Part of the joy of living in Israel is being able to spend weekends discovering its hidden gems, unearthed through opportune conversations or chance encounters on a morning walk.
Hiking through the Jerusalem hills, wooden signs with an image of a goat lead the way to a delicious goat cheese dairy, nestled in a cavernous hollow close to Sataf Springs. It’s owned by the free-spirited Shai Seltzer who, together with his two grown sons, has been creating mouthwatering goat cheeses for close to 40 years.
A former botanist, Seltzer received his first lesson in cheesemaking from a local monk and has continued to learn ever since. He attends international conferences on artisanal food from Europe to Africa to Asia, tasting, smelling and learning as he goes. “It is a way of life; we live within the cheesemaking process.”
Seltzer explains that the process is akin to painting a watercolor. One begins with a wet canvas and, slowly but surely, colors are added to create a masterpiece. Likewise, with artisanal cheese, one begins with the milk and then special enzymes, yeasts and bacteria are added, and slowly but surely, the unique cheese is created.
Seltzer’s cheeses are made with painstaking love. He tastes them at every stage of preparation, adjusting and refining as he goes.
“The cheese we create is an expression of the land on which it is created,” he says. “Month to month, year to year, according to the weather, what the goats are eating and the land on which they are grazing, the cheese changes. We can give a name to each type of cheese, but it is incomparable to cheeses created elsewhere. Our cheeses are simply an expression of the Judean Mountains.”
Alongside the natural limestone cave in which the cheeses mature and ripen, some 170 goats graze on the mountainside. They have adapted to their lush, mountainous surroundings and produce high-quality milk, rich in fat and dry matter (milk content excluding the liquid). The Seltzer family has developed a variety of cheeses they serve to visitors alongside specially selected wines that bring out the distinct flavors in the cheese.
“Here in Israel we have wonderful wines, but we chose the award-winning wines from the Golan Heights Winery both due to their depth of flavor and also, in our opinion, because they are the best kosher wines,” said Shai’s son Omri as he brought out overflowing cheese platters and bottles of wine.
The first samples we try are the soft cheeses. They are deliciously decadent and creamy, with flavors that coat the tongue as they melt in the mouth. A scrumptious fresh cheese is wrapped in vine leaves, which adds yet another dimension to the flavor. The crumbly “Mony” cheese has a much softer, delicate taste.
Omri pairs the soft cheeses with a Yarden white gewurztraminer, an off-dry, fruity wine. The fruitiness and tart acidity of the wine refresh the palate and allow the individual flavors in the cheese to be fully expressed.
Moving on, Seltzer produces a platter with hard cheeses in a range of colors, textures and sizes. These have tough rinds that absorb the earthy aromas of the cave in which they are stored. “Michal” is a young, hard yellow cheese that both crumbles and melts in the mouth. An exhale through the nose completes the tasting, leaving a robust flavor on the tongue that captures the rich cream of the goat milk and the gentle bitterness and earthy flavors from seven months of fermentation in the cave.
The harder cheeses need a fruity, fuller-bodied wine to complement them, so Seltzer offers a Yarden cabernet sauvignon or pinot noir. The pinot, whose fruity notes of sour cherry and raspberry are delicious on their own, develops into a well-rounded wine when paired with the cheeses. The cabernet sauvignon is fit to pair with the strongest of cheeses. Deliciously complex with a fruity character, its earthy and oak notes also complement the earthy flavors present in the cheese.
Ending the tasting, Omri produces the farm’s masterpiece, a cheese aged in the cave for 4 1/2 years. Hard like the rind of Italian Parmesan but crumbly like shortbread, it is a collision of sharp nutty flavors and gentle creamy tones. A sweet dessert wine from Yarden Heights complements the cheese’s subtle sweetness. Paradoxically, sweeter wines often are paired with sharp, blue-veined cheeses to break down and balance the salinity and sharpness.
For visitors exploring the Jerusalem Hills, the Seltzer farm is a highly recommended and very tasty pit stop (see details at www.goat-cheese.co.il). For those wishing to recreate the experience at home this Shavuot, presenting a smorgasbord of carefully paired cheeses and wines will delight guests and elevate this dairy-themed festival to new levels.
Anna Harwood is a freelance writter based in Israel.