Sofia is a soft, ripe goat’s milk cheese with layers of vegetable ash woven into its creamy interior. Made in southern Indiana, this style pays tribute to cheesemaking traditions from France’s Loire Valley, famed for its elegant balance of sweetness and zestiness. On both the outside and inside, these practices also deliver stunning visuals, giving this cheese a rustically entrancing aesthetic on both the plate and the palate. Although all of Capriole’s cheeses earn well-deserved acclaim, Sofia is consistently among their most beloved selections. In 2020, this longtime popularity was formally honored with a Good Food Award.
Capriole Farm is owned and operated by Judy and Larry Schad, who inherited Larry’s family’s nineteenth-century farmstead in the late 1970’s. Over the course of the 80’s and 90’s, their operation grew steadily but surely, from modest morning-milking of a few goats before heading off to work, to enough canning, preserving, and cheesemaking to overflow the kitchens of friends and family, and eventually hundreds of animals and a commercial creamery on the farm. They were doing things according to a humble tradition that, perhaps unsurprisingly, yields exceptional results, but they were doing it for many years when the south and midwest did not present tremendous markets for it. But as national inclinations evolved in the early twenty-first century, Capriole finally reached a point where there was so much demand for their cheese that they could no longer manage both the farm and the creamery, and so they sold their herd to principled farmers throughout Indiana, who now provide the creamery with the milk for their cheeses.
Ingredients: Pasteurized goat's milk, culture, animal rennet, salt, ash, geotrichum candidum
~1lb
