Making LegatoGelato gelato

Making LegatoGelato gelato

Part 1

 

What makes our gelato unique is our goat milk, and all our excellent ingredients, but the milk is the biggest part of the gelato.

 

We own Snap Dragon Dairy ourselves. These are our goats, hand raised on our farm in Fanny Bay. I love my goats and they get awesome care. Making good milk means you start from a brand new baby goat, raise it right, make sure she has had the correct vaccination program, proper nutrition and is bred at the right age. When she is having baby(s) herself, the pre and postnatal care needs to be done right. The new mums join the other does and begin their milking career. We feed the best alfalfa and local hay and source out the best grains. We don’t feed just organic as it is too expensive and the goats won’t eat some of it. We slip in whole organic grains and organic alfalfa pellets where we can.

 

Taking the right care of a herd of 40 goats takes energy and time but they are a very rewarding animal and give back way more than we put in.

 

We milk our goats in a licensed dairy parlour twice a day. Our parlour is inspected routinely and is very clean, the stainless steel equipment just gleams. The milk from the ladies is rapidly chilled in our stainless steel bulk tank. We usually save up for 3 or 4 days and then make some gelato. Throughout the milking and storage of the milk we are careful not to agitate the milk more than necessary – any mixing or frothing begins the breakdown of the fat molecules and we want everything whole and pure.

 

FYI – as a licensed dairy we are required to submit monthly samples of milk for testing at the provincial testing facility. For the last year – EVERY monthly test has come back better than EXCELLENT. For the bacterial testing the inspector stated that a 50 count means we would have to clean and retest, a count of 20 is considered good, a count of 5 is excellent. Our counts are consistently coming out as 1, so better than Excellent! Pat on our own backs for that one – it’s a very high standard to achieve.

 

So a big part of the Legatogelato is ready to go.