Photo by Carmen Troesser
Drive south on I-55 until the malls give way to sandstone outcroppings and hawks loop through blue sky like they’re stitching thread through the clouds. Just north of Ste. Genevieve, you’ll reach Bloomsdale, a barely there town of 500 or so. Tucked out of sight, across a clear, rock-bottomed creek, is a storybook red barn. A meadow dotted with sweet-faced Saanen goats, so pure a white that they glow in morning’s soft light. A milking parlor, a house almost 200 years old, a cheesemaking plant and aging rooms, a tiny shop. The realized dream of Steve and Veronica Baetje.
Tall, lean, and laconic, Steve is a stonecutter and woodworker. Veronica, too, is both artisan and entrepreneur. Her cheeks are ruddy, flushed with health, her bright blue-green eyes indicator lights for a brain that’s always on. The two live simply and insist on kindness. The material goods they covet are European vats and reclaimed barnwood; their idea of leisure is a Sunday picnic in a hidden glade on their own land.
Stay a while at Baetje Farms, though, and up from the storybook pop unexpected details. Veronica’s 2001 Porsche (her father was a mechanic in love with fast European cars and vintage airplanes). The orders pouring in from New York, Chicago (the Pastoral retail/restaurant chain, an Oprah Winfrey favorite), and the Bay Area. The trips to Europe to pick up world-class awards for Baetje cheeses. Six interns from L’École Nationale de L’Industrie du Lait et de la Viande in La Roche-sur-Foron, puzzling out rural Missouri culture in heavy French accents as they scrub the counters.
The Baetjes haven’t become worldly, but their cheese has bought them entry into a very sophisticated world.
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Steve and Veronica Baetje hold one of their newest additions.
It all started with a goat named Cookie and a promise to God.
There’s always been a sturdy old-fashioned heroism to Veronica Baetje. You can imagine her in a bloodstained apron, nursing soldiers in the Crimean War, or sweating in long skirts as she plowed a family farm in Alsace. But in reality, she and Steve grew up in South County—Oakville, to be precise. The streets were named for French towns, but the European influence ended there. Families ate Velveeta—Big Macs for a treat.
Veronica’s parents did grow fresh veggies, though, and her dad baked bread. She could tell the difference between good food and plasticized, processed crap, and she was drawn to the simple and the natural. Six years after she and Steve married, they moved to a Mennonite community in Orchardville, Illinois, whose members grew all their own food.
By then Veronica had endured a cruel succession of miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her. She took comfort from cooking, and sharing, food more delicious than anything she could buy. “It was great to be able to grow something without all the unknowns—the chemicals, the engineered genes,” she says. She contemplated getting her own cow, but cows are big. She came home instead with Cookie and, because she refused to separate them, Cookie’s 4-month-old kid, Lily.
Veronica used her new stream of goat milk to make chèvre, cheesecake, cheese balls, Alfredo sauce, even Cheddar and Parmesan. Since the miscarriages, she’d felt cut off from the life around her, raw and empty. Now nature drew her close, soothing her with its cyclical rhythms.
Her interest built. She enrolled at the Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese and learned the chemistry behind the magic, then studied at the University of Wisconsin. She’s like her dad, she explains, describing the 1937 Fairchild plane “Red” Luecke restored from scratch and took into the air: “When he was really interested in something, he went full bore.”
They began to dream about cheesemaking as a business. And when they had dreamed enough, in May 2005, they moved to Bloomsdale and bought goats: First floppy-eared Nubians, which bawled all the time and nearly drove Steve crazy. Then the gentle Swiss Saanens, which lick his hands or nibble his shirttails with real affection and only bleat softly at milking time.
He rises at 2:45 a.m. to empty the vats, then milks at 4 a.m. Veronica masterminds the cheesemaking. Since their years with the Mennonites, she’s pinned a small white veil to her red-gold hair every morning. The Bible suggests that women cover their hair when praying or speaking about the Lord. Much of her day’s work is a mindful prayer. And she’s promised God to talk about him whenever she can.
