Step aside, old Bessie, and make way for goat’s milk, an under-featured but well-deserving player in the dairy game. Big Picture Farm, a small goat dairy and farmstead confectionary and creamery in Vermont, showcases goat milk—fresh from its own herd—in its award-winning cheeses and caramels.
I tried the Goat Milk Chai Caramels, deliciously addictive little gems infused with plenty of chai flavor. I was immediately smitten with the packaging, featuring charming, lopsided line sketches of the farm’s goats, each identified by name. The caramels inside came individually wrapped, adorned with miniature goat doodles that matched those on the box.
At first bite, they were delightfully chewy and stick-to-your-teeth sweet, but quickly melted into smooth, rich, and creamy bliss. The chai spices shone through at once. Strong, warm, and comforting tones of ginger, cinnamon, and a motley mixture of others lent a wonderful depth of flavor, elevating the caramels beyond the simple sweetness of sugar and putting a welcome and delectable twist on your typical confection. The flavors were reminiscent of chilly autumn weather and fuzzy winter sweaters, but I recommend enjoying them year-round regardless—any time that calls for a sweet treat or surefire pick-me-up (read: all the time).
Fat Toad Farm, another small, family-run, pasture-to-table business in Vermont, specializes in goat’s milk caramel, with a traditional Mexican sauce known as “cajeta.” Though it offers a variety of flavors, I sampled its most basic, consisting of only two ingredients: goat’s milk and sugar. The caramel was velvety smooth and mildly sweet, with a subtle but unmistakable tang from the fresh milk—much more than the sum of its parts.
Fat Toad Farm painstakingly hand stirs its caramel in small batches, over the course of five hours, in traditional copper kettles, a testament to its dedication to quality, simplicity, and just really, really good caramel. The result is an unusually thin but incredibly creamy sauce, with an intriguing balance of richness and lightness that is both delightful and dangerously moreish. I would imagine it to be delicious drizzled over apple slices or vanilla ice cream, baked into a batch of fudge-y brownies, or swirled into a mug of steaming hot chocolate. Unfortunately, I'll have to leave the experimentation up to you. My supply is already being quickly depleted, devoured in its simplest, and purest form: straight from the jar, one euphoric (and absolutely shameless) spoonful after another.
