Recipe
Baked feta with thyme honey and cracked pepper
Six-month feta bakes without collapsing. A younger, wetter cheese turns to soup in the same dish.
Craft note · 5 min read
Why we cut sheep's milk with twenty percent goat
The PDO ceiling is thirty percent. We stop at twenty, every make, and the reason has nothing to do with what the two milks cost.
In this note
- What each milk brings
- Where twenty percent comes from
- Why the ratio is fixed, not seasonal
- What you should be able to taste
What each milk brings
Sheep's milk is the body of the cheese: high in fat and casein, it sets a dense curd that survives six months in brine without falling apart. On its own it can finish heavy, and slightly waxy on the palate.
Goat's milk brings acidity and a cleaner, brighter finish. It also weakens the curd. Push it too far and the paste turns crumbly somewhere around month four — long before the barrel is due to open.
Where twenty percent comes from
We tested fills at ten, twenty and thirty percent across three seasons, opening one barrel of each at four and six months. Thirty was consistently the brightest at four months and consistently the most fragile at six.
Twenty held its structure at six months and still carried the goat's lift. Ten tasted like a good but unremarkable sheep's cheese. So the ledger says twenty, and it has said twenty since.
Why the ratio is fixed, not seasonal
Plenty of producers move the blend with whatever milk is cheapest that week. Doing that makes the cheese honest to the market rather than to itself, and it makes a six-month ageing programme impossible to plan.
Our flocks are milked side by side and the vat is filled to the same ratio every morning of the make. If the goats are short, the make is smaller — the blend does not change.
What you should be able to taste
A firm, sliceable paste that yields rather than shatters, a clean lactic top note, and a long saline finish with a faint hazelnut edge from the beech.
If your piece crumbles to dust under a knife, it is either much older than six months, much drier, or it was never blended for keeping.
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