White-coated and gloved, Clément Dijoud weighs balls of chèvre with meticulous care and hands them to Alison Penalver, who expertly rolls them into logs. Both interns are from Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps. “I studied agriculture,” he says, “and during my internship with goats, I made goat cheese. It’s like I died.”
The French interns still haven’t gotten used to the Midwest’s size and scatter. “You are so far from everything—there’s no center,” Penalver says. Veronica grinned at the look on one intern’s face when he saw cheese in a can. The dry twists of beef jerky by every cash register were equally alarming: “But surely this is for dog treats?”
Penalver says people keep telling her, “‘I have a recipe that calls for goat cheese.’ Well, there are a thousand different kinds! Miette or Camembert or…” She waves her hands in exasperation. “It’s like saying to use cow cheese!”
At farmers’ markets, people tell Veronica, “I’d love to quit my job and make cheese.” “It’s sad,” she says. “They are city people. They see a romantic picture of a green meadow full of flowers and grass, with munching goats and somebody skipping through making cheese and singing from The Sound of Music—and it’s not like that at all. Sometimes you have a sunny day and it’s almost like that. But you still have all the aspects of running a business in this day and age. I just had to write a bioterrorism policy in case terrorists attack Baetje Farms!”
She is happiest when she’s “in the cheese room with everybody, listening to Bob Marley or the Eagles or French Catholic hymns—it just depends on who’s in charge—and making some good cheese.” The process is different for every type: “Some are cooked curd, some are washed. Some are lactic, some have a washed rind. And they all use different culture”—meaning the good bacteria that transform them. Hers comes from France.
“You lower the milk’s pH to make it more acidic and add your rennet,” she continues. “Rennet is an enzyme that helps the milk thicken into a gel.” There are thistle and vegetable rennets, but she mainly uses traditional animal rennets, which come from the stomach of a grazing animal, like a cow. “The babies drink the milk, and it forms a solid curd in their stomachs so they can digest it slowly.”
At the moment, a batch of Miette is draining, a clear pale-yellow liquid dripping into white buckets. “That’s the whey, being separated from the curd,” Veronica explains. “Then we salt it. Miette is a lactic cheese, so it has a longer set time. It takes 16 to 20 hours to form a curd at room temperature, is then hand-ladled over eight to 12 hours, and drains for about 48 hours.” Then it ages, and when its bloomy rind begins to wrinkle and the layer below liquefies, it smells “like white wine and yeasty bread dough,” she says, “and tastes like cheesecake.”
Inside the stainless steel vat, I see a slowly spinning agitator arm and the arabesque of a little blade beneath it, spinning under the arm like they’re disco dancing. “It is taking a long time to heat,” Dijoud tells Veronica, and she checks dials with a worried frown.
“Parts for this vat come from the Netherlands,” she says. “If the heating element has cracked… We need Steve.”
Summoned, he bends to examine the vat while Veronica, relaxed again, tells me they grew up across the street from each other and married at 22.
“So at what point did you fall in love?” I ask, turning to include Steve.
“I don’t know,” he mutters without looking up. “We have a major crisis here.”
“When he stopped throwing rotten duck eggs at me,” Veronica inserts lightly.
“Don’t talk about that stuff,” he says, grumpier by the minute. “Just the cheese.”
“He’s just worried about the vat,” she says, calmly proceeding to talk about their courtship, the sorrow of not having a child, their search for deeper meaning, the demands of growing a business.
This reminds her of the current logistics. “Here’s what I need,” she tells Steve. “It’s 2:30. Alison and I were going to deliver that airport shipment and then meet with the farmers’ market ladies at the Cheshire”—the sort of social event Veronica hardly ever allows herself. “On the way, I was going to take Clément to play Wiffle Ball with those guys from De Soto. That is not going to happen, because I need him to babysit that vat.”
There’s a flurry of debate, Penalver offering to stay so Dijoud doesn’t miss a chance to practice English, Steve suggesting that Dijoud go to the Cheshire and drink wine with the ladies, Dijoud insisting that it is his duty to stay with the cheese. Steve comes back, mind made up: “You go to that thing. You take Clément to the baseball. I’ll take care of the vat.”
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Pyramid molds shape the award-winning Bloomsdale cheese, named for the valley where the farm lies.
