A Cheesemaker Blooms
At the Three-Ring Farm in Logsden, it's all about goats, molds and bloomy rinds
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By Niki Price
Oregon Coast Today
Not so long ago, it could be difficult to get “the Velveeta crowd” to taste the rich, aromatic flavor of goat milk cheese. Thanks to increased attention from chefs and trend-leaders across the country, however, artisan producers like Pat Morford at Rivers Edge Chevre are finding a very receptive public.
“Every month, it seems that Martha Stewart has something in her magazine about goat milk cheese. People are discovering that it tastes really good.”
This isn’t news to Pat, who tends and milks a herd of 60 Alpine goats at Three Ring Farm in Logsden on the Siletz River. She has always kept dairy goats and raised her children on the milk they produced. She first tried making cheese back in the 1970s, with disappointing results.
“I started making cheese with junket and buttermilk,” she said. “It was edible, but not great cheese.”
The real breakthrough came in the 1980s with the rise of culture houses, which sold culture, rennets and other supplies to small-scale cheese producers. Around the same time, Pat was raising replacement calves for a dairy farmer and refining her goats’ genetic lines. Still, she said, her herd was barely paying for itself.
Over the course of several years, she collected used equipment, some a 1950s vintage, and formulated a plan.
She taught herself how to make surface ripened cheeses, often called “bloomy rind” cheeses, aged between 10 and 21 days, and fresh chevre, which is served plain or with herbs, nuts or other flavors.
In 2005, with a small business loan, she turned the bottom floor of her Logsden home into a state-certified cheese-making facility. The herd grazes on the hillside nearby, their diet supplemented with a custom dairy grain, pumpkin seeds and pulp.
She offered her first cheese for sale in September 2005. Today, she creates a variety of French-style “bloomy rind” cheeses, including the soft-ripened, Humbug Mountain, Cape Foulweather, Marys Peak, the Siletz River Drum and Valsetz.
Her most attention-getting cheese, however, is Up in Smoke, a fresh chevre that has received mouth-watering reviews in several publications, including the Oregonian food section and Edible Portland magazines. The ball of fresh chevre is smoked, then wrapped in smoked maple leaves that have been misted in bourbon. It’s very popular at Murray’s Cheese Shop, on Bleecker Street in New York City.
What’s next for this up and coming cheesemaker? Right now, she’s working on a farmhouse tomme, which is a raw milk cheese aged five to 10 months.
“It’s a really nice little cheese that looks just like a river stone. It’s mottled, just like it’s covered with lichen. It’s really pretty,” she said.
She’s planning an open house for next August, with wine and beer vendors, artists and other friends. Also in the works is the Saint Olga, a washed rind cheese, which Morford says is “stinky and quite delicious.” The rind is washed using beer from the Siletz Brewing Company, which helps it turn orange as it ages.
This summer, Morford will be adding dairy ewes to the milking herd. Adding sheep’s milk, she said, will be “an exciting addition to the cheese. It raises the protein of the milk and the whole solids, and makes for a different kind of cheese. The combination should be really nice.”
In a short time, Rivers Edge Chevre has become a small farmstead cheese with a national following. In addition to Murray’s, it’s sold at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese in Pike’s Place Market, Seattle, as well as Curds and Whey, Whole Foods and New Seasons markets in Portland.
With help from her husband, George, daughters Spring and Astraea, she sells at farmers’ markets in Newport, Beaverton, Oregon City, Lake Oswego and Yachats.
Locally, goat cheese lovers can find Rivers Edge Chevre at the Nye Beach Gallery and Oceana Natural Foods Cooperative, both in Newport, and just down the country road from the farm, at the Logsden Country Store.
“We still get the odd person who looks suspiciously (at the chevre) and says, ‘No, I don’t want to try that.’ But thanks to the media attention on goat cheese, it’s gotten so the most surprising people will eat it. Even the whole Velveeta crowd.”
For more information on Rivers Edge Chevre and Pat’s prize goats, log on to www.threeringfarm.com.
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