Très Belle Chèvre
Goat Dairy & Fromagerie
From Country Roads Magazine--- 2006
ARTICLE---Goat Cheese from the Ground Up
Goat Cheese from the Ground Up
How two pregnant goats started Wanda Barras
on a culinary quest.
By Marcelle Bienvenu • Portrait by Wes Kroninger
Wanda Barras tends to two of her flock of forty Nubian and Lamancha goats.
You can usually find Wanda Barras wandering around her tree-shaded yard, a scarf around her head and an apron flapping around her figure as she tends to an ever-expanding herd of Nubian and Lamancha goats.
In 1999 she accompanied a friend to Jackson, Louisiana, to pick up some goats and being a sucker for animals (for twenty years she hand-raised and trained exotic parrots and cockatoos for avian fanciers—and also has guineas, Great Pyrenees dogs, pot-bellied pigs, and assorted chickens who lay eggs that range in color from pale green to chocolate brown) she brought home two goats (both pregnant) of her own.
“Now I have forty goats and milk twice a day, which yields about fourteen gallons daily,” she laughs. “I find they give more milk when I have country music blaring through the milking sheds.”
She knew nothing about goat milk or cheeses when she came home with Old Bouquet and Trinket (the goats), but she realized that once she began milking (after the babies were born) she had best learn and learn quickly.
She traveled to France and Italy with her husband and couldn’t stop eating the superb goat cheeses they found there.
“I went to a cheese-making seminar, got on the Internet, read every book I could find on the subject and just began experimenting. I built a small milk room, about the size of a closet, got it certified by the USDA and learned by trial and error,” she grins.
Now she’s in a new, larger milk room and is turning out about forty pounds of curds a day, which eventually becomes feta, aged cheeses, ricotta and various shapes and sizes of goat cheese garnished with her trademark of fresh herbs, edible flowers and her own sun-dried tomatoes.
Since Wanda is my first cousin and lives just up the Bayou Teche from my home, I’m one of her best customers. Nothing is more enjoyable, as far as I’m concerned, than a cocktail hour spent nibbling on any of her cheeses (accompanied by bread that I make with the whey from her milk) with a glass of chilled white wine. Follow that with a dinner that highlights another remarkable goat cheese.
