-scale pasteurizer and the time it takes to milk each goat by hand limit the amount of cheese she can produce. The coolers come home empty from the markets week after week.
With the growing demand for fresh, locally made goat cheese, Maribeth and Derek are looking for a bigger property that can handle more goats and, possibly, a machine to do the milking.
“I can’t keep up,” Maribeth says with a smile as she tends to the milk on the stove. “They just love goat cheese.”
Other dairy farms in the area that produce goat cheese are Hillman Farm in Colrain; The Farmstand at Mine Brook in Charlemont, which makes Goat Rising ch?vre; Rawson Brook Farm in Monterey, which makes Monterey Ch?vre; and Westfield Farm in Hubbardston.
