CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Leslie Cooperband and her husband, Wes Jarrell, are broke. They’re exhausted. On this, the first bitter night in November, their feet are frozen. Their hands are numb. They’re hungry.
They couldn’t be happier.
Cooperband and Jarrell run Illinois’ first licensed farmstead goat cheese dairy, Prairie Fruits. The state issued final permits last August, about a year after Cooperband’s first four goats arrived on the seven-acre farm. She now can milk about 20 of the 30 Nubian and LaMancha goats milling around the big loose pen. Most of the rest are too young to milk. She also has an affable, gigantic Nubian buck she calls Everett Lee.
Cooperband uses the goats’ milk in her mild, addictive fresh chevres (French for goat cheeses) and in her aged cheeses, a flinty firm banon-style (wrapped in mulberry or other leaves) and a creamy, soft Camembert-style.
As Cooperband strews fresh straw bedding, then parcels out sweet-smelling alfalfa hay, she talks about her animals. Her face is barely visible under the heavy hood of her parka. Her nose runs a little bit and her cheeks are ruddy with cold, but her blue-gray eyes shine.
“I wanted to milk goats and I wanted to make cheese,” she says, casually caressing every goat that wanders within her reach, and calling each by name.
“Some people just want the animals, and some just want to make cheese. From the start, I wanted to do both.” Her determination to do both – that’s what makes her a farmstead cheese-maker, instead of just a cheesemaker – has led her far from her Boston upbringing.
What’s a nice girl from New England, a Barnard College grad who never even encountered a goat until she went to Costa Rica for graduate studies, doing in an ice-rimmed goat pen in rural Illinois?
It’s a long story, and a long shot.
Cooperband, an extension specialist in sustainable agriculture and community development with the Illinois Cooperative Extension Service, was formerly a professor of soil science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While there, she ran into Jarrell, a research scientist in soil science. They had met some years before, at a conference in Las Vegas.
By 2000, they were married. They were regulars at the Dane County Farmers Market, the largest farmers market in the country, which is held on the grounds of the state capitol.
There, Cooperband discovered Anne Topham’s Fantome Farm goat cheeses. Topham was one of Wisconsin’s first farmstead goat cheesemakers, and the two quickly became friends.
The affection Cooperband had developed for goats in Costa Rica, and the cheesemaking class she had taken there, began to bubble up in her thoughts. Could she, she wondered, do what Topham was doing? Impossible, her common sense said. She and Jarrell lived in town, after all.
Then, three years ago, Jarrell landed the post he now holds, head of the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science.
He had accepted the job, but even before the couple moved to Illinois, friends spotted the seven-acre farm with the new big barn for sale. It was a no-brainer. The couple bought the farm and began to make plans.
Jarrell, the son of Oregon fruit growers, has planted more than 300 fruit trees – varied varieties of heirloom and hybrid fruits – plus dozens of berry bushes and vines.
—
And Cooperband’s first goats, three yearling does and a buck, arrived on the farm in June 2004. No one told her that she should keep the females in a separate pen from the male – she thought they were too young to breed – and she learned her first difficult lesson that fall.
“One of the does kidded prematurely on Thanksgiving,” she says.
“The little doe died at birth. The little buck died about two months later. It was very, very hard.”
That was just the beginning. At the same time that Cooperband was learning how to manage her goats, she was also learning what the state health department required to be licensed. And, of course, she and Jarrell were both working at their office jobs.
The laws governing dairying are complex and strict. Illinois follows the federal Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO), said Larry Terando, the state rating officer for the Illinois Department of Public Health who worked with Cooperband and Jarrell as they tried to comply.
“All of the regulations and requirements are there for the protection of the public’s health. Milk has the potential to be a very hazardous food,” Terando says. “Just because you’re a small producer doesn’t mean that the hazard is any less. You can have a very small dairy, and if the product is contaminated, you can get a lot of people sick. That’s why we need to make sure the law is followed.”
The PMO covers animal health and housing, where and how milking should be done, how the milk should be handled and stored, and sanitation. It was just the first of many laws Cooperband and Jarrell had to worry about.
“The cheese part of their plan falls under Illinois’ manufactured food laws,” Terando says, so they had those to contend with.
“Leslie and her husband did a great job of meeting the laws,” Terando says. “She and her husband really worked hard to find out what we would accept, then figuring out how to do that.”
