We love organic, naturally raised meat!
We have several sources for our amazing pork: Laughing Stock Farms,
 Amris Farms and our favorite, Pierre Kolisch's Juniper Grove Farms.
They are the source for our outstanding prosciutto,
dry-aged at least one year at Three Square.
Chef Jacques Pepin called it "amazing".

It has taken a bit of physical and logistic work, but Juniper Grove

Farms Pork has finally made it to Three Square Grill's kitchen.

    Pierre Kolisch, Juniper Grove's owner, has been making farmstead

goat cheeses in the central Oregon town of Redmond for over 12 years,

and now, with chef David Barber, he is producing  what we feel is the finest

naturally raised pork anywhere, exclusively for Three Square Grill.

    When Three Square Grill opened in 1995, his amazing cheeses found a

home almost immediately, the Fromage Blanc, goat feta and ("the best

goat cheese in the world")  Tumalo tomme have become staples of our

little neighborhood joint.

    The main by-product of cheese making is whey. With the daily milking

of close to 100 goats during the cheese making season, a farm the size

of Pierre's is left with a substantial volume of the nutritious liquid.

      It is obvious that Pierre's decision to raise his own hogs was a

good one. The Red Duroc breed was developed in the northeastern US in

the early 1800's and is famous for it's compact size and flavorful meat.

David selects them at Pierre's, personally takes them out to Carlton

Farms, Oregon's premier custom processor, and then on to Three Square.

The pork is comparable to beautifully marbled prime beef, a style that has been

bred out of the animals by the commercial pork industry, intent on producing the

other white meat.

Juniper Grove pork appears on our menu as : Dry-aged prosciutto, Pork loin chops, grilled with our own

honey smoked bacon and topped with Barb’s homegrown white currants,

carmelized sweet onions and fennel, a well as on Our famous Lexington Carolina

style BBQ sandwich, specialty smoked bacon, ribs, hamhocks, guanciale and much

more.

We believe that we are the only restaurant of this size raising it's own pork, and we

are really excited about this product, and have had an incredible response to it so

far.

Please contact us for more info, or stop by Three Square for a bite.

---

Juniper Breeze

Old World Flavor In the High Desert

Pierre Kolisch steps out to greet his visitor, tall, lank frame comfortable in well-worn jeans, handshake firm, smile slight and shy.

Juniper Grove Farm sits on a small west-facing hillock, five prime acres of Central Oregon perfectly suited to his avocation and vocation.

Kolisch makes and sells genuine farmstead cheese from pure goat's milk. He's refined his business acumen since 1987, experimenting with breeds of goats and sizes of herds, defining the product worthy of his label.

This week, two wheels of Kolisch's Tumalo Tomme are being hefted, sniffed, tasted and graded by experts in Wisconsin in a special competition for independent cheesemakers. He describes his tomme as "firm but creamy; somewhat undiscovered. I'm very high on it...it compares very favorably with the best in Europe."

The name comes from the style of cheese produced in the Savoie in the French Alps. Kolisch appended Tumalo for the hamlet near his farm. He

perfected his processing of the unpasteurized cheese through experiment and adaptation in his dairy’s cellar. There the wheels are aged on pine planks and hand-rubbed regularly with saltwater, partly for texture, partly to stimulate the growth of bacteria throughout the cheese for texture and flavor.

 Nothing is added to the milk or the brine solution; the deep orange color comes naturally from yeasts and bacteria.

"We recognize that this kind of cheese is not typically associated with goat's milk, at least in this country," wrote Kolisch with his entry. "However...we enter them because they are unique and have proved to be an exquisite marriage of our milk and our micro-environment."

Kolisch has a keen interest in perfecting what he calls "world-style" cheeses. For the past six months he has concentrated exclusively on making and marketing them.

He started the dairy alone, did the ground work, built the building, assembled the business and, in 1991, started selling cheese to the public. Several years ago he met and married Jessica, a message therapist. Their son is 4.

"I started very small and had pretty quick growth at the beginning," Kolisch says of his dairy business. While he finds marketing increasingly challenging, he says, "lt pleases me to be more involve in production, in making a new, better cheese."

To accomplish this aim, Kolisch "settled out" his herd to 60-70 goats, dug a new well, retrofitted his milking room to milk 10 at a time on the "pipeline," (a closed system which conveys the milk via vacuum to tanks in the cheese room) and, just this year, has seen full use of his self-designed cellar.

He calls the facility a leap of faith," saying simply he studied the parameters, and built the building."

Kolisch speaks with modesty, but behind his success is two years living in France learning cheesemaking from experts.

Flashback to the young man graduating from Catlin-Gabel School in his native Portland and heading east to take a degree in American Studies from Amherst. He returned to Oregon for a trial law degree from the University of Oregon, practiced in Southern Oregon and Southern California for five years, grew tired of the profession and gave it up.

"I wanted not so much to do cheese-making," Kolisch says, "but I had an idea I wanted to be on a farm. I always had an inclination that way (and) felt cheese making was my metier because if I had 1,000 acres, I certainly couldn't see myself raising corn.

"I didn't want to do that kind of farming. I wanted to be more of a speciality producer."

He looked with interest at the wine industry in 1983, and determined it was "well-established and pretty much quite competitive." So he broadened his view and went to the masters.

Kolisch spent a year in school learning cheese-making before apprenticing himself to three farms for another year, learning the oldworld technique of cheesemaking in caves.

When his visa expired, he returned home and immediately migrated to Central Oregon to buy a five-acre farm.

"My plan was to make cheese. Raising goats was an experiment, but cows milk was in short

supply then and is even shorter now. So, rather than depend on buying bulk, I decided to raise my own."

Kolish grazes his goats on irrigated pasture for six months and feeds them hay. His herd includes five bucks and sixty or so does of several breeds: Toggenburg, Saanen, French Alpine, Anglian Nubian ("excellent milk, very rich") and La Mancha.

With a more efficient dairy, Kolisch says his challenge has become marketing, "the mixture of selling something people will like. I'm trying to find that."

He grows herbs (garlic, savory, thyme, parsley and chive) and flowers (pansies, borage Johnny-Jump-Up and calendula) to enhance the taste of his Fromage blanc, or white cheese, and Coeur, a heart-shaped fresh chevre.

Portland speciality stores such as Nature's Zupan's and Stroheckers are 75 percent of his market. Newport Market in Bend is his Central Oregon outlet.

He does "tastings" several times a year, finding that educating the salespeople helps them tell his story. "They'll pass it along; they're more excited about selling the cheese."

Kolisch uses express mail to sell directly to some customers. He's looking into possible retail and catalog outlets. In short, he doesn't want to leave the farm.

We're completely wedded to (the goats') lifestyles," he says, "but on the other hand, I have complete control over the raw material. It's an extension of

what nature has given us...we're just bringing it to a more interesting state."

Kolisch smiles, slight and shy.

"It also renders a certain kind of cachet, refining what's being produced from our little patch of earth."

He and a visitor take their leave from the goat pens. One last question:

Does he like cheese?

Yes, as it turns out, he does,

To prepare for the interview, he had a cheese sandwich for lunch.