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Judith Schad

In this story: Establishing an American art Watching the mold grow Diners want the best RELATED STORIES, SITES

(womenconnect.com) -- Judith Schad didn't really know much about goats, until her children brought one home to raise in the backyard as a 4-H project. A backyard goat was not that odd in Greenville, Indiana, especially in the Mother Jones redux of the late '80s; and Schad, an avid cook, began experimenting in her kitchen, making cheese from the goat's velvety milk.

She first took her cheese to local farm markets, then drove it to restaurants such as Timothy's in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. Customers liked that the cheese was fresh, its origins were natural, its producers had faces. Schad's small company took flight; she named it Capriole Inc., from the Latin capra for goat, after "the little dance goats do when they're babies and they're happy."

Today, Schad's operation boasts 300 goats and makes 1,000 pounds of chevre a week, to be consumed by diners in distinctive restaurants from New York to San Francisco.

Schad started with little more than her kids' goat and "a cheesemaking book from Ricki Carroll at New England Cheesemaking, the mother of us all." Now Schad, 57, is part of a new breed of artisanal cheese makers along with Mary Keehn of California's Cypress Grove Chevre, and Paula Lambert of Dallas' Mozzarella Company who are re-discovering the ancient craft.

Establishing an American art

Though worlds away from the shrink-wrapped, dayglo orange, chemically engineered squares that typically adorn Wonder Bread, this is uniquely "American cheese." Schad and her fellow pioneers have resurrected and refined traditional cheesemaking techniques, to produce farmstead cheeses in a class of their own. Formerly the exclusive province of the French and Canadians, fresh cheese by American makers is now appearing in markets and restaurants across the country. Chefs are featuring "microcheeses" in American cheese tasting menus at the likes of New York's Gramercy Tavern, Chicago's Ritz Carlton and New Orleans' Bayona.

Yet even as acclaim and volume grow, these cheese makers stray little from their backyard roots. "We stay small by staying farmstead," Schad says. "If we breed a doe, two years later you may see milk from that kid."

Making basic cheese is simple. It starts with milk, which is injected with a culture of bacteria and rennet, an animal derivative that persuades the milk solids to coagulate. Separating the resulting curds and whey yields cheese.

For decades, Americans made cheese at home or bought it from nearby farms, until one Jesse Williams built the first U.S. cheese factory, in Rome, New York., in 1851. In that first year, his factory churned out four cheeses a day, averaging 150 pounds each. They cost him about 5 cents a pound to make; he sold them for 7 cents a pound. As he began refining his techniques to manufacture more cheese, in more sterile conditions, he blazed a trail that would eventually render cheese making rote, and scarcely organic.

Watching the mold grow

When Schad started Capriole, she was in the vanguard of bringing back traditional cheese making. She learned the art from Carroll, owner of New England Cheesemaking, who had been teaching the techniques since 1978.

"Back then there weren't many of them -- a handful. Now there are close to 600," Carroll says. "But there are not a lot of people in this country that make true on-the-farm cheese. Many get milk shipped in or from co-ops. Judy's really been able to take off."

Another difference at Capriole is the attention to detail. The mold used for ripening the cheese is a difficult one, requiring low temperatures and high humidity (they've built a special cave) as well as constant nurturing. Says Carroll of Schad's operation: "For me that is a special place. They hand shape each of the cheeses -- there's an extreme amount of manual labor that no one is aware of when it hits the shelf. Watching the mold grow is like watching a baby grow up. That's when it's an art."

For Schad, cheese is not so much a business as a calling. She and her industry mates travel to workshops and teach the techniques they've so lovingly resurrected; they monitor the success of young up-and-comers and apprentice any who ask.

"Cheese is a perfect food. It's a finished thing, you don't have to do anything with it," says Schad. "I am passionate about cheese. A big Montgomery cheddar rolls in here from England and we all stand around it and it's the best thing."

As a business it's not bad, either. Capriole, Inc., which made $8,500 in 1988, its first year, garnered $300,000 in 1998. For the most part, profit is plowed back into the farm and the herd, which has taken eight years to build.

"It's all about not being high tech, it's about sustainable agriculture," says Schad. She adds one caveat: "We pay ourselves well."

Diners want the best

The reason for the company's success, says Schad, is a new emphasis among American diners on fresh. "People are a lot more food-aware. People want local, they want fresh and they want to know who is producing their food. It's a farm market mentality."

Cheese consumption in America has been on the rise for much of the past decade, increasing from 17.5 pounds per person in 1980 to 27.4 pounds in 1997. Retailers and chefs are responding. In Northeast states such as Maine and Massachusetts, cheese makers can -- and do -- survive by producing cheese in their kitchen and selling it in farm markets. Nationwide, gourmet foodsellers like Whole Foods (owner of Bread and Circus and Fresh Fields markets) feature a wealth of American artisanal cheeses in their cases. Even corner supermarkets have ventured from the typical Swiss and Cheddar to the likes of Buffalo mozzarella, Camembert and fontina.

Schad's chevre rarely makes it to retail. The limited supply is snapped up daily by some of the country's top chefs, and shipped fresh overnight all across the nation. Joe Castro, chef at Brown's Hotel in Louisville, was among the first chefs to buy from Capriole, eight years ago. He uses Schad's cheeses in everything from primary courses to cheesecakes and brulees.

"Her fresh cheese is the best I've ever tasted," Castro says. "Now she's aging cheese and her Mont St. Francis is superior to anything I've ever tasted, even in Europe."

But it's more than the cheese: "We developed a relationship from the first time. The service is outstanding," says Castro, remembering tasting dinners at the hotel where Schad and her husband Larry have come to cut cheese and tell diners about its production. "The commitment on their side is unbelievable. She's as interested in what we're going to do with [the cheese] as we are. And when you get that kind of excitement behind the product, that's real special."

As Schad helps redefine the business of American cheese making, she has to contend with an American marketplace dynamic "where everything is big, big, big, grow, grow, grow." Though the tiny cheese company once had to grow just to survive, Schad now says the goal is different: "To stay small. Small enough so it's still hands-on, to still know what all the parts are doing."