He fixes the vat—another crisis averted. They recall the spring when 10 nannies gave birth in one day. “We’d just be finishing one, and another would go into labor,” Veronica says. “You have to keep up with the tagging—we track the pedigree, and we want to make sure they get their own mother’s colostrum.”
Or the time Steve met her in the driveway, yelling, “Two heads and a foot are all coming out at the same time!” When they get a mother through a difficult birth, she bonds with them for life. “The minute you go into the pen, she’ll be right here,” Veronica says, patting her hip.
“When it looks like a hard birth—you can see the mother gritting her teeth, and her body tenses, and you can see the struggle in her eyes—we bring them Tension Tamer tea,” she adds. They are given antibiotics only in medical emergencies, and then their milk is not used. They eat alfalfa hay, which is high in proteins, and sunflower seeds, oats, corn, and molasses, and they drink filtered spring water. Apples and pumpkins are their sweet treat. When I wonder aloud whether the goats like their own cheese, her eyes fly open: “It’s too expensive to give them the cheese!”
The goats are all affectionate, but one in particular, Naughty, insisted on making herself a pet, opening the gates so she could follow Veronica wherever she went. “Sometimes she let all the others out. At the height of the lilac blooming season, I looked up and saw all the goats surrounding our giant lilac bushes, nibbling.”
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Dawn in the dairy barn, where the goats snack as they’re milked. (The farm’s logo is a Saanen goat’s head, framed by laurel leaves and adorned with a fleur-de-lis to represent the area’s French heritage. The motto below it is the promise of Proverbs 27: “And thou shalt have goat’s milk enough.”)
The most auspicious crisis, though, was the sticky, oppressive drought that hit in 2011 and 2012, leaving the goats too stressed to produce much milk. Veronica made panicked calls and eventually found milk—sheep milk, from a farm in Kansas. She and Steve made the 15-hour round trip in a day. The next morning, she started experimenting with a blend.
It turned out to be genius. Both sheep and goat milks have very small fat globules, making them easier to digest than cow’s milk. Both are naturally homogenized—no cream to separate and rise to the top—and blend easily. But the sheep milk has a bit more fat and protein.
Goat milk is as delicate as spun sugar; too much sloshing, and its protein strands snap. To keep it from drying out, you have to handle the soft curds with, well, kid gloves. Critics have long praised Baetje Farms’ “lightness of touch,” rhapsodizing over the cheeses’ texture.
Now, with the accidentally inspired addition of sheep milk, there’s a little more forgiveness, a touch more richness and luscious mouthfeel, a stronger matrix yet the same silky, molten texture.
To show me, Veronica steps inside an aging room, eyeing the shelves like a kid who’s found hidden Christmas presents.
“We are so used, in this country, to cheese that’s wrapped in plastic and can’t breathe,” she remarks. “We do naturally rinded cheeses, and a lot of different microflora develop to form that rind.”
She gathers up a few cheeses for an informal tasting. “Fleur de la Vallée gets flipped and doused with saltwater as it ages,” she begins. “The repetitions develop the rind and the flavor. It’s soft and slightly sticky, very satisfying, with a lot of flavor notes. It’s sour-creamy, and it makes me think of bacon and eggs.” Steve, who’s come up behind her, snakes his hand around to steal a piece.
Dense and velvety soft, Rendezvous clings to your mouth. Amoureux is the newest, nutty and buttery. “It’s like two pieces of cheese fell in love,” she says, “bound together by a ring of ash.
“Our cheeses go well with a nice charcuterie tray,” she adds, butchering the pronunciation. She’s not a foodie in the way some customers are, tossing out foreign names and lyrical descriptors. She’s a foodie in her refusal to compromise.
Dijoud’s favorite is the little pyramid-shaped cheese named Bloomsdale, a Valençay-style lactic cheese that’s entirely goat milk. “It’s softer under the rind and dry in the middle,” he says, “and it’s like it melts from the top.” Fresh and mild when young, with a salty bite, Bloomsdale ripens from outside in, and as it turns molten, the flavor deepens, adding blue notes balanced by the rind’s earthy mushroom flavor. Bloomsdale has won top honors at the World Cheese Awards four times already.
