The same purchase provided the high and low moments on Planet Cheese last week. The high was finding Vermont Creamery goat feta at Oxbow Cheese Merchant in Napa, my neighborhood shop. Vermont Creamery makes some of my favorite bloomy-rinded goat cheeses (Bijou and Bonne Bouche among others), and a sublime cultured butter as well. But I didn’t know the creamery made feta.
That’s because they keep most of it in New England and supply it primarily to restaurants. But what a tasty feta this was--one of the few made in America that I consider worthy of a Greek salad.
Feta is challenging to make well in this country because we don’t have the rich sheep’s milk that gives Greek feta—the best, in my opinion—its creaminess. By law, Greek feta must contain at least 70 percent sheep’s milk; the remainder is goat’s milk. Try to make feta with goat’s milk alone—or, worse, cow’s milk—and you end up, typically, with a crumbly, granular result.
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