Fat Toad Farm and the Vermont Goat's Milk Caramel
Fat Toad Farm's caramel has no cream and no butter. It is goat's milk and cane sugar, cooked down slowly in copper pots with a little baking soda until the milk itself turns brown, thick and faintly tangy. That is the method of cajeta, the goat's milk caramel of central Mexico, and it came to Brookfield, Vermont, by way of a daughter who had lived in Mexico and a family that already kept dairy goats. What follows is the maker's story, how the jar is made, and how it compares with the two dairy caramels closest to it. The complete caramel guide covers the wider family.
One goat, then eighty
Fat Toad Farm began in 2007 as a homesteading experiment with a single French Alpine doe named Jupiter. The founders were Judith Irving and Steve Reid, a former commercial real estate broker, working from their home in Brookfield. The herd grew, and for its first years the farm made goat cheese as well. The caramel came from family: one of their daughters had lived in Mexico and introduced them to the goat's milk confection there. They began cooking it on the kitchen stove.
The turn came in 2009, when they took the caramel to the Fancy Food Show and sales took off. The piece on the Fancy Food Show and the sofi Awards explains why that trade show matters to small makers. In 2015 the family chose the caramel over the cheese. They sold their herd of 80 goats to Ayers Brook Farm, stopped making cheese, and turned the building they had put up for the cheese next to their house into a caramel kitchen.
The order that changed course
In 2017, distributors placed an order for 40,000 jars, about a quarter of the company's annual production. No bulk order that size came again. The orders that followed were steady but smaller, and the family watched their caramel sit in distributors' warehouses, get discounted, and end up shelved beside mainstream brands instead of in the specialty section. Steve Reid later called working with large national grocery distributors "a fool's errand."
In the fall of 2018 they cut back, eliminating two jobs and not replacing two workers who left, and ran it as a family company with a single employee. Calley Hastings, one of Irving's daughters, was working in the business alongside them by then. In December 2019 the company expected to turn its first profit in four years. A national placement can look like a breakthrough and behave like a flood. Fat Toad Farm's answer was to get smaller.
A new home in Barre
In 2022 Fat Toad Farm Caramel moved to Butterfly Bakery of Vermont in Barre. The farm no longer milks its own herd and works with local partners Ayers Brook Dairy and Joneslan Farm, so the milk still comes from Vermont goats. Butterfly Bakery describes the caramel as hand-stirred and made with a traditional slow-cooking method, and its photographs show it ladled from a large copper pot.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2007 | Homestead begins in Brookfield, Vermont, with one French Alpine doe, Jupiter |
| 2009 | Caramel goes to the Fancy Food Show; sales take off |
| 2015 | Herd of 80 goats sold to Ayers Brook Farm; cheese stops; caramel only |
| 2017 | Distributor order of 40,000 jars, about a quarter of a year's output |
| 2018 | Company scales back to a family business with one employee |
| 2022 | Production moves to Butterfly Bakery of Vermont in Barre |
How the caramel is made
The recipe is short. The caramel is goat's milk, sugar and baking soda, and the Vermont Specialty Food Association's member listing puts the base as goat's milk and pure cane sugar. The milk and sugar cook down slowly in copper pots, stirred by hand so the bottom does not scorch, until most of the water is gone and the milk sugars and proteins have browned. That browning is the Maillard reaction, the same chemistry covered in the piece on browning, and it is why a dairy caramel tastes of toasted milk rather than burnt sugar.
According to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, the baking soda does two jobs: it makes the milk less acidic, which speeds the browning, and it helps keep the milk proteins from curdling during the long boil. Goat's milk brings its own character, a faint tang that keeps a sweet sauce from going cloying. The Vermont Specialty Food Association listing describes Fat Toad Farm as one of the first small-scale artisan producers of goat's milk caramel in the United States.
Fat Toad, cajeta and dulce de leche, side by side
All three are milk and sugar cooked down until brown. The differences are the milk, the extras, and who writes the rules. Mexico's agriculture secretariat traces the name cajeta to cajetes, the wooden containers the sweet was once sold in. Mexico protected Cajeta de Celaya as a geographic indication on 29 June 2022, covering Celaya and four neighboring municipalities in Guanajuato. In 2006 Argentina approved a voluntary Premium quality protocol for dulce de leche (Resolution 798/2006), with hard numbers for moisture, protein, fat and bicarbonate. The piece on Argentina's sweet tooth covers where dulce de leche sits in daily life there.
| Fat Toad Farm caramel | Cajeta de Celaya | Argentine dulce de leche | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milk | Vermont goat's milk | Goat's milk; Premium grades goat only, other grades may blend up to 50 percent cow's milk in the November and December low season | Milk or reconstituted milk, with or without added dairy solids or cream |
| Sweetener | Cane sugar | Sugar, with glucose allowed in some grades | Sucrose, partly replaceable by glucose syrup |
| Alkali | Baking soda | Baking soda | Sodium or potassium bicarbonate at 0.04 to 0.06 percent of the formulation |
| Traditional extras | Flavors sold separately; the traditional jar is plain | Optional flavorings under the GI; vanilla and cinnamon in the traditional home recipe | Vanillin only |
| Vessel | Copper pot, hand stirred | Copper pot and pine paddle, 1.5 to 4 hours | Heat at normal or reduced pressure |
| Rule | None; a maker's recipe | Mexican geographic indication, 2022 | Argentine voluntary Premium quality protocol (Res. 798/2006): moisture 30 percent max, protein 5 percent min, fat 6 percent min |
In practice, the Vermont jar sits closer to cajeta than to dulce de leche. It shares cajeta's milk and its tang. Dulce de leche, cooked from cow's milk, has none of that tang. For a tasting, San Ignacio dulce de leche (shop San Ignacio dulce de leche) makes the Argentine side of the comparison.
How to use the jar
It pours thick at room temperature and loosens with a few seconds of warmth. The obvious uses are right: over vanilla ice cream, or on sliced apples and pears. The tang earns it places where a butter caramel would weigh things down, beside a sharp aged cheese or over plain yogurt. A few flakes of salt on top sharpen it, and the finishing salt guide explains which flakes hold their crunch on something wet. Dark chocolate is a natural partner, and the craft chocolate guide covers the bars.
Visitors can ask staff questions in the shop.
Sources & Further Reading
- VTDigger: Making it in Vermont, Fat Toad Farm is keeping caramel simple
- Butterfly Bakery of Vermont: the Fat Toad Farm story
- Vermont Specialty Food Association: Fat Toad Farm member listing
- Diario Oficial de la Federación: Declaration of the Cajeta de Celaya geographic indication, 2022
- SIAP, Mexican Agriculture Secretariat: Cajeta, a traditional Mexican sweet
- InfoLEG: Argentine Resolution 798/2006, dulce de leche Premium quality protocol
- Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 2004)
- The Pantry Dispatch: Caramel, The Complete Guide
