Going for the Goat Appleton family business takes chevre products to Italy

From the road, Capercaillie Dairy Goat Farm looks like a pastoral paradise. The shingled buildings are nestled among leafy trees and open to picturesque gardens with flowers and grapevines. At the end of a path through a central garden, goats hop and run in a wide yard. As they frolic, a bearish white dog strolls along the fence. It is a friendly, poetic scene.

Milking time is another story. When Caitlin Hunter and a visitor walk into the milking parlor, goats jump and kick at the door. The animals know that milking time, which happens twice a day, is also feeding time. These two rituals, it’s safe to say, are the most excitable times of the day.

Claymore, the Great Pyrenees, stirs at another door. He sees a stranger on his turf and gets edgy. He no longer looks like a character out of a children’s book. Now he looks serious. His eyes say, touch the goat and you die.

Hunter pours feed into plastic containers on the wall, and then opens the barn door slightly. Four big goats and one kid rush in. The big ones take their places at eating posts and noisily munch, their goatees shimmying up and down with each chew. The kid skips giddily until Hunter leads her toward a bale of hay in another room. “There’s always a little one that’s spoiled rotten,” she says.

When she returns to the milking room, Hunter wipes off the goats’ udders and hooks up two of the animals to a vacuum pressure milking machine. In the background, a generator hums, but the swosh, swosh, swosh of the milking fills the room. Sometimes, when the liquid is slow to come, Hunter milks by hand.

By hand. That’s the operative word at Appleton Creamery, where Hunter, her husband, Bradley, and their daughter, Fiona, produced more than 5,000 pounds of their award-winning goat cheese last year. In September, the Hunters traveled to an invitational cheese show in Bra, Italy, to display and promote their varieties of handmade goat cheese – called “chevre” and pronounced like Chevrolet without the “olet.”

“Imagine the Common Ground Fair but all cheese. And wines and beer and bread and honey. And set in an ancient Italian town,” said Caitlin Hunter. “We were in a cheese haze for three days. It was total immersion in an eating culture that loves the type of food we like to produce.”

Appleton Creamery, the main business at Capercaillie, was one of three out of 52 American cheese makers that journeyed to Italy in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The others were represented by their products but because of travel and scheduling complications, as well as fear, many cheese makers stayed behind. Those who went offered the typical free samples that all the cheese makers give to participants, as well as a separate tasting table with minimal charges, all of which were collected as relief funds for the American tragedies.

Back home, the Hunters often have to educate potential customers about the glories of goat cheese. Chevre, they explain, is a French-style fresh goat cheese, mild in flavor, tender in texture. It’s lower in calories and easier to digest than many other cheeses, and it’s a good source of potassium and vitamin A. When you add chevre to green salads, pizza, soups, potatoes and fish, the dishes take on an exotic elegance.

But does it taste like a goat?

The answer, said Chef Manuel Mercier who serves Appleton chevre at The Youngtown Inn Restaurant in Lincolnville, is no. “It has a good consistency and fresh taste, not like the cheese you open from a package,” he said. “It’s soft and mild and not strong at all. It doesn’t taste goaty.”

When the Hunters went to Italy, which they did with the encouragement and financial contributions of family and friends, they found a community of people who not only accept goat products as part of everyday eating but love the unique delicacy of the flavor and artistry of the production process. In part, the support was because the cheese show was organized by Slow Food International, a food movement that promotes artisan food makers. But in Italy, the Hunters found simpatico palates at every turn. So what if they don’t speak Italian. They spoke the language of cheese. In short, the Hunters felt as if they had come to a place with the same heartfelt, care-filled goals as they have set for their own products and lifestyle.

“I make this cheese because I want to make something that tastes like cheese, something that lets you taste the flavor coming,” said Caitlin Hunter, who also teaches part-time in the local public school. “But Americans often aren’t ready for that. They can be hesitant about new flavors.”

