Cheese, Chèvre (Fresh Goat)

⚠ UNTESTED as chèvre. I work with goat milk constantly — a good feta should be goat’s milk and goat is all I normally use now — but making a fresh goat cheese is not the same as making a brined one, and I am not going to claim it. A briefing.

Chèvre is the cultured fresh-cheese make run on goat milk, and the milk changes the result far more than the method does. It is tangy, bright, slightly chalky on the tongue, and it carries the specific flavour people call “goaty” — which has a real chemical name and a good etymology, below.

🔴 And here is the thing worth knowing before you buy the milk: goat milk is not richer than cow’s milk and it yields less. Fat and protein come out almost identical on the carton — 3.26/4.07 against 3.42/4.09 — but goat milk yields around 11.9% cheese against cow’s 15.4%, because it is lower in αs1-casein. That is a composition difference, not a richness difference, and it means a gallon of goat milk gives you noticeably less cheese for noticeably more money.

The diagnostic detail: a proper chèvre culture usually carries Geotrichum candidum as well as the lactic bacteria, which is what lets a log grow that fine wrinkled coat if you age it a week or two.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon goat milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/8 tsp mesophilic culture, or a purpose-made chèvre culture (which includes Geotrichum candidum)
• 1-2 drops liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 1/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1 to 2 tsp fine salt (about 1% of the drained curd)
• Optional coatings: dried herbes de Provence, cracked black pepper, edible vegetable ash

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Black Pepper

1. Warm the goat milk to 72 °F / 22 °C. Gently — goat milk scorches at least as readily as cow’s. Add calcium chloride if it is shop-bought; goat milk is routinely homogenised and pasteurised hard, and it makes a weaker gel than cow’s milk to begin with.

Culture it, stir it right through, and leave it a minute to rehydrate first.

1. One or two drops of rennet, diluted. Goat milk’s weaker set is the reason this make tolerates the second drop where a cow’s-milk fromage blanc does not.
2. Cover and leave 12 to 18 hours at room temperature. You want a firm yogurt-like set with clear whey on the surface.
3. Drain in butter muslin, 6 to 12 hours. Hang it. Drain further than you would a fromage blanc — chèvre should hold a shape you can roll.
4. Salt at about 1% of the drained weight and work it through. Weigh the curd if you can; “a teaspoon” is a guess and salt is doing real work here, not just seasoning.
5. Shape it, and decide whether to stop. Rolled into a log in cling film, or into small rounds, or pressed into a mould. Eat it now, or coat it and give it a week in the fridge, uncovered on a rack — with a Geotrichum-bearing culture it will start to develop a fine wrinkled surface and the flavour will deepen considerably.
6. Coat it, if you are coating it. Herbs, cracked pepper or ash on the outside of the log. Roll it just before serving if you want the coating bright, or at shaping if you want it to work into the surface.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED as written. I use goat milk regularly for feta and I have a firm opinion about it there; I have not run this particular make. This is not any of the protected French goat cheeses — Sainte-Maure de Touraine, Crottin de Chavignol, Valençay and the rest are aged, rinded, PDO cheeses tied to specific places. This is fresh chèvre, which is the family they all start from.

Why goat cheese tastes of goat — and the etymology is the explanation ⭐ The flavour comes from three short-chain fatty acids that goat milk carries in far greater quantity than cow’s: caproic, caprylic and capric acid. All three are named from Latin capra — goat. The chemistry was named after the animal, and then the animal’s cheese turned out to taste of exactly those compounds. Goat and sheep milk also carry a lipase that liberates them as the cheese ripens, which is why an aged goat cheese tastes markedly goatier than a fresh one.

The yield problem, stated honestly 🔴 Goat milk yields about 11.9% where cow’s milk yields about 15.4%, because it is lower in αs1-casein — the protein that does most of the structural work. It also gives a softer, more fragile gel for the same reason. ⚠ And the popular claim that goat milk is “naturally homogenised” is a misconception: the fat globules are only slightly smaller (2.76 vs 3.51 µm). The real reason the cream does not rise is that goat milk lacks agglutinin, the protein that clusters fat globules together in cow’s milk so they float as a group.

Sourcing Fresh goat milk from a farm behaves considerably better than the shelf-stable cartons, which are usually UHT and will not form a proper set at all. If UHT is your only option, this is not the recipe to attempt — make a hot-acid cheese instead, where the rule does not apply.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/fresh-and-acid-set/ for the make, and /cheese/milk/ for why the milk matters more than the method here.