Vermont Creamery

How French Chèvre Came to Vermont

Allison Hooper spent a summer in Brittany in 1980 working on a small goat farm for room and board, and she came home with an idea. Fresh chèvre — the soft, tangy, spreadable goat cheese Americans didn't really know at the time — was made all over France by women in stone farmhouses using techniques that had barely changed in centuries. Vermont had goats and dairy know-how but nobody making chèvre. In 1984, Hooper partnered with Bob Reese, who was working at the Vermont Department of Agriculture, and the two of them started Vermont Butter and Cheese Company in a house in Brookfield with a single cheese vat. Within a few years, restaurants across New York and New England were putting Vermont chèvre on their menus. Within a decade, Vermont Butter and Cheese had grown into the American benchmark for fresh French-tradition goat cheese — and had launched an entire generation of American chèvre makers who trained there before opening their own operations.

Today the operation is called Vermont Creamery, based in Websterville, Vermont, and it makes a full range of French-tradition dairy: fresh chèvres, aged goat cheeses in the Loire Valley style (Bijou, Bonne Bouche, Coupole), cultured butter with European-style butterfat content, crème fraîche, mascarpone, and mixed-milk cheeses like Cremont that combine goat and cow milk in the style of French Chaource. The company is now part of the Land O'Lakes cooperative, which gives it distribution reach that a small family creamery couldn't manage — but the cheese range and the technique both trace directly back to what Hooper brought back from Brittany forty years ago.

The Vermont Creamery Range

Fresh chèvres. Classic Chèvre is the anchor: a soft, spreadable log of fresh goat cheese with a mild lemony tang. It crumbles into salads, spreads on toast with honey, folds into scrambled eggs and pasta sauces, and slices into rounds for warm-cheese salads. Fresh Herb Chèvre is the same cheese rolled in a French herb blend. Blueberry Lemon Thyme Chèvre pushes into flavored territory for cheese boards and dessert applications. Classic Goat Cheese Crumbles are pre-crumbled for salad and pizza convenience.

Aged goat cheeses in the Loire Valley style. Bijou is a small button of aged chèvre with a wrinkled geotrichum rind, aged about a week, mild and yeasty with a fresh finish. Bonne Bouche is a French-tradition ash-rubbed pyramid, aged about ten days, with a fluffy rind and a soft cakey interior — one of the American cheeses that consistently wins ACS awards. Coupole is a larger dome of aged chèvre with a wrinkled rind, aged two to three weeks, softer inside than either Bijou or Bonne Bouche, at the point where the cheese starts opening up.

Mixed-milk and specialty cheeses. Cremont is a mixed-milk (goat and cow) triple cream in the style of French Chaource — buttery, mushroomy, decadent, with a bloomy rind. It's the closest American cheese to a Brillat-Savarin and eats beautifully on a board with Champagne. Vermont Cultured Butter is European-style butter with 82% butterfat content, cultured before churning for a deeper flavor, sold both salted and unsalted. Vermont Crème Fraîche is proper French-tradition thickened cream — the cultured version, not the thin sour cream Americans usually get — for finishing sauces, making tarts, or dolloping on soup. Mascarpone rounds out the dairy side.

Cooking, Pairing and Storage

Fresh chèvre is one of the most versatile fresh cheeses in the American pantry. Crumble it into salads — roasted beet with chèvre and walnut is a classic, and watermelon with chèvre and mint is another — or fold it into scrambled eggs at the end of the cook. On toast, it goes with honey and cracked pepper for breakfast, or fig jam for dinner. Rolled in herbs, it works as an appetizer. Sliced into rounds, brushed with oil, and warmed in a hot oven, chèvre drops onto a bed of dressed greens for the classic French warm-goat-cheese salad. On boards, pair chèvre with fruit-forward wines — Sancerre, Vouvray, a dry rosé — and honeycomb, walnut, and slices of green apple. The aged Loire-style goat cheeses (Bijou, Bonne Bouche, Coupole) belong on a proper cheese board with better bread, honey, and a serious white wine or dry rosé. Cremont pairs with Champagne or a light red like Pinot Noir. Cultured butter improves everything you put it on but shines particularly on good bread with sea salt, or melted into a beurre blanc.

Store cut chèvre wrapped in cheese paper or a breathable cheese storage bag refrigerated. Fresh chèvre keeps 7 to 10 days once opened; aged versions like Bijou, Bonne Bouche, and Coupole keep a couple of weeks and continue to develop character. Cultured butter keeps three weeks refrigerated or several months frozen. Crème fraîche keeps two weeks refrigerated. Chèvre and cultured butter both freeze well for cooking applications, though fresh chèvre loses some of its spreadable texture on thawing.

Also Worth Exploring

Vermont Creamery is one of several American producers making European-tradition cheese worth knowing. For the full American producer roster including West Coast operations like Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese and Vermont neighbors like Plymouth Artisan Cheese, browse the American cheese collection. For French chèvre imported from the Loire Valley — the tradition Vermont Creamery came out of — the chèvre and fresh goat cheese collection covers both American and French makers side by side. To build a chèvre board around Vermont Creamery's range, the honey and mustard cheese pairings collection covers the honeycomb and fig preserves that fresh goat cheese naturally wants.