Courtesy of The Guild of Fine Food
Clad in her crisp white judging jacket, Veronica Baetje plunged her cheese iron again and again, rotating it with a half-spin of her wrist and extracting a plug of Gruyère or Cheddar or manchego. The room at this convention center in England’s West Midlands was a grid of long white-clothed tables with BBC cameras on the perimeter. Atop the tables were cheeses elaborately decorated with nasturtiums or hay; tall, stiff rounds in dark rinds; African cheeses with bright tribal labels.
Sixty times, she brought cheese to her lips, tasted, analyzed. She’d jot notes, cleanse her palate with a slice of apple or pear, a crunch of cracker, a swish of water or wine—then taste again.
As they finished, a coordinator approached and bent toward Veronica’s ear. Would she serve as one of the 16 final judges, choosing the best of the Super Golds for the top winner of the 2015 World Cheese Awards?
She froze. She’d just been chatting with someone from the Canary Islands about their experiments in blending cow and goat milk after grazing the animals together on rich volcanic soil… Judge the Super Golds? Was she ready?
“You seem unsure,” he remarked.
“I’m just—honored,” Veronica blurted, “and I want to do a good job.”
“OK, so that’s a yes”—and the coordinator strode off.
Slowly Veronica walked to the L-shaped judging table and took a seat toward the middle, her cheeks pink above the white jacket, her hair pulled back and covered by a small white veil. Sixty more cheeses to taste, and now her opinion mattered even more.
Only eight of these Super Golds came from cheesemakers in the U.S.—and Baetje Farms’ Miette was one of them. (Bloomsdale won silver this year.) Veronica would not, of course, be assessing her own cheese, lest she be stripped of her judging credentials.
Instead she chose a cheese she described as tasting like a picnic in a sunny Alpine meadow. It was strikingly similar to the top winner, Le Gruyère AOP Premier Cru, from Switzerland—which won by a single tense point.
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Saanen goats from Switzerland are the sweetest, quietest breed of goats the Baetjes have kept.
“That’s for Tower Grove,” Veronica says, pointing to a hunk of cheese set aside for a regular customer. Two employees are wrapping wedges of cheese for nine farmers’ markets, placing them on the long, pale wood market trays that Steve made. He also built all the white cabinetry in the new shop, using planks from a house that was built right after the Civil War. (“I’d just gotten out of the hospital with a broken arm, but they called and said, ‘If you want any of this wood, take it now!’” he laughs. “I took everything.”) He antiqued the cabinets with a brown glaze and painted the walls behind them a misty blue-green-gray. The light fixtures are old glass butter churns with clear Edison bulbs.
His next project is upstairs: a huge room that could be used for cheese tastings, pairing classes, and parties, with a deck that overlooks the pasture. “I want to put in a commercial-grade kitchen that looks like a home kitchen,” he says. “A big fireplace, a long farmhouse table, some leather couches. The walls would be stone, and I’d put beams across the ceiling—I want it to look like it’s several hundred years old.”
Veronica, meanwhile, is mulling over next season’s interns. Her heart caught at one application, a boy whose father owns a farm in northern Italy and makes fontina in a traditional copper vat. The boy’s been teased at school forever—“You smell like a cow!” But at 14, he decided it didn’t matter; he would go to cheese school so he could help his father.
After the World Cheese Awards, The New York Times did a long feature on Baetje Farms. An artisan cheese shop in Denver opened with the proud announcement that it will carry “the rare, award-winning cheese from Veronica Baetje in Missouri.” She’s been invited to the Canary Islands to exchange ideas. The institute in France that sends her interns has invited her to intern there, and she’d love to work in their laboratory, so she’s polishing her French.
“On family vacations, we’d be coming home, and just beyond our exit was the turnoff for Iowa,” she recalls. “Dad would tease us: ‘Why don’t we just keep going and go to Iowa?’ It sounded wildly exciting to me—exotic and fun.” She grins. “I never dreamed I’d go to all these places, just because we bought one goat in 1998. And cheese took us around the world.”
