How to Make Goat Cheese, Rural Style

Now, you don’t think we’d leave Domaine Bio de Kerjean without giving you a proper post on how to make goat cheese, do you?

You're in goat world now. There's no turning baaaaaack. Get it?

I'll try to cover chevreything here.

Learning this skill might be the highlight of the trip so far, because you can bet your boots there is cheese-making/eating in my future. And now I shall be unstoppable.

So here’s the process for this farm’s goat cheese: Begin milking the goats at 8am. 

How do you milk a goat, you ask? Well, the one-and-only John "eatsmorecheesethanahumanshould" Amory has allowed us some exclusive footage on the process…

Thanks, John.

Combine this fresh milk with what was milked the previous night, add rennet (an agent to help milk quickly coagulate), leave this under a heat lamp to coagulate until the next morning.

Now, take what was left to coagulate the day before, and you’ll have a neatly separated mass of curds and whey.

Separated curds and whey left to coagulate overnight (look closely and you can see the curd)

Begin scooping the solids (curd) into a mold that will allow the liquids (the whey) to drain away (…awhey?). This mold will drain overnight, and by the next morning you will have a mass of curd (your future wheel of cheese) that is firm enough to be taken out of the mold and left to continue draining and drying. 

Spooning the curds into the mold

As the cheese dries, it shrinks (think water-logged sponge vs. dry sponge) and flavor intensifies. 

Cheeses sitting out to dry

They can be eaten from day one for a very fresh chevre, or left to age as long as you like for a more brittle and much stronger version.

We also flipped the rounds two times a day to maintain an even center of gravity (otherwise you would have a concave wheel as gravity pulled the moisture-heavy curds downward).

A special humidity-controlled room for further aging of the cheeses. On the left are the
older ones. On the right—you guessed it—we have the younger, arranged with
the youngest at the top

And voilà! Now eat that goat cheese!

Constantly...

Goat milkers in action

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