Capricho de Cabra

By Janet Fletcher: As trite as it may sound to Bay Area diners by now, a warm goat cheese salad rarely disappoints anyone. Fresh goat cheese becomes soft and spreadable when warmed, not stringy like mozzarella or stiff like Gruyere. When I was a cook at Chez Panisse many years ago, I made hundreds of baked goat cheese salads, which called for coating disks of goat cheese in olive oil and fine breadcrumbs. These days, being lazy, I will sometimes put a disk of unbreaded goat cheese in an olive oil-rubbed ramekin and warm it in the oven until it softens, then spread it on baguette toasts to accompany salad.

My new favorite cheese for this sort of use is Capricho de Cabra, a silky-textured fresh goat cheese from Spain. Call it chevre if you like, but that's the French word for goat cheese. I like the word "capricho," which, like the English caprice, suggests something that seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, when I investigated the word's etymology, I learned that "caprice" derives from the Latin for "goat." Before it came to mean a whim, caprice referred to a goat's leap.

Based in the Spanish region of Murcia, the Capricho de Cabra producer also makes Caña de Oveja and Caña de Cabra, two fine cheeses occasionally available in the Bay Area. According to Brad Dube, who works for the importer Forever Cheese, the producer is the largest goat cheese maker in Spain. Size does not often correlate positively with quality, but this simple, fresh cheese more than meets expectations.

Retailers cut it into disks, but Capricho comes to them as a snow-white, rindless, Cryovac-packaged log weighing 1 kilo (a little more than 2 pounds). It smells clean and pure, with no gaminess, and it drifts across the tongue, leaving a lighter, smoother, moister and more mellow impression than most young goat cheeses. It has none of the chalky quality or gumminess that can inflict some fresh chevres, making them feel like bad peanut butter. Dube attributes the lush texture to the high fat content of the Murciana breed's milk, but careful handling of the curd probably also has something to do with it.

I like to scrape the surface of the Capricho with a table knife to make creamy, buttery curls. Warmed in an oiled ramekin, it is irresistible. Serve it with a green salad, some walnut bread and any dry wine that isn't too big. For a white, pour a Spanish Verdejo; if you prefer red, a Spanish Garnacha.