SOQUEL — Mary Beth Magee, once a new York chef, found a couple of kids in the Soquel Hills after she moved here in 1985 to raise a family.

She was enjoying fresh eggs and milk from the farm down the street when, one day, the farmer said she was looking to downsize. she sent Magee home with a goat — and a recipe for fresh chevre.

Because goats are herding animals, Magee brought home another and soon was churning more cheese than she could use.

“People who don’t like goat cheese like my goat cheese,” she said. “I’ve had goat milk that’s pretty goaty and just not as sweet.”

For now, only her neighbors and family enjoy Magee’s raw-milk chevre, but the cheesemaker is flirting with the idea of bringing it to the marketplace.

She couldn’t have picked a better time: California goat cheese is having its heyday now that it’s transitioned from offbeat salad topping to an everyday cheese, thanks to the work of a few trail-blazing California women in the 1970s whose stories started much like Magee’s own.

Magee’s early encounters with goat cheese were in new York in the 1980s. she was working in the first restaurant of Thomas Keller, who has become America’s most celebrated chef. He was using goat cheeses imported from France.

“On payday he’d hand you an envelope and shake your hand and thank you, and he’d come out with us and go dancing,” Magee remembers. “But in the kitchen everything was very precise, and as you can see in his food today, everything is followed to a T.”

She followed orders as a budding young chef, but today in her own kitchen, Magee taps her intuition. she rarely measures ingredients, she said, and her philosophy with cheesemaking is the same.

“You can kind of play with your recipe to create your specific cheese,” she said. “I get an idea from the books, but if I want something with little holes, buttery and a little soft that doesn’t have to age long, I’ll just add certain amounts of rennet and maybe raise my temperature.”

Following in the footsteps of goat cheese pioneer Laura Chenel, Magee adds cultures from France to the raw goat milk from her backyard, helping the cheese achieve specific flavors — buttery bries, tart goudas, etc. Her family eats goat ricotta woven into lasagna and goat Parmesan sprinkled over salads or crackers. Her brother will get a two-pound wheel for Christmas, she said.

Her backyard goat milk is sweet enough that in a blind taste-test, her kids — the two human ones — can’t tell it apart from organic cow’s milk. she credits this in part to her lop-eared, Roman-nosed breed of goats, Nubians, which give a milk high in butterfat. Her cheese’s flavor also comes from the animals’ diet: alfalfa, organic goat pellets and whatever they can forage from the family’s five acres.

“The milk in cheese is akin to the flavors that grapes carry from the ground,” said Lynne Devereux, founding president of the California Artisan Cheese Guild, referring to what is known as terroir. “You can tell if the goats are grazing on a field of onions. you can taste the variation from spring to fall.”

The goats at Harley Farms in Pescadero are kept away from grazing on the goat dairy’s edible flowers, but many say the flora still contribute to the flavor of the cheeses. Since 1992, owner Dee Harley has packaged her cheeses with borage, pineapple sage, cornflower and other edible flora, all grown on the farm.

But goat cheese is also sweeter because of what the makers don’t add.

“Parmesan recipes usually call for different additives,” Magee said. “They’re supposed to make up for the fact that you’re using pasteurized milk.”

Lipids and calcium chloride in most commercial brands of Parmesan give the hard cheese its tanginess. Magee’s raw-milk Parmesan has none.

Domestic goat cheese started to show up in the U.S. in the 1970s, recent enough that many of the California pioneers still threw their hats into the ring two weeks ago at the 27th annual American Cheese Society competition.

“When we first started, we’d do demonstrations at the store and people either started gagging or backing up,” said Jennifer Bice, owner and head cheesemaker at Redwood Hill Farm, which took home a blue ribbon from the competition for one of its goat-milk cheddars. “Now when we do demonstrations, people say, oh, I read about this.’ to see that change in your own lifetime is really something.”

Her parents started the Sonoma goat dairy in 1968, around the start of the back-to-the-land movement. But they didn’t intend to be at the forefront of a revolution — their kids just really liked 4-H.

The family sold raw milk in bottles in the ’60s, but the dairy fell to the wayside until Bice resurrected it in 1978 with her late husband. The bottles came back, then yogurt, then goat-milk cheeses. But the audience was skeptical.

At the same time, another Sonoma producer, Laura Chenel, was selling her early attempts at goat cheese to Alice Waters for a new specialty dinner item at Waters’ white-tablecloth restaurant, Chez Panisse.

“Until I went to France, I thought she invented the warm goat cheese salad,” Bice said, laughing.

BEYOND THE CHEESE PLATE’

Just as in the cheesemaker’s 4-H days, the goats at Redwood Hill Farm are still shown as registered purebreds. Bice can see them grazing from her home on the farm, where she drinks her coffee with goat milk and honey — a blend she can’t really find when she eats out. It’s a testament, perhaps, that despite the industry’s growth, there’s still a long way to go.

But stories that start out like Magee’s are popping up everywhere, like at Rainbeau Ridge Farm just 40 miles outside new York City. Lisa Schwartz — now the farm’s owner, herdswoman and cheesemaker — had no farming experience in 2002 when she and her husband bought a pair of Alpines. But their Chevrelait and Meridian goat cheeses this year took first and second place in the “fresh hand-ladelled” category of the American Cheese Society competition.

“Goat cheese is an ingredient, beyond the cheese plate,” Schwartz said. “It’s not just milk in the form of cheese, passed off as something gourmet. It’s really a high-quality product. I think chefs really understand goat cheese.”

The Schwartzes published a book last fall, “Over the Rainbeau” [Rainbeau Ridge; 272 pages; $34.95], that highlights goat cheese as the main ingredient in more than 60 recipes, including cheesecakes and dips.

Magee and others see goat cheese as a healthy cheese.

“The other day I wasn’t in the mood to cook, and I thought I could make bean and cheese burritos, because I know a lot of families who will make them for their kids,” Magee said, laughing.

She had tortillas in her pantry, and she went to the store for a can of refried beans. But she couldn’t do it. she needs more substance in her meals, she said.

Almost always lower in calories, cholesterol and fat, goat-milk cheeses are being touted as a cheese option that’s not only more “farm fresh” than cow cheeses, but healthier, too. Goat milk is the closest to human milk — save for donkey milk, not yet sold in stores — so it’s easier on the digestive system and often offered to colicky infants or those with lactose intolerance.

Now that her son and daughter, 8 and 10, are a bit older, Magee is tip-toeing back into the food business. she recently lent her cheesemaking expertise to the Santa Cruz County chapter of the American Red Cross for the nonprofit’s lecture series on sustainability, and she’s considered working with Claraville Farm, which had a raw-milk facility in Santa Cruz for 10 years before moving just outside Hollister in 2007. The dairy doesn’t have goat milk or goat cheeses — yet.

“It’s a lot of work,” Magee said, “but it’s definitely my dream.”