Often, it wasn’t easy. Terando says Prairie Farms “meets all the standards of a state-of-the-art billion-dollar dairy.” But a billion-dollar dairy would produce much more milk than Cooperband’s few dozen goats. Trying to find equipment that met the law’s requirements yet was the right size for Cooperband’s small production was a headache.
Consider the pasteurizer.
That “billion-dollar dairy” might need to pasteurize thousands of gallons of milk, often in batches of hundreds of gallons. But Cooper-band and her goats needed a much smaller vat pasteurizer.
Still, it cost more than $18,000.
—
Cooperband and Jarrell also needed to buy an electric milking system. A refrigerated milk holding tank. Cheese molds. Thermometers.
Supplies for sending off samples for bacterial testing after every milking. They had to build a completely enclosed milking room in their barn. The law required them to install a separate washing room, a full bathroom and a cheesemaking room separated from the milk parlor by at least three doors.
It didn’t take long to see that the $60,000 Farm Credit Services loan they had gotten wouldn’t begin to cover the costs. So Cooperband and Jarrell cashed in retirement investments, scratched around for spare money and invested a great deal of sweat equity. In the end, they spent more than three times the amount they had budgeted to obtain the license.
At $5.50 for about six ounces of fresh chevre, it’ll take years to dig out from that debt. Can they do it?
“The amount of cheese she’s going to have to sell to get a return on that investment” is staggering, says Allison Hooper, president of the American Cheese Society and co-owner of Vermont Butter and Cheese.
Hooper is one of the early pioneers in goat cheese dairies in the United States. When she started making cheese in the early 1980s, Hooper says, she was able to get started for about $10,000 – but she wasn’t keeping the animals. She was buying the milk.
“Is there room in the marketplace? It depends on Leslie’s marketing strategy. Making fresh chevre is great, but the aged cheeses will be what gets her good PR,” Hooper says. “If she goes deeply into regional growth, she can develop a following, and she’ll do fine.”
Cooperband already is developing that following.
Jean Flemma buys Cooperband’s fresh chevre at the lively Market on the Square, Urbana’s Saturday morning farmers market.
Flemma, who works for the non-profit Prairie Rivers Network, moved to Urbana from Washington, D.C., about three years ago.
She loves goat cheese and she especially loves Cooperband’s goat cheese.
“I take it everywhere I go,” she says. “I take it to parties; when I travel, I take it to my friends. I even took some to Canada on vacation last summer.
“One of the benefits of living in a place like this is that you can buy food from people that you know. I buy everything that I can from local people, and I value the sustainable production aspect of it too.”
Cooperband is developing the aged cheeses that Hooper says will be necessary for Cooperband’s reputation. Last fall, she began offering the banon-style cheese, a two- to four-ounce disc of firm goat cheese wrapped in mulberry or sycamore leaves soaked in Alto Vineyards’ Illinois chambourcin wine. Her first Camembert-style cheeses emerged from aging around Christmas.
After evening milking, over dinner of a roast chicken, pan-roasted vegetables and salad – all from the farm – Cooperband and Jarrell concede that they’ve made a big gamble. Both suggest that they wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I guess this is another way of investing for the future,” Jarrell muses, indicating the farm and all it represents with a sweep of his hand. Cooperband makes a nearly imperceptible nod of her head.
Cooperband says she aims to end up milking about 50 goats. She needs that many to have enough milk to make enough cheese to pay off the debt. But never so many goats, she says, that she doesn’t know their names.
BUYING INFORMATION
Leslie Cooperband’s Prairie Fruits cheeses are made in small batches from the milk of just a few goats. Consequently, you won’t find them yet in retail stores in Chicago. But they can be ordered by mail.
Right now, Cooperband and her goats are taking a well-earned rest.
The babies are due this month and next, and they’ll need their mothers’ milk. Cooperband expects to begin making fresh chevre and other cheeses again in March. She may have a few aged cheeses available.
Her fresh chevre will be available plain, with peppercorns and with herbes de Provence. Mild and creamy, with just a touch of “goaty” flavor, it’s an excellent choice for those who aren’t sure they like goat cheeses as well as those who know they do.
Cooperband’s chevre has lemony and faintly floral notes. It’s easy to spread, and adaptable in cooking too.
Her banon-style cheese is firm, with the flavors from wine-macerated leaves per-meating the outer quarter- to half-inch of the cheese. Inside the cheese, the “paste” is smooth, creamy and slightly acidic. Cooperband’s banons are sold while still young.
