How to Pair Goat Cheeses with Apples

Erika (Sharfen) McKenzie, Chapter Cheesemaker dairy herd manager, Pennyroyal Farm

Erika Scharfen only ever wanted to be a dairy farmer. Growing up in California’s Sonoma County, she milked cows at her mother’s family’s farm. She wrote a high school paper on the thermal transfer in the bulk tanks of dairy cooling systems, and at University of California at Davis in the early 2000s, she specialized in dairy and livestock production. There, she fell in love with goats. “They have everything I love in dairy cows but so much more personality,” says Scharfen. “They want you to scratch them behind the ears like cows, but then they head butt each other, open gates, and cause mischief. They’re like puppy dogs with udders.”

Today, Scharfen co-owns the hybrid operation Pennyroyal Farm in the Anderson Valley, the winemaking region of Mendocino County. Her business partner Sarah Cahn Bennett grows the grapes and vinifies wines; Scharfen raises 100 Nubian, Alpine, La Mancha, and cross-bred goats and 30 Panama–East Fresian cross-bred sheep and makes cheeses from their milk.

I have often come to the Anderson Valley for its cherry-bright Pinot Noirs. But before Northern California became wine country, other agriculture dominated. Pennyroyal represents a dairy farming tradition that was strong in Sonoma. There, and in Mendocino, fruit orchards flourished, too. On this trip, I was staying at one of the Anderson Valley’s last two remaining orchards, The Apple Farm, that the original owners of The French Laundry, Sally and Don Schmitt, bought in 1984, retreating here after they sold their Napa restaurant to Thomas Keller a decade later. Today farmed by the Schmitts’ daughter and son-in-law, Karen and Tim Bates, with their daughter Rita and son-in-law Jerzy, this inn, cooking school, and orchard produces over 100 varieties of apples that are sold fresh, milled into chutneys and jams, and pressed into juice and hard ciders. “In the 1930s, ’40s and ‘50s, the area had a thousand acres of apples and just a couple hundred acres of vineyards,” Tim Bates told me. The farm boasts 114-year-old trees.

Pairing apples and cheese: what works

Cheese and apples is a pairing so common that we often take it for granted. Inspired by the place where I was staying, I had arranged a tasting of the two at Pennyroyal. Apple season was over, however. The Apple Farm’s heirloom trees were bare. Its exacting owners don’t store their fruit; they prefer to use it when it’s at its peak. But I got some storage apples from neighboring Gowan’s, another family-run operation that is the Valley’s most historic. They’ve been in operation since 1876. Along with varieties I had scored at an organic market, I had a good haul of fruit.

Testing every possible combination of 15 varieties of apples with 8 types of goat and sheep cheese, the experience left me with a working set of rules for nailing the pairing of apples and cheese. Some combinations felt off: The cheese got overwhelmed by the zing of the apple, or the apple was clobbered by the umami punch of the cheese; the flavors or textures clashed. But the pairings that worked elevated both the apples and the cheese. Here’s what I learned:

Fresh Chèvre Needs a Balanced Apple

Laychee goat milk cheese and Pink Lady apple

Chèvre means “goat” in French. Laychee, Pennyroyal’s version, goes through full lactic fermentation before the curd is drained and salted. Like all fresh chèvre, it is dependent upon the flavor of the milk. In spring, it might include sheep’s milk, but in winter, it’s all from the goats. Their milk generally brings a lemony acidity, but when the weather is cold, the butterfat is high, and the milk is at its richest. So, then, is the cheese. That balance of acid and butterfat needs an apple to match. Whereas sweet apples like the Honeycrisp brought out a sour note in the cheese, Granny Smiths were too tart, clobbering the chèvre’s delicate flavor. Best was a Pink Lady, bred for its balance of sweetness and acidity. For flavor, “a good rule of thumb is to pair like to like,” says Scharfen, but where texture comes in, the hard crunch of the Pink Lady contrasted pleasingly with soft cheese.

Sharp Apples Make a Spice-Laced Chèvre Pop

Laychee with Fennel Pollen and Pink Peppercorn and Granny Smith apple

At Pennyroyal, Scharfen blends Laychee with a number of ingredients to make flavored chèvres. The Laychee with Fennel Pollen and Pink Peppercorn, the spiciest, most savory version she makes had enough personality to handle a Granny Smith. Here, the cheese and the apple were each teetering on the far ends of the flavor spectrum. The wild sharpness of the Granny Smith tempered the heat in the cheese. So, in this case, contrast was key.