It’s not that Appleton Creamery products, which contain vegetable rennet and no artificial hormones, are a hard sell, exactly. The Hunters peddle their wares at farmers markets in Belfast on Fridays and Orono on Saturdays, and always sell more than they can stock. Even in stores, such as the Belfast Cooperative and French & Brawn Market Place in Camden, the shelves are quickly emptied of chevre wrapped in a brandied grape leaf, or rolled in black pepper, or with orange essence, or chipotle, or dill, or dripping with olive oil with roasted garlic and herbs (a combination that has won top honors from the American Cheese Society and the American Dairy Goat Products Association ).

“Their cheese is incredibly popular,” said Joel White, a manager at French & Brawn. “I sell out of it immediately. The product is so nicely displayed and it’s local and the quality is always great. When I am out of it, customers are not happy. If I don’t have it, some customers will drive up to Appleton to get it themselves.”

A customer arriving at the Appleton farm, five acres tucked into twisting country roads that wind along hilltops, might find Bradley – if it’s spring – delivering new kids, or Fiona making her specialty fudge from goat milk. Claymore will be there, too, in the field with the bouncy goats.

A true renaissance family, the Hunters stay busy with a variety of occupations. Bradley is a sail maker and works on sails and riggings in a loft he built adjacent to the family home. That also makes him the chief stitcher when Fiona has a rip in her clothes. And since his work keeps him on the property all day, he tends to be the family chef. Bradley also built the barn and workrooms where all the cheese preparations and machinery is housed.

“It’s a full team effort,” said Bradley, who bought the property in Appleton in 1979 when it had only a cottage on it. “The farm couldn’t operate without Cait to make the cheese and go to markets, or without me to build the buildings, deliver the babies and break the ice in the winter. And Fiona helps with the farmers markets and makes the fudge. This is a small, intimate operation that’s very personal because we are all so close to it. We take a lot of pride in the art and science involved.”

Caitlin, if she’s not teaching, will undoubtedly be in the barn, where she can spend whole days in high season up to her arms in goat milk. The business, after all, is her brainchild.

“I love it,” said Caitlin about working with the goats and designing cheese. “I love making a product people love to eat. If it wasn’t goat cheese, it would be something else. For me this is a creative outlet.”

“We’re sort of leftover hippies,” Bradley added.

It all began more than 20 years ago when Caitlin moved from her native Massachusetts to Matinicus Island. She began raising goats, making cheese and selling farm products. Eventually, she earned a college degree in business and she and Bradley married. In 1994, the two became licensed to sell their farm products – including the chevre, feta cheese, Crofter’s cheese (a semihard cheese), a few aged cheeses, and goat milk soaps, which Caitlin’s sister, Megan Cafferata, helps make.

The Hunters started in the early 1990s with three Swiss Alpine goats, noted for adaptability, good health and excellent milk production. “We only expected to have them for family use,” said Bradley, “but we kept wanting to keep the offspring each year.” This summer, more than 90 kids were born on the farm. Fiona names the goats and there’s always a theme, such as gods and goddesses or jewels. Next year, the theme will be anything Italian, to celebrate the visit to Bra. Often the names pay tribute to the family’s Gaelic background. The name of the farm – Capercaillie – is derived from Scottish words and is also the registered herd name for the goats.

Most of the goats, including four bucks used for breeding, stay at the creamery. But each year, the Hunters sell kids to other farms or to people who want the feisty animals as pets.

Recently, at the Orono Farmers Market, the Hunters were handing out samples of chevre. Fiona was along, but had fallen asleep while reading in the front seat of the van. Her parents were busy packaging cheese for eager customers and explaining their products to skeptical ones. The sheep were safely back at the farm with Claymore.

“All artisinal food came to this country hundreds of years ago and then got lost,” said Caitlin. “The United States needs to be re-educated about this type of food. If presented with good food, most people will appreciate it and buy it – even if the flavor is new to them.”

Buy it, they do – at farmers markets, in specialty food shops, through mail order. And, as with the Italians and nearly everyone else who tastes the creamy cheese, they come back for more.