Making artisan cheese since 15

ALTURA, Minn. — When Katie Bonow was 15 years old, she started making goat milk cheese to use the extra milk from her herd.

“My mom was like, ‘Well, we’re not just going to dump this milk, so you are going to have to learn how to deal with it,’” Bonow said.

Since then, she has learned to more than deal with it. From her beginnings experimenting using recipes from 4-H friends and books she ordered about cheese, she has gone on to work on cheese-making dairies in Italy. And, for the past nine years, she has operated her own micro-creamery, Capra Nera Creamery LLC.

Bonow milks a herd of 35 goats on a farm she and her husband, Ryan, own near Altura. Ryan is also a dairy farmer — of the bovine variety. He and his family have a 250-cow herd a few miles away. Bonow does the day-to-day work, but Ryan is moral support and helps with tasks that require large equipment.

“I wouldn’t be able to do this without my husband,” Bonow said. “Having the farm so close by is very beneficial to me.”

Bonow processes 100% of her milk into six types of unpasteurized, aged cheese. The first, which is her own creation and her most popular cheese, is called Contadina. It is a cheddar and Parmesan mix. She also makes black pepper Asiago, rosemary Asiago, a Gouda-style cheese, a Tomme-style cheese and bleu cheese.

“That’s just what I knew how to make, and that’s what I was interested in making,” Bonow said. “There’s a market for it. … (And) I found that I accidentally stumbled on a good system for me.”

Bonow milks seasonally, with cheese production from June through October.

“Cheese making season … it’s a marathon,” Bonow said.

The rest of the year, she sells her cheeses, since aged cheeses have an extended shelf life.

“There are pros and cons,” Bonow said. “I do have a break in cash flow over the summer, but then I have goat sales to make up for that. It’s taken me a while to figure out these financial and business aspects of it, but the more that I just go with what I know I want to do … the more I can tweak these pieces to suit my needs.”

As the season continues, and the milk composition shifts with it, Bonow changes the variety of cheese she is making.

“It makes being seasonal a lot easier,” Bonow said. “Super seasonal milk like that is a little bit harder to handle because it fluctuates so much from the beginning to the end.”

Bonow does not push her goats for production, with much of their nutrition coming from 7-8 acres of pasture or dried hay, with a grain mix fed in the parlor. Bonow used to bottle-raise the goat kids, but now, she does dam raising to save time.

Throughout the season, Bonow plans so she has milk to process consistently.

“I’m always strategic about how many I’m milking throughout the season so I can make cheese every other day,” Bonow said.

Bonow’s milking and processing all happen under one roof: with parlor, milk house, cheese-making room and aging room all in her barn. Bonow’s cheese vat holds about 30 gallons of milk. From that, Bonow gets 3-5, 5-pound wheels of cheese.

Bonow said she works to fit her dairy and creamery into everything going on in her life. Since starting Capra Nera Creamery in 2016, Bonow has gotten married, has had two children and is expecting another child in November.

“Most of (the changes) come down to reducing my workload so that I can handle it,” Bonow said.

Bonow includes her children in her farming endeavors. During the school year, while her oldest, Oren, is at school, 3-year-old Lyla can be found playing in the barn while Bonow milks, hugging the goat she affectionately renamed Boogers, or helping her mom.

“It’s important for me that I be able to raise my kids on a farm,” Bonow said. “I love that they’re able to be out here with me.”

Bonow grew up on what she describes as “a very idyllic dairy farm” near Spring Grove, which her parents continue to operate. Bonow won her first dairy goat at age 12 through a 4-H essay contest. By her senior year of high school, she was hand milking a herd of nine. During college, she reduced her herd for the sake of her mom, who was milking them.

Several formative experiences during college taught Bonow more intricacies of cheese-making. The first was taking a 2-week course on cheese making through the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese. Second, she spent a semester abroad in Italy, and worked over the summer on organic farms across Italy through a program called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. The program allows workers to get experience and free room and board in exchange for labor.

Two of the farms she worked on that summer — one in Sicily and the other in Valle d’Aosta in the Alps of northwestern Italy — processed milk into cheese. The summer after graduation, she returned to Italy with WWOOF, this time working on a dairy near Lake Como.

“They milked about 100 goats … and they were doing on-farm cheese production, so it was the closest thing that I could get to what I’m doing now,” Bonow said.

Living abroad, Bonow said she absorbed the Italian appreciation for high-quality, locally-made foods.

Fast forward to today, Bonow sells locally-made cheese she crafts herself. Her cheese is sold 80% direct to consumers. Bonow sells at the Rochester Farmers Market, as well as restaurants and specialty shops and through a distributor in the Twin Cities.

Though her operation has changed, Bonow’s appreciation for farming and making cheese has not.

“It’s this personal challenge now to make this work and figure out how to make it financially make sense and work well with my family,” Bonow said.