Earthy Apples Go Great with a Savory, Flavored Chèvre for Cooking

Laychee with Chive Flowers and Gala apple

If you’re eating apples and a savory or spicy flavored chèvre on a cheeseboard, contrasting apples are best. But if you’re cooking with a spicy chèvre, or one with Boursin-style flavors, like Pennyroyal Laychee with Chive Flowers, dice up an earthy apple, like a Gala, to throw into your dish. That’s a marriage made for a curry—or even a turnover. The Gala’s soft texture is perfect for baking.

Tart Apples Bring Out the Funk in Camembert-Style Cheese

The semi-soft Velvet Sister is Pennyroyal’s riff on Camembert. It’s made from pasteurized milk innoculated with lactic acid bacteria and Penicillium candidum, which gives it a white, bloomy exterior. Turned and salted, wrapped in cheesecloth and dried with fans before aging, it achieves a warm-butter texture when fully ripe, with a mushroomy flavor. In winter, it’s made with 100-percent goat’s milk, which also lends it brightness. You’d imagine an earthy apple would complement it, but we found that the best pairing was a Granny Smith, whose snappy contrast accentuated the funky goodness in the cheese.

Salty Cheese, Like Provolone, Loves a Sweeter Apple

Fog Lifter provolone-style cheese and Honeycrisp apple

Log Lifter, Scharfen’s provolone-style cheese is named after a rain that raises creek levels enough to lift logs and send them downstream. She makes it in summer, during peak milk production, when goats’ udders are full. Only aged a couple of weeks, it’s a good cooking cheese. Says Scharfen, “You can throw it on your pizza. You can throw it in a burger. It’s mild and melty.” Like all provolone-style cheeses, it’s also rather salty. That makes it a partner for a crunchy, sweet apple like a Honeycrisp or Cosmic Crisp. Their sugary flavor offsets the cheese’s saltiness, and their hard texture is a nice counterpoint to smooth, semi-soft cheese. Pile slices of each onto multi-grain bread with grainy mustard and pan-toast it all for a knockout grilled apple-and-cheese.

Young, Raw-Milk Cheese Shines with a Floral Apple

Boont Corners, Pennyroyal’s version of a tomme, is a raw goat’s milk cheese made by washing the curds during stirring, then scooping the curds into molds for a gentle overnight pressing and subsequent brining. Scharfen offers it in three age expressions. The youngest is around two months old. It’s usually made in spring. “You get a grassy kind of vegetative sweetness,” says Scharfen. Fuji apples were the perfect partner for the cheese; so aromatic and flowery themselves, they brought out the cheese’s springtime florality.

Hard, Sweet Apples Accentuate Nutty Cheeses

Boont Corners Vintage and SugarBee apple

At five to seven months old, the Boont Corners Vintage takes on a nutty, cheddarlike flavor and a firmer consistency. The apple that pairs with it must match its texture; soft apples like an Opal or a Crimson Gold tend to seem grainy and mushy against a harder cheese. The apple’s sweetness is important, too. Something sugary but not super tart does the best job of highlighting the cheese’s nutty panache. For this mid-aged tomme-style cheese, we liked a SugarBee apple best. Derived from a Honeycrisp that bees cross-pollinated with an unknown apple variety, the SugarBee is only mildly acidic but with a candylike sweetness and crunchy texture that holds up to the sharper, stiffer cheese.

Dry, Earthy Apples Match a Well-Aged Cheese

There’s some sheep’s milk—about 20 percent of the whole—in the eight- to ten-month-old Boont Corners Reserve, the oldest expression of this tomme-style wheel. “With that added age, we tend to get crystallization development,” says Scharfen. “It can be super sweet with caramel notes and a bit of toffee sometimes, but also a meaty, nutty kind of umami.” The Opal, a fruit with a sneaky sweetness and a softer, grainier texture with not a lot of juiciness, was like the apple version of the cheese. It wasn’t so sweet that it clashed with the cheese. Rather, it emphasized the cheese’s cave-aged flavored. And where other cheeses would make this apple seem mushy, the aged, crumbly Reserve showed it in its best light.

Wine-Washed Cheese Pairs with an Old-Timey McIntosh

Washed in Pinot Noir and then buried in pomace (the seeds, stems, and skins left over from winemaking), Fratty Corners is a cheese that truly expresses the hybrid nature of Pennyroyal Farm. It’s milky and soft but with a grapey aroma. Its subtle fruitiness tasted sour when paired with super-sweet apples, but a McIntosh, which balances sweet and tart, went well. A slice of this hard, crisp apple is a good vessel for the pliable cheese.