Granja dos Moinhos

Forty years ago, when he decided he was going to produce chèvre cheese in his home village of Maçussa, Ribatejo, there was no shortage of people who thought Adolfo Henriques was crazy. But he wasn't.
A course at NLEIT (National Laboratory of Engineering and Industrial Technology) gave him the foundation. The rest improved over time. “These guys from an American university came here, to see how I made the artisanal yeast, which they only do in the laboratory. I was asked which university I worked with. 'With the university of life,' I told them”. One of the first customers was the mythical Michel, Olivier's father, who used it in a recipe awarded by “A Capital” magazine in 1986: chèvre breaded with raspberry jam. Many others followed, especially amid the restaurants.
Still, Adolfo did not industrialize production: he continues to make only 100 pieces of cheese a day, old-fashioned, in small installations near his home. This training sociologist is, of course, not a fan of ASAE. “One day, they wanted me to install one of those fly killers. I did it. But for a while, I began to notice that the mold did not form. It took me a long time to realize it was from the device, the ultraviolet lamps sterilized everything.”
But not only cheese is the production of Granja dos Moinhos. Recently, Adolfo also began to make bread from barbela wheat, whose production has been recovering along with his friend João Vieira. The benefits are immense: it is a bread with much less gluten than ordinary wheat, with many more vitamins. Produces at the rate of 50 per day. Those who do not sell and do not eat use to make the manja, a traditional dish of the region, based on bread, potatoes and olive oil, with which he receives friends in his reunions, to accompany sardines or cod in the fire. And what a beautiful afternoon there is.