My recent new learning has been around getting more educated around goat milk. Vanilla Bean has been nursing the baby goats and I have had it easy around milking duties for the morning and evening chores.
Lately I have started weaning the babies off and have had to focus on my own learning around milking a goat. So this process started a while back when my neighbor, who also owns goats, taught my 10-year-old daughter how to milk her goats. So now my daughter taught me how to milk a goat, which I might add I learned fairly quickly.
So that’s the first problem, but the second question you have to ask yourself is now what do you do with the milk. This answer to that question aligned with my birthday present. I was excited to receive a ice cream maker for my birthday. I was super excited to get started. We rushed out to the barn, milked Vanilla Bean, and headed back to the house to get started.
The very first recipe we tried was a honey vanilla recipe that called for egg yolks, milk, honey and vanilla. It did not call for heating up the liquid nor did the recipe actually call for sugar. So I got the batch started and midway through tasted it and it really was missing the sweetness, so then I added the sugar midway through. This process generated, in my opinion, pretty good flavoring but I did not like the consistency as a result of putting the ingredients in in the middle of the process. I also wondered if putting the fluid in the machine without heating it up had any impact.
So we were eager to milk vanilla Bean the next day to get more milk to try a different recipe. This time we heated everything up and the new recipe did not call for egg yolks but it called for starch. Looking online everybody talked about egg yolks in their ice cream and how it makes it creamy so at the last minute I decided to add several egg yolks. Our feelings on that ice cream is it was creamy and more of the consistency we like, however, you could taste the starch pretty strong.
So the adventure continues to find the perfect mixture to create an amazing vanilla ice cream.
Chick with a Whistle Farms 