Get ready for goat's milk ice cream

Imagine strawberry ice cream with a swirl of balsamic vinegar. Or chocolate ice cream infused with real cabernet wine. If these flavors seem exotic, the main ingredient in a new kind of ice cream may be even more surprising: goat’s milk.

Laloo’s Goat’s Milk Ice Cream (pronounced Layloo’s) appeared in a few small California markets a little more than a year ago, but now it is appearing across the country in a major grocery store chain. While it’s picking up fans among adventurous eaters, it has also got children scratching their heads--what is a flavor called “Chevre Chiffon” supposed to taste like? And frugal shoppers are wincing at the price: It sells for about $8 a pint.

“That’s weird,” said a skeptical Lizzie Helck, a 10-year-old from Plainsboro, N.J., whose favorite ice cream is plain old Breyers chocolate. “I don’t think you’re supposed to eat goat’s milk.”

Some farmers and goat enthusiasts have been making goat's milk ice cream for their families for generations, but Laloo’s is the only brand that is becoming widely available. In November 2004 it was introduced into one small market in Sebastopol, Calif. A month later it was available in 15 Sonoma County stores, and then it expanded to 125 gourmet grocers throughout California, Oregon and Washington. This month, goat's milk ice cream came to Whole Foods Market stores in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Louisiana. By May it should be in most Whole Foods stores along the East Coast, from Boston to Boca Raton.

Grocers have taken note of the increasing popularity of many goat’s milk products. Michael Johnson, a buyer for Aptos Natural Foods in Aptos, Calif., says that in the past two years his store doubled its selection of goat’s milk products, with yogurt selling especially well. In the past year both goat’s milk ice cream and butter came to the Cornucopia Community Market in Carmel, Calif., according to buyer Adam Dillon.

Goat’s milk ice cream is finding a niche among some snackers who have problems digesting cow’s milk. Goat's milk has slightly lower levels of lactose than cow’s milk--about 4.1 percent compared with 4.7 percent in cow's milk.

Customers who are concerned about the use of hormones in milk cows are also looking for alternatives. Burke Webb, a buyer for Fiesta Market in Sebastopol, the first store to stock Laloo’s, said some customers preferred goat’s milk foods to the soy products that imitate milk.

Laloo’s is certainly a refined taste, with flavors like Molasses Tipsycake and Black Mission Fig.

“My ice cream doesn’t taste very goaty,” said Laura Howard, the founder of Laloo’s. “You could do a blind taste test and probably not know it's goat’s milk."

An anonymous reviewer, in a blog entry about Laloo's, said the flavor was detectable. “The goat does show in the aftertaste, like the finish on a good wine. Starts figgy, finishes with a nice earthy goat.”

Howard, whose nickname became the company’s moniker, gave up her fast-paced Los Angeles lifestyle a year and a half ago to move to a small plot of land in Petaluma, Sonoma County, the heart of California’s goat farm country. She used to produce music videos for U2, Radiohead and Aerosmith, and commercials for Nike and Budweiser. Now the 39-year-old ice cream entrepreneur shares three acres with her husband and eight goats, just five miles down the road from a family-run goat farm, where she gets her milk.

An ice cream fanatic, Howard didn’t think she could follow the advice of a yoga instructor to eliminate cow’s milk from her diet. Then she inherited an ice cream maker from her grandparents’ West Virginia farm, poured in some goat’s milk, and the idea for a new business was born. When she brought her first batch of ice cream to the Fiesta Market, the staff liked it so much the manager made room in the freezer to stock it that same day.

But price could limit the ice cream’s appeal. The store manager of Sonoma Market, Mark Gore, said the ice cream is popular, but because of the price, “It isn’t doing as well as it should.”

Howard says $7.99 a pint is not a huge markup. A “teeny tiny boutique business” doesn’t get many price breaks, she said, so Laloo’s would have to expand drastically to bring down the price. Getting milk from goats is also more labor intensive than milking cows. It takes about 10 goats to produce the same amount of milk as one dairy cow, said Jennifer Bice, founder of Redwood Hill Farm, which makes a popular goat’s milk yogurt.

Although goat cheeses have been popular for many years, Howard thinks the United States is just catching up with the rest of the world in its appreciation for the tang of goat’s milk in other forms.

“It’s been around for thousands of years,” she said. “It’s not a flash in the pan.”

E-mail: mrf2107@columbia.edu