Why goats and not chickens, cows, horses or rabbits?
We had a neighbor who had two dairy goats, and [my wife] Dona came home once with the milk still warm in the bottle. I always experimented in the kitchen, so first I made a quesa blanca, which wasn’t great but it was OK — certainly it was the freshest cheese I’d ever had. Then I made a chevre and it was a revelation. I’d never tasted anything like it, because to eat a fresh raw milk chevre only hours old is illegal. One of our staples is a chalky log of goat cheese you buy in a store, and to realize we could actually make something so much better than that was astonishing. So the first thing was about the cheese. But it’s also about the animals. When it comes to cheese, there’s goat people, there’s sheep people and there’s cow people. None of them see eye to eye, and all are biased. The stereotype is sheep people like landscape; they like to see the flock on the hillside, which looks pretty, but a sheep person doesn’t really like the animal itself. Goat people like the animal and make
