| While this fresh goat cheese spread from the Creamery doesn’t get a lot of attention out in the world at large, I was thinking the other day that it ought to! It’s terrifically tasty and great to keep on the shelf in your refrigerator for easy access at any time of the day. It’s also a wonderful example of what it means to have a local cheese—made here on Plaza Drive, right between the Bakehouse and Coffee Company (come by and visit), using milk from Michigan farms.
The Creamery’s Fresh Goat Cheese is a very regular item at our house, where we use it for snacks and also as an ingredient in a whole range of other dishes. From toast to omelets to pastas, and pretty much everything in between. While it’s not technically “cream cheese” because no cream is added back to it, from an eating standpoint that’s the easiest way to explain this cheese With the same lovely, creamy texture and fresh flavor as cow’s milk cream cheese, it just happens to be made from local goat milk instead of cow’s milk!
The fresh goat cream cheese is great spread on a fresh-from-the-toaster slice of Bakehouse Farm bread, spread with a bit of the Mahjoub family’s organic Tunisian harissa and then topped with a fried egg that’s been cooked off in extra virgin oil. Not only does it taste good, but the colors of the yolk, rolling over the red of the harissa on the white background of the cheese and brown crust of the toast is as glorious to look at as it is to eat!
It is also really good, and easy to use, in risotto. When your rice is nearly done, just spoon some of the goat cream cheese and stir it in. It will melt in and give your risotto a really nice, rich creaminess. Easy to add to pasta sauces as well! And of course, the fresh goat cream cheese is awesome bagels, or on the first Tuesday of every month when we make bialys at the Bakehouse. (If you don’t know them, they’re the traditional bread of the town of Bialystok in Poland, about a five-hour or so drive to the southeast of Knyszyn. A bit like a cross between a bagel and an onion roll, they’re terrific. Toasted and then spread first with a bit of butter and then with this fresh goat cream cheese, they’re a beautiful taste of East European culture.)
If you head over to the Coffee Company, you can find goat cream cheese on the terrific toast menu—the Bulgarian Toast is made with lutenitsa (a spread of cooked peppers and eggplant, what some refer to as “Bulgarian ratatouille”) and the Creamery’s Fresh Goat Cheese on Sicilian Semolina bread from the Bakehouse. Super tasty, it’s our biggest-selling toast!
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A wonderful, semi-soft goat cheese with a gentle full flavor
In the small lakeside town of Port Washington in Wisconsin, about half an hour north of Milwaukee, the folks at Blakesville Creamery are making some marvelous cheese. They started only 18 months ago, so the fact that their cheese is already this good is a tribute to their care and their craft. I’m particularly smitten with their Sunny Ridge!
The founder of Blakesville Creamery, Lynde Uihlein, has had a long career in land preservation and community activism. In 1990 she founded the Brico Fund, a non-profit focusing on helping advance women’s issues and environmental causes. While I don’t know that Lynde formally wrote a vision the way we’ve learned to do it here, it’s pretty clear that she had one in her head. Culture magazine writes that, “The folks at Wisconsin-based Blakesville Dairy Farm have had a cheesemaking dream for years but were waiting for the right time and resources to make it work.” Pandemic or no pandemic, they’re making those dreams into a reality. As the writer Varyer says, Blakesville Creamery is “part idyllic goat farmstead and part production and aging facility, built with the cheesemaker’s eye on precision, experimentation, and scale.”
Sunny Ridge is made in the tradition of the great European washed rind cheeses like St. Nectaire. In this case though, Sunny Ridge is made with the farm’s own fresh goat’s milk. The young wheels of Sunny Ridge are washed with beer from Is/Was Brewing in Chicago. The end result is full flavored and eminently accessible. It has a clean, complex, flavor that’s just right to appeal to cheese novices and to folks like me and Tammie who have worked with artisan cheese professionally for decades. Meaty, milky, and mellow at the same time with a nice touch of salt, it’s terrific (at room temperature) to snack on accompanied by fresh vegetables, or eaten with a chunk of French baguette from the Bakehouse. It’d be really tasty, too, with boiled Yukon gold potatoes. I’m not the only one who’s enamored of this new arrival—Sunny Ridge just won a Good Food Award a few months ago. The folks there said it’s “exceptionally delicious [and] also supports sustainability and social good.”
Order Sunny Ridge for pick up from the Creamery.
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