Wabash Cannonball’s Taste

The exterior of this cheese smells like barn animals, in a good way! This pasteurized ash dusted goat ball is considered one of the first US-made goat cheeses comparable to classic French chevre in any way. Wabash Cannonball looks like it’s name, a cannonball dusted with snow. It has a blue-green ash rind just beneath its soft white surface. The ash coating creates a thin, wrinkled skin around the snow white interior paste is dense, yet soft and yielding.

Wabash Cannonball is a soft-to-semi-soft cheese and is farmstead produced by Capriole Farmstead Goat Cheeses in Indiana.  Wabash Cannonball is a tart cheese with a surprisingly bright lemony or grapefruit flavor. It’s a petite but dense sphere of lightly-aged goat cheese that offers clean citrus flavors. Imitating its European cousins in the mouth with a soft and creamy texture. At its optimum age, the cheese is musky, slightly sweet with a more delicate flavor.

Serving Wabash Cannonball

Rest at room temperature for an hour before serving. Cannonball is best served whole on a cheeseboard with dry white wines such as Sauvignon Blanc or Gruner Veltliner. It won Best-of-Show, American Cheese Society 1995.

How Wabash Cannonball is Made

Capriole is located in the lush, rolling hills of Indiana, just over the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. When Judy Schad and her husband Larry bought their property in 1976, they discovered that it had once belonged to Larry’s great-great-grandfather. To honor family tradition, they decided to build their new log cabin right over the foundation of the old house. First populating their family farm with lots of different animals, they soon fell in love with their mischievous goats. Now they have a healthy herd of 400 Alpine, Saanen, and Nubian goats that provide milk for their handmade goat cheeses. Recently, they sold the herd to a neighboring farm to focus entirely on the cheesemaking side of the business.

The surface of the cheese is dusted with vegetable ash to promote ripening. Wabash Cannonball is a dense sphere with a gentle, creamy, slightly acidic flavour with clean citrusy hints. The rind is a fluffy mushroomy snowball-like covering of Penicilium Candidum mould which gives way to a deeply wrinkled surface of Geotrichum Candidum as it matures.