Goats cheese

For me, there’s nothing more evocative of the interior of the Mediterranean than the sound and smell of goats. It evokes olive trees and wild thyme, dry shrubbery, limestone rocks, and sunshine. It’s all those things I didn’t grow up with in the suburbs of London – and all those things I yearned for.

I’ve become a bit of goats cheese addict since I came here. I’t’s always been a favourite but am now in a place where it’s relatively cheap. I throw it into salads, mix it with roasted veggies, eat it on crackers with chutney, add it to omelettes or just munch on it as it is. Lately I’ve started fantasizing about getting a few goats and making it ( a Plan B!) , so I was very happy to be put in touch with Domingo who produces organic goats cheese in the heart of the Sierra de Cadiz

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Domingo is a one man band. He keeps his 130 goats in the grounds of an isolated farmhouse between El Bosque and Ubrique, just below the famous Salto de Cabra. The goats spend their days roaming and grazing in the pure mountain air. Domingo works alone, doing everything by himself: the milking, the stirring, the squeezing, the curing, and finally selling in the local organic food markets.

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We arrived at the farmhouse just as Domingo was about to start making the day’s batch. We watched him bent over the stainless steel trough, separating the curds from the whey with his hands. The liquid was drained into bucket and poured into a large pot to be made into ricotta

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Back at his trough, he scooped up handfuls of the curds and pressed them into round perforated containers. Once he had squeezed all the liquid out of them, they solidified into their cheese like shape. He rolled each one in salt, and left them to sit for 24hrs. The following day, he would rinse off the salt and move them to the temperature controlled chamber to cure.

                    

 

Domingo produces three hard cheeses – fresh, semi cured and cured, and obviously, the time he leaves them determines their flavour and strength. The fresh has to be made with pasteurized milk and is ready to eat in a few days.  However, he leaves the semi-cured for up to two months and the cured – which comes out VERY hard and strong – for up to eight months.

It is a total mystery to me how working with one single ingredient can produce such different results. Why do his cheeses have their own distinctive flavour? After all, it’s all just milk – well, milk and a bit of bacteria. Of course, this is true for every cheese which makes me realize that as simple as it looks, it’s one of those things that requires instinct, knowledge and a true sense of the nature of the material. Plus, a lot of hard work. 

  Domingo says that a lot of the flavour comes from the environment itself – the grass and the herbs that the goats eat, and the temperature and quality of the air. And then, on top of that, it’s about the handling of the milk and the temperature it’s cured at. All those very subtle factors go to produce a consistent and distinctive flavour. It seems theres a lot to learn!

 

 

I’m not sure what Domingo would have made of what did with the cheese I brought back but I was inspired by something I’d seen Ottolenghi make a few days earlier – a herb  and spice crusted Fried Goats Cheese  Good enough for Ottolenghi, good enough for me. So, this was lunch. I changed the salsa to a chilli red pepper sauce  (no tomatoes on hand) but it doesn’t look as good for the picture so click the link and get his recipe. It was delicious.

Thinking about it though, I doubt that Domingo really cares too much about how I eat his cheese. He probably can’t even look at the stuff after working with it day in day out. I think that what he never tires of though are his gorgeous goats. And who can blame him!

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 And as for me and my Plan B ? Hhmm…..Im not so sure. I think I might just keep cooking and eating it.