Rosie and Amy at the Expo.
A few weeks ago, Amy sent us her fabulous version of Jim Wallace’s recipe for Lactic Cheese with Truffle Oil. We posted it (click here) with a promise to tell you more about Amy and her cheese making:
I live in Reno, Nevada. Reno is at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. I actually live a bit out of town in a rural area that is 1/2 way between Reno and Lake Tahoe at a higher elevation than Reno and I get a lot more snow than in town.
The farm in winter.
Sunset at the farm.
Forest hiking is minutes from my house and we do a lot of that. It’s much greener than the desert in Las Vegas, which is where I grew up.
Her neighborhood.
I make my living as the Director of Program Management in the advanced development engineering team at Scientific Games. Basically, I am involved in the engineering of slot machines and associated gaming equipment for the casino industry.
With grandbaby.
My joy, outside of work is organic gardening and cooking. I have a full organic garden, 9 raised beds. We grow beets, carrots, parsnips, kale, spinach, romaine, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, onions, peppers (multiple varieties), beans, peas, corn, sage, oregano, chives, parsley, thyme, rosemary, dill and other herbs each year. These do best in our climate. Tomatoes and eggplant are a struggle, so we start them indoors and don’t move out until the last frost.
It made sense to pursue the best ingredients by creating them at home, which is how I began my cheese making journey.
We live in a rural area that permits livestock on small acreage. We are on a one acre parcel. We raise chickens and goats, but I have stopped breeding goats for now. I did active milk production for home use for 8 years.
The barn in summer.
I bred registered Nigerian Dwarf Goats for production and show. I chose this breed due to their small size, ease of handling and high butter fat content of their milk. If kept separate from bucks, the milk from a goat doe is rich and creamy and has no “goaty” flavor. It makes the best lattes imaginable!
Goat milk latte.
We have two goats now, Ellie and Cocoa.
Also – a mini-donkey, Rosie, a few chickens for eggs, two dogs (Great Dane Remi and Vizsla Gracie) and three barn cats – Monkey, Sushi and Sake.
Russ (Amy’s husband) with one of the barn cats.
Rosie working her seasonal job in a live nativity scene.
During my breeding years, I began making cheese and soap with the raw milk. The cheese making was my original goal, but soap became a fun way to use milk that wasn’t premium for the cheese pot or drinking. Last year was my final breeding and milk year, but since I do know how to hand milk, I fill in for other small producers when they need to travel. Its not easy in Reno to find people who can hand milk a goat if you need to go out of town!
Holiday soap making.
I could go on for hours about the bio-security and safety precautions I employ for work with raw milk, but that is probably not your audience. I will only collect milk from does where I am intimately familiar with their herd management practices. My large-animal veterinarian is one such person, and her goat is where I collected all the milk I am using this season. Her doe originally came from my herd and is the daughter of Ellie, my first major production goat who is retired and lives with me as a pet.
With Ellie’s babies.
Goat milk is easy to freeze. Unlike cow milk, the fat molecules are smaller. Goat milk thaws and returns to a great state for drinking and cheese making. It keeps for about six months. So when I have the opportunity to collect milk in exchange for “babysitting” lactating goats, I freeze it for later use. (We have an upright freezer in the garage for garden vegetables, meat my husband hunts and milk from the goats.)
Vanilla Cajeta made from frozen goat milk.
For soap making, goat milk must be frozen when you start, to prevent the lye used for saponification from burning the milk at that step in cold processing of soap. So, the frozen milk is fine for this product. It can be kept longer than the milk I use for cheese as I am not worried about the quality for food consumption or the separation of fats that continues the longer the milk is kept frozen.
At full production with my goats, I was making a lot of cheese and sharing with family and friends. Through websites, books, and trial and error, I taught myself to make cheese, yogurt and kefir and have been guiding others in our area along their journeys.
New England Cheese Making Supply Company was part of my journey from day one. I’ve ordered your cultures, press and molds over the years – your yogurt cultures are the best I’ve ever used. I relied heavily on the books A Cheesemaker’s Journey by Mary Jane Toth initially, but progressed using Jim’s recipes from your website, and 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes: From Cheddar and Brie to Butter and Yogurt by Debra Amrein-Boyes.
We’re honored to see that Amy uses our press!
With the milk I froze late this summer, I’d planned on doing simple herbed chevres for holiday gift giving, but saw Jim’s Lactic Cheese with Truffle Oil and just had to give it a try. I did the inclusion of truffles as the recipe suggested for a modification. It’s so beautiful and creamy, and such a short process time that I am going to do another batch, as the first will go to quickly. I am going to pair it with a small bottle of black truffle oil for a gourmet gift.
This cheese came out wonderfully and the recipe is easy to follow. With about 9 years of cheese making under my belt, I am bit more confident in playing with the recipes and using molds of my choice for my purposes, and changing up additions such as the truffles, etc. This is where it becomes super fun.
Amy’s Lactic Cheese with Truffle Oil
I love to make soap, garden (landscape and vegetables), and my biggest hobby is cooking. That’s how all of this got started. I wanted the freshest ingredients for my cooking. First came the vegetable garden, then chickens, then goats.
A deer in her garden.