Later this year, she expects to offer a Camembert-style and a blue-veined cheese.
For information about Cooperband’s cheeses, including how to buy them, call the farm at 217-643-2314 or send an e-mail to prairiefruits@gmail.com.
—
CHEESEMAKER RECIPES
Farmers market goat cheese frittata
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
Leslie Cooperband said she likes to improvise with this recipe: “I don’t really follow a recipe for the frittata. Feel free to adjust amounts.”
INGREDIENTS
DIRECTIONS
1. Heat the broiler. Whisk eggs, milk, salt and pepper to taste together in medium bowl; set aside. Heat olive oil in large oven-proof skillet over medium-high heat; add shallots. Cook, stirring occasionally, until browned and caramelized, about 5 minutes, adding water if needed to prevent burning.
2. Stir in mushrooms; cook until soft, 3 minutes. Add the spinach; heat until wilted, 1 minute. Add the tomato slices. Add the egg-milk mixture; cook, stirring often, until eggs are almost set, but still uncooked on top, about 5 minutes.
3. Top the eggs with goat cheese in small dollops. Transfer skillet to oven; broil until top of the frittata is bubbly and lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Cut into wedges.
Nutrition information per serving:
322 calories, 56% of calories from fat, 20 g fat, 8 g saturated fat, 439 mg cholesterol, 14 g carbohydrates, 21 g protein, 585 mg sodium, 1 g fiber
Goat cheese ravioli with sage and brown butter
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Yield: 3 servings
If you prefer, you can use flat-leaf parsley leaves in the ravioli instead of sage, but do add fresh sage to the butter sauce. Robin Mather Jenkins developed this recipe.
INGREDIENTS
DIRECTIONS
1. Heat the butter in a small skillet over medium heat. Add the onion; cook, stirring often, until translucent, about 2 minutes.
Remove skillet from heat. Transfer 2 tablespoons of the onion from the skillet to a medium bowl. Add the goat cheese, egg, salt and pepper to taste to the bowl; mix well.
2. Wet one wonton wrapper with cold water with your fingers. Place a tablespoon of the cheese mixture on the center of the wrapper; place one sage leaf on top. Cover with another wet wonton wrapper; squeeze out as much air as possible. Press firmly to seal edges. If desired, use a biscuit cutter to cut into rounds. Repeat procedure until all the cheese mixture has been used, making 13 to 15 ravioli.
3. Heat a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil over high heat. Return the skillet with the remaining onions to the stove top over medium heat. Cook, stirring often, until onion and butter turn light brown, about 5 minutes. Remove skillet from heat; stir in vermouth and the minced sage.
4. Add 4 to 6 of the ravioli to the boiling water. Cook until they float to the surface, about 3-4 minutes. Remove ravioli from water; drain. Place in a shallow buttered dish. Repeat with remaining ravioli. Pour the browned butter and onions over the ravioli; serve hot.
Nutrition information per serving:
520 calories, 46% of calories from fat, 26 g fat, 16 g saturated fat, 134 mg cholesterol, 49 g carbohydrates, 21 g protein, 1,159 mg sodium,2 g fiber
Goat cheese ice cream
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Chilling time: 3 hours
Yield: 5 cups
This rich dessert is from Leslie Cooperband. Freeze the left-over egg whites in an ice cube tray, then transfer them to a zip-top food storage bag. The thawed whites will beat to a better volume if you let them sit at room temperature for about half an hour, says the American Egg Board on its Web site, aeb.org, which offers recipes for egg whites, such as angel food cake.
INGREDIENTS
DIRECTIONS
1. Combine half-and-half with sugar in a large saucepan, stirring to dissolve sugar. Heat just to a boil over medium heat, about 9 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks in a heat-proof bowl. Slowly stir in 1 cup of the hot cream mixture to egg yolks, mixing until combined. Slowly stir the yolks back into the rest of the cream mixture, mixing well.
2. Heat, stirring constantly, just until mixture thickens to coat the back of a spoon or just reaches 185 degrees, about 6 minutes (do not boil). Strain through a fine strainer into a large bowl; stir in the goat cheese until melted. Refrigerate, covered, until thoroughly chilled, about 3 hours. Freeze in an ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s directions.
Nutrition information per serving:
297 calories, 56% of calories from fat, 19 g fat, 10 g saturated fat, 286 mg cholesterol, 25 g carbohydrates, 8 g protein, 91 mg sodium, 0 g fiber
