The Benefits of Using Using Goats’ Milk for Cheese Making.
Article by Luke Dolby
Let’s take a look to see what is happening Cheese-wise back in the United Kingdom. Over there, cookery programs dominate the TV Channels and Brits are being urged to produce more and more of the items that they eat – and also to question the quality and composition of foodstuffs that they buy from their local supermarkets.
The surprise star of all this culinary euphoria is cheese and in particular goat and sheeps milk cheese which seem to appear daily on every episode. Goats cheese headline for every soup, salad and souffle. Feta is declared fabulous, Valençay is voluptuous while Roquefort simply rocks…
But what is it that sets these cheeses apart from the cheeses that are produced from their cow-milk cousins? Apart from the taste, there are many reasons why they are simply (and deliciously) different…
Let’s get technical here (but don’t worry, it’s only for a paragraph!)
Cows milk and goats milk have similar amounts of fatty acids – these are the cheeses building blocks – but the composition of these fatty acids are different. Put baldly, goats milk has a much higher proportion of medium-chain fatty acids – but what exactly are fatty acids? And what is a medium chain? A fatty acid has carbon atoms linked in a row with the ‘acid bit’ stuck on the end, and medium-chain means, well, the row is just a few atoms long – say from five up to about ten carbon atoms or so. Six carbons in a line gives Caproic Acid, eight carbons makes Caprylic Acid whilst ten carbons give Capric acid – and unsurprisingly they are all found in goats milk and have been named after the goat (Capra)! They all contribute to the characteristic tart flavor of goat’s milk cheese – and surprisingly are virtually missing from their cows milk counterparts which specialise in much longer chains. On the negative side, they are also responsible for that ‘goaty’ smells that occurs when a goats milk product goes off (and it is certainly not a nice niff…)
OK, science lesson over. What else gives goats milk and its products such an advantage over its cow milk counterparts? The first thing is that the cream in goats milk is found in very small droplets, dispersed throughout the liquid and this means that it is self-homogenized. This is different to cows milk, which has great big cream droplets that rise to the surface very quickly. Just look at a pint of full cream cows milk to see the cream. As an aside, that’s why you can freeze goats milk (and sheep milk too), whilst cows milk can split into sludgy layers of milk and cream when frozen.
This also means that the curd formed in the stomach (or in the cheese mould) is softer. This ability to form a soft, sloppy curd is vitally important to babies who suffer from colic, when the problem is ascribed to pains caused by the hard curd created from cows milk products causing considerable discomfort in a tender new stomach.
However, not only is goats milk far easier to digest than cows milk, it also does not have the bovine proteins that are responsible for a whole set of ailments ranging from migranes to eczema to asthma. For those who suffer from these allergies, the only way to check if cows milk products are the culprit is to totally remove all cows milk products from the diet – and that includes cakes and cookies too – and replace it with goats milk and goats milk products.
All in all, the benefits of goats cheese from both a taste and dietary superiority viewpoint mean that the growth in its popularity is likely to accelerate dramatically.
So next time someone compliments you on your fabulous goats cheese salad, you can smugly reply “Well, of course you know its those short-chain fatty acids that are responsible for its piquancy…”
