What started out as a hobby has ended up in a Northland goat farm producing some award-winning cheeses.
Jennifer Rodrigue and her husband David own a boutique cheese-making operation, Belle Chèvre Creamery in Waipu.
Goats - Belle Chevre Creamery Photo: supplied by Jennifer Rodrigue
More than 20 years ago, Jennifer Rodrigue left California travelled around the world with her family before settling down in New Zealand.
She tells Kathryn Ryan they've always loved everything about goats, their personality, looks, size and manageability.
But because of her son's schooling and upbringing, they couldn't tackle their dream to raise goats from the get-go.
"The idea of moving onto land had to take a backseat, but when he was 18 we found this piece of property 40 acres, in the hills overlooking Waipu and out to the sea, and decided to make that our next venture in life," Rodrigue says.
"We wanted a property to do something specifically with goats and we didn't initially want to be tied down to dairy but that idea of doing meat was a little bit 'eh', so we decided to do dairy.
"Being a California girl, I love my goats' cheese and goats' cheese in New Zealand was pretty hard to find, especially up here in Northland. We decided there might be a market for it."
They raise Anglo-Nubian goats - characterised by their long floppy ears and curved Roman noses.
"The goats are kidding in phases this year ... Right now I only have four little kids I'm looking after ... and I've got eight of the mums on the stand milking right now, so we're just starting production," Rodrigue says.
Cheese-making is not a difficult process, but it's time-consuming and involves a lot of washing dishes, she says.
"If you have good milk ... and you're processing small batches fresh daily and you acquire some decent cultures and you keep your environment immaculately clean, it turns into cheese pretty easily."
There are also some regulatory hoops to jump through as artisan cheese makers, she says.
"There is a lot of responsibility that one has to assume and they have all of the right checks and balances in place to make sure New Zealand keeps its food quality standards very, very high."
As the business developed, she says she found herself embarrassingly good at making cheese, winning three gold medals at the 2020 NZ Champion of Cheese Awards.
"I have had quite a bit of success and I attribute it to the goats and their milk, they make beautiful milk and the freshness, and the fact that we're still trying to do this as an artisan producer, not scaling up to quantity is where I think I would have trouble.
"We decided to stay artisanal boutique and small, and for the most part people are going to have to come to Waipu if they want to have this goats' cheese.
"We like the idea of local producers selling locally and if I get inquiries due to some radio or news article ... I send them to other artisanal local cheese makers I know of that are local to them, to sort of keep it that way."
Their main focus is on the French styles of goat cheese, Rodrigue says.
"Basically, I make the soft goats' cheese, which when you see it in recipes or a recipe called goats' cheese, that's what they're asking for.
"This product is available from just about every Four Square in New Zealand from Spain or someplace overseas with a six-month lifespan and a bunch preservatives, but it's not that hard to demand this locally from our local goats farmers.
"We call it chèvre. It's an incredibly interesting product to work with ... so in addition to selling the standard 125g roll of chèvre, I also mould it and age it a little bit and marinate it in extra virgin olive oil from a local grower here in Mangawhai and introduce some herbs to it and that's a nice shelf stable product that can keep for a couple of months."
The French Valençay style of bloomy rind cheese is another specialty of the cheese makers, which Rodrigue has named Manaia Ma.
"It's a pyramid shaped cheese ... It gets ashed with vegetable ash, and this neutralises the acid and allows that bloomy rind to grow, such as you have on Camembert and brie, but in this cheese it has a different consistency on the inside, instead of getting creamy with age it gets what we call fudge-ry."
