Small Pleasures: Digging Into Gammelgården Creamery’s Maple Skyr

If I had my druthers, I would eat a maple creemee for breakfast each morning.

Due to Pownal’s Gammelgården Creamery, I get fairly shut. The ladies-owned micro dairy’s dreamy, creamy maple skyr is a socially acceptable breakfast that tastes like a deal with.

Offered at shops in southern and central Vermont, Gammelgården’s Icelandic-style skyr is technically a delicate cheese, but it surely tastes and acts extra like yogurt. The creamery completely sweetens the wealthy skyr with Vermont maple syrup. It additionally sells skyr in flavors comparable to apple pie, cherry almond, strawberry and wild Maine blueberry.

Gammelgården’s origins date again to 2004. Stina Kutzer had at all times wished to have a small dairy. On her fiftieth birthday that yr, her husband, Peter, gave her a Jersey calf named Babette.

“I used to be simply going to have a household cow,” Stina Kutzer stated. When Babette had twin heifer calves two years later, she discovered herself with a herd and began experimenting within the kitchen.

In 2010, Kutzer and her sister, Marta Willett, constructed a small creamery and named it Gammelgården as a nod to their heritage; the title means “small, outdated farm” in Swedish, Kutzer stated. They deliberate to promote cultured butter and a yogurt made with the leftover skimmed milk, strained in cheesecloth to show it good and thick.

The milk inspector informed the sisters that they may promote their handmade product, however they could not name it “yogurt” until it was machine processed. In order that they determined to call it “skyr,” one other Scandinavian time period, since they make it the identical means as the standard Icelandic delicate cheese. After skimming off the cream, they pasteurize the milk, add cultures and rennet, and hold it to let the whey drip out.

Gammelgården launched with 5 cows and a 22-gallon pasteurizer. The sisters offered merchandise at farmers markets in Dorset, Bennington and Troy, N.Y., and introduced them to native shops. Williams School, simply throughout the border in Williamstown, Mass., began shopping for their skyr in 2012; to maintain up with the elevated demand, they acquired an even bigger pasteurizer and supplemented their very own milk provide with high-quality milk from space farms.

The creamery now wholesales merchandise to greater than 30 companies in Massachusetts, New York and Vermont — as far north because the Middlebury Pure Meals Co-op and Little Seed Espresso Roasters in Middlebury. Prospects across the nation place orders on Gammelgården’s web site.

Peter Kutzer handles a lot of the wholesale deliveries, although the crew — which incorporates Signe O’Neil, the Kutzers’ daughter — is searching for a distributor. “That may assist us increase in Vermont,” O’Neil stated, “as a result of my poor father is driving in all places proper now.”

Every week, the household nonetheless makes two or three batches of skyr by hand, precisely because it did when Gammelgården began, although the batches have grown. To verify the hanging skyr has strained sufficient earlier than including maple syrup (or jam, for the creamery’s different skyr flavors), Kutzer pinches it to examine its thickness, she stated. Seasonal adjustments such because the cows’ weight loss program and lactation can have an effect on the skyr.

In any season, I get pleasure from Gammelgården’s maple skyr with berries or rhubarb and do-it-yourself granola — or straight out of the container. Subsequent time I top off, I’ll attempt O’Neil’s winter-appropriate suggestion: a dollop on oatmeal.

Small Pleasures is an occasional column that options scrumptious and distinctive Vermont-made meals or drinks that pack a punch. Ship us your favourite little bites or sips with massive payoff at meals@sevendaysvt.com.