At 6:30 in the morning three times a week, Benoît de Korsak drives his biodiesel truck down the windy, straw-colored hills around Bodega, a small town in northern California just a few miles east of the Pacific Ocean, to pick up 80 gallons of fresh milk from a nearby dairy. Bianchi’s Dairy raises only pasture-fed Jersey cows—lean brown cows that somehow remind me of goats—and produce what in Benoît’s opinion is the best-tasting milk. He brings the milk back to a small dairy facility shared with a cheesemaker, where he and his brother, David, make small batches of artisanal yogurt that they package in charmingly old-fashioned ceramic cups.
“We wanted to do everything locally and make a product that would be representative of this land,” says Benoît. He and David, who are from the French alpine region of Savoie, experimented with different types of milk and recipes before settling on their current formula. “We found that when we were using 100% Jersey milk, the taste was so much better. Since our plain yogurt is just milk and cultures, the milk we use makes a big difference,” says Benoît.
