Food & Drink

Goats strike gold

Dripping Springs' Pure Luck dairy is sweeping awards with its artisanal cheeses

By Kitty Crider
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FOOD EDITOR
Tuesday, September 05, 2006

A few weeks ago Amelia Sweethardt of Dripping Springs sat nervously at the American Cheese Society's annual competition in Portland, Ore. She had entered seven cheeses, and while she knew that she was a good cheese maker — her family's dairy had 23 national awards from other years to prove it — this was the first competition since the death of her mother, Sara Bolton, founder of Pure Luck Grade A Goat Dairy.

Competition was tough. From 28 states and two Canadian provinces, 157 producers entered 941 cheeses, almost 200 more than last year's record 749. Sweethardt would not win on a sympathy vote. This was a blind judging of cheeses, scored on both aesthetics and technical competence. "I never go thinking we'll win. There is so much good cheese out there," says the 29-year-old Sweethardt.

All of Pure Luck's cheeses are made with the farm's own goat milk — from the popular chèvre to feta, even a blue. And Pure Luck is a very small goat dairy that makes only about 65 pounds of cheese a day from its 72 milking Alpine and Nubian goats. Still, at the end of the awards ceremony, Sweethardt was holding four ribbons:

• First place in blue-mold cheeses for Pure Luck's Hopelessly Bleu.

• Second place for feta made from goat's milk.

• Third place in American-made cheeses/international style for Sainte Maure.

• Third-place tie in soft-ripened goat cheeses for the Del Cielo.

Collecting Pure Luck's first blue ribbon for a blue came as a shock to Sweethardt. "When I sat back down, I was very sad. Mom was not there. It was a long-term accomplishment of a cheese worked on for years."

Call it a Tiger Woods moment in cheesemaking.

Daughter and Mom had been close. Working together for eight years, they had shared successes and failures, tears and joy in managing a herd of rambunctious goats and turning their milk into cheeses. Daughter had really missed Mom in selecting the cheeses for entry this year. But Daughter had done well. She and the rest of the 10-year-old dairy's small cheesemaking team were validated.

"We're doing it! I felt real proud to bring the awards home for all of us. It would have been hard if we had not won anything," says Sweethardt, wiping the tears from her eyes as she recalls the moment.

The art and science of cheese

Typically an upbeat, oft-smiling young woman, Sweethardt is standing on the concrete floor of the 16-by-24-foot cheesemaking plant — a red metal building across the road from Pure Luck's organic herb farm. The white-walled room with stainless steel counters, sinks and tanks, and white plastic tubs and molds, has eight windows. The bucolic view is of a rural Texas landscape of trees, pastures and barns. The room smells not of goats, but distinctly of chlorine added to the washing solutions, a reminder of the importance of food safety.

Sweethardt's mother once said, "Ninety-five percent of cheesemaking is sanitizing and washing," giving a dose of reality to an age-old artisan food process.

Her daughter provides a second reality check. The bulk-milk tank went out recently, and on a farm where goats are milked twice a day, the tank is critical. While she waited for the serviceperson, she pasteurized the morning milk to hold it safely. She made raw milk cheese out of the afternoon milk.

Although the tank was repaired in 12 hours, she had to work long into the night sterilizing it for the next morning's milking.

At Pure Luck, cheese is a made seven days a week from mid-March through mid-October; six days a week the rest of the year. Every Monday morning, Sweethardt and Juana Mora, her assistant cheese maker, empty the goat milk from the refrigerated holding tank and pasteurize it. A freeze-dried bacteria is added to change the milk sugar to an acid and give the cheese flavor. After pasteurization, the milk is placed in 4-gallon plastic tubs. Here is where rennet, an enzyme, is added to help the milk coagulate, the amount varying with the type of cheese. Within hours the milk forms a large block called a curd, with a texture of thick yogurt or tofu. It is ready for scooping when a spatula dipped into the curd causes the curd to break evenly.

On a typical week, they will make 400 pounds of chèvre (fresh goat cheese), 21 pounds of Del Cielo (a Camembert style of cheese), 60 pounds of feta, 30 pounds of Claire de Lune (a soft ripened cheese), 17 pounds of Sainte Maure ( a creamy mold-ripened, log-shaped cheese) and 45 pounds of blue. Ninety-five percent of these cheeses will be sold in Texas at Central Market, Whole Foods Market, Wheatsville Co-op, Boggy Creek Farm and Sunset Valley Farmers Market, as well as to upscale restaurants and hotels here and in other cities.

Pure Luck a favorite of chefs

Mark Paul, chef and co-owner of Wink restaurant, has used Pure Luck as a supplier for years.

"The Del Cielo has an awesome flavor," Paul says. "The Sainte Maure is a great cheese. We have gone so far as to do an all-Pure Luck cheese plate on our menu. When we bring in Pure Luck, we highlight it."

A curse of being a small farmer, he adds, is a consistent supply. He cannot get all the Pure Luck cheeses, such as the blue, all the time.

But "the quality has always remained high. The passing of the torch to Amelia happened a while back," Paul says. "We like them a lot, as people as well as their products."

