Touring a GOAT farm in Door County, Wisconsin (Gelato + BABY goats! 🐐)

Today's adventure is all about goats! Yesterday we spent our first day in Wisconsin's Door County exploring different parks, seeing beautiful Lake Michigan and Bay views, riding a tractor to an island, and attending our first ever fish boil. And for our final adventure in both Door County and Wisconsin, we're going to tour a local goat farm plus try some delicious goat milk foods. One thing we have loved getting to experience lately are some of the amazing small local businesses we come across in our travels like Union Star Cheese and sharing their business and story with you. And today we're here in Sister Bay in Door County to tour Door County Creamery, which is a goat farm that not only raises goats but also makes goat milk gelato, goat cheese, goat milk soap, and has a restaurant with some delicious food items. They offer tours of the farm Wednesday through Fridays, which costs $45 per adult and includes a goat milk gelato tasting, cheese tasting, goat milk soap, getting to hang out with goats, information on how they operate their farm, plus 20% off at their creamery store and restaurant. We're about to head to the farm and we are so excited to learn more about the farm, hang out with goats, and eat some delicious food. So Rachel and Jesse, Jesse is from Door County. If you know nothing about his family, they own JJ's La Puerta. It's a Mexican-American restaurant down by the water, a mile down the road. And then right next to it is the Waterfront Restaurant. That's a fine dining restaurant. He used to travel all over the world stodging. So basically, he would work for free accommodation. Before he did this, he did go to UW-Madison in Wisconsin for culinary arts and then he started his travels. He fell in love with the whole goat scenario in Avignon, France. That's where he would wake up, he'd milk some goats, make some cheese, drink some wine, you know, and then repeat. He kind of fell in love with that. So when he came back to Door County, that's when the Waterfront opened up. So this was over 10 years ago. And then that's where he was executive chef, started cooking there. As I said, he still creates the menu. And then Rachel came into the picture and they fell in love. And three years later, they got married. And he used to always say to her, you know, let's get some goats and make some cheese. And then she kind of finally gave into that. And they started off with their first 11 baby goats from Prairie Fruit Farms in Champaign, Illinois. So we have two breeds on the farm. And that's the Manchas, and that's no ears. She is an example. Froggy here, you'll notice. So a few of them don't have ears. So we don't clip them off. That's just the breed that we have. And then we have Nubians. And Nubians have long, floppy ears that hang straight down. And then if we crossbreed them, we get the little elf ears. So you notice the little elf ears on some of them. So Nubians have a really high fodder fat in their milk. And the Manchas have a really high volume in their milk. Almost as good fodder fat, but not as good as Nubians. So we crossbreed them to get the best fodder fat and the highest volume of milk that we can to make our gelato and our cheese. Tour is starting off strong. We're starting off with goat milk gelato. This is raspberry panna cotta. That raspberry flavor is so fresh and good. And it's incredibly creamy. So the difference between gelato and ice cream. In our goat's milk gelato, there's way, way more milk ratio to cream. So it's less fattening. Whereas in ice cream, there's way more cream to milk ratio. So it's more fattening for you. Now, being that said, there is a little bit more sugar in gelato. So you only need like a little teaspoon to get that full flavor in your mouth. And that is because there's less air whipped into gelato. There's about 25% air whipped into it. So that's why it's so creamy and decadent and rich. These are all our milking dames. There's about 100, a little under 100 dames here. So we have three boys. We had four about a month and a half ago. We lost Pacino. So little Brady is three. And then next to him in the middle, the brown and white with the black mane, that's Capitoa. He's five years old. And there are two purebred Nubians, long floppy ears. And then next to them, the other one that they're petting is Dan. So he has no ears. He's the Mancha. Come the end of September, usually October, tours don't stand this close. It's pretty far away. That musky smell that they put on themselves to attract the dames is there. And they're yelling and the dames are yelling up here. So we know it's time to get them going. And he sections off about 20 to 30 dames in a section. And then he'll let one book in there and leave them in there for two to three days. And then rotate books in and out of different sections for the next two to three weeks. Very quick, very fast process. There was only eight dames that didn't get pregnant this season. Five last year. After learning more about the males, it was time for the best part of the tour. The kids. I could cry right now. This is the cutest thing ever. The best thing in the world is baby goats running at you. We never wanted to leave the adorable baby goats. But next up, it was time to learn how they milk the goats. So this is where we do the milking. We milk the goats twice a day, every single day. Once in the morning and