Cheese Supreme

The first time I had the Funky Black Goat I actually couldn't believe it. I kept shaking my head: No, this is not a local cheese. The core was crumbly and Parmesan-colored, but the periphery was all veined-blue, where the black wax was falling away. It was fiercely tangy, wildly savory, and finished forever, unfurling streams of rosemary, burnt grass, dulce de leche caramel, salt, pine needle, pepper, miso-ferment, and more. It's sister cheese, Funky Old Goat, was tawnier, sweeter, firmer, but still boasted a goaty fierceness on top of its apricot-almond core. Damn! I took the cheese to a party and left a room speechless with the stuff. One of my friends insisted all night that I was just using him as a guinea pig, that I'd unveil in print that the cheese was really some Italian imposter.

That week I called Mary Falk, the owner and cheesemaker at LoveTree, and asked her what the heck was going on with this stuff. She told me the Amish's tale of woe and said that the strange path this cheese had taken is not reproducible. It started with that good goat's milk, and then there was the mysterious cheesemaking that resulted in Falk receiving bandage-wrapped rounds to age in her clay caves. However, the cheeses weren't right. They were ballooning up and doing other peculiar things, forcing Falk to attempt all kinds of triage to save them. In the end, half were dipped in black wax (making them Funky Black Goat) and the other half were dried out in a way that guided them to becoming something like LoveTree's other cheeses, and thus was born the Funky Old Goat.

The dazzling layers of flavor that have emerged in these cheeses Falk attributes to their profound age: Most are over a year old, which is old for goat cheese. They started life at 13 pounds and now are down to 8 or 9.

"People say they can taste our caves, that our caves create a beefy flavor," Falk told me. "I think that's because of the moisture. Our cave is an 1,800-square-foot complex that took us five years to build. It's 15, 20 feet down into hills made of 90 feet of clay. It's a Y-shaped tunnel complex, all concrete walls, but there's no mechanical refrigeration. It's all fresh air convection cooling. We let the earth cool the air, and the cheeses age according to the rhythm of the earth. The native artesian springs provide the cave's moisture, and, other than that, it's all about the native molds of the area. We say we bring the flavor of the north woods to our cheese this way, but people get really passionate about the flavor of our molds. People have actually bought our cheese and tried to scrape the mold off in order to inoculate their own aging rooms."

So, as near as I can tell, good goat's milk plus complete chaos and heartbreak plus good, beefy caves equals magic. As of this writing Mary Falk had 4,000 or 5,000 of these 8- or 9-pound cheeses left, probably enough to get through Christmas. And then that will be that. To deepen the mystery a little more, I tried both cheeses a few weeks after my initial bedazzlement, and suddenly the Funky Black Goat was mellow and nutty, while the Funky Old Goat had the fiery layers of profundity. I told Falk about this, and she said she wasn't surprised. The cheeses were so inconsistent they had been driving her crazy all year. Which one will you get? You pay your money, you take your chances. It's worth it, though. Before I got off the phone with Falk, she taunted me with one more question: But did you try the fish bait?

Try the fish bait? Was this some kind of test?

Fish bait

I rushed down to the farmers' market the next Saturday. Fish bait, it turns out, is only available at the St. Paul Farmers' Market, and is only to be fed to wild fish while you are fishing, and is never to be fed to human cheese connoisseurs because, in America, only fish are allowed to eat cheese that has been aged less than 60 days. Get it? Good. Unfortunately, I wasn't fishing, so I ate mine. Magical. Fish bait is a hard, aged sheep's milk cheese with a rough, rock-like exterior and a tangy, bold—dare I say beefy—interior. It's got a mild beginning that leads to a big, woodsy burn and heft, and lest you think I'm endangering Falk by writing about her fish bait, please know that someone already ratted her out to the feds. "First we sold it as cat food," Falk told me, "but the state said we didn't have a pet food license. Then the FDA came out here for a week. It was like Columbo, very methodical. They chiseled away at every aspect of the business and finally said, 'Everything's fine.'" It's a golden age to be a fish in Minnesota.