Elmar Prambs, executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel, also features Pure Luck cheeses by name both on the menu and for guest amenities. "We picked it up a year or so ago when we were looking for a Texas amenity with Texas wines for guests in rooms."

Each of the six cheeses, which are also sold online (purelucktexas.com) and at Pure Luck's small farmstand, takes more than one day to make. On a recent Tuesday, Mora salted the exterior of a dozen 8-inch deep rounds of the blue cheese for flavor, mold retardation and dryness. The cheese had already been inoculated with Penicillium roqueforti, and later would be poked with holes to allow growth of the desired blue veins.

Mora also scooped fresh chèvre curds into small plastic baskets, to allow the whey to drip out and the cheese to condense. The curds make a plopping nose, like Jell-O, as they fall into the baskets. Then the dripping begins. When complete, the 5-ounce rounds of cheese will have an attractive basket imprint on the surface as they are unmolded. Some of the chèvres will be sold plain; others coated in herbs, crushed red peppers, pesto or other flavorings for nine varieties.

The chèvre is one of the dairy's most popular cheeses, and though it did not pick up an award this year, it has won national blue ribbons in previous years' competitions.

Meanwhile, Sweethardt — dressed in brown pants, a green tee, clogs, a hairnet and a white apron — salts the outside of 4-inch rounds of Del Cielo cheeses. The Camembert-style cheese was named for a Joe Ely song that Sara Bolton and her husband and dairy co-founder Denny Bolton used to listen to in the wee hours of the morning at the dairy. That cheese has won a blue in years past, too.

Next, Sweethardt scoops cheese curds into 48 cylindrical molds, each 3 inches wide. She is making logs of Sainte Maure, a creamy French-style cheese that is later rolled in vegetable ash and the surface ripened to form a white rind.

"It's my favorite right now," Sweethardt says. "I love it on crackers or on a pizza with caramelized onion. I generally eat it as dinner."

She fills the cylinders to the top with the curd — the same basic cheese curd as the chèvre. As the whey drips out and the curds settle, she will have to refill all the cylinders.

The whey from the various cheeses is collected into a 35-gallon yellow bucket and fed to the goats. "They absolutely love it!" she says.

Evolution of a cheese maker

As Sweethardt scoops curds repeatedly, she talks about the past decade. In 1997, she says, she was working with computers in Austin and decided to come make cheese once a week with her mom. But one day grew into two. She found a calling in the pastoral setting and the challenging cheesemaking room.

In 1998, she joined her mom full time in the cheesemaking plant. However, unlike her mother, whose first love was the goats, Sweethardt's is cheese making.

But she admits a fondness for the herd, all of whom are named. Her favorite is Daisy, a big 11-year-old goat with a large udder and a decided attitude. "She's a brat. She jumps fences. She kicks on the milkstand."

This year Sweethardt began milking goats again to reacquaint herself with the total process and because the dairy needed the help. The goats average about a gallon of milk each a day, which makes about 1 1/3 pounds of cheese.

Sweethardt has been around goats since 1979, when her mom bought the 10 acres near Dripping Springs to expose her and her sister Gitana to organic farming and goats. Five years later, Mom married Denny Bolton, whom she met at a local plant nursery, and the two of them created one of Texas' first certified organic farms. They also produced two daughters, Claire and Hope, as well as the dairy.

Denny Bolton says he never dreamed he would be involved in a national award-winning dairy when he and Sara married. They were both interested in organic farming.

They didn't want to have the biggest goat dairy in Texas. "Most of America think you have to get bigger, but we decided — Sara and I and Amelia — that instead of getting bigger, to get better," Bolton says. "Quality is what we are striving for, more than selling to more customers."

All the family works or has worked the farm and dairy. Denny Bolton, who has always been in charge of marketing, shipping, deliveries, the Web site and other business matters, is president of Pure Luck Dairy Inc. Sweethardt, the cheese maker, is vice president, and Gitana, a full-time mom who has a microbiology degree from the University of Texas, is secretary/treasurer. The other daughters are involved, too; in fact, two of the cheeses — the Claire de Lune and the Hopelessly Bleu — are named after them. In addition to the family, a half-dozen employees, mostly part time, also work the farm and dairy.

The dairy is financially successful, Sweethardt says. "We pay our employees and our taxes and we are still living a rich life — rich to us — in a country setting."

Her goal for this year is to be on top of all aspects of the operation. Production at a farmstead dairy is based on balance: how much milk you have, limited by space. However, she admits she is working on a new semisoft cheese.

For the moment, though, she is savoring the current cheeses' awards. On this day, the judging scores and comments for Pure Luck's entries arrive in the farm mail.

"A lovely cheese, perfectly balanced flavors and aromas with only minor uneven texture. . . Great metallic blue on rind. Lovely interior. Well defined veins."

Sweethardt smiles tremulously at her fiancé, Ben Guyton, who works part time for Pure Luck.

She's done her mother proud.

There's a new "dairy queen," as her dad calls her.

And she rules.

kcrider@statesman.com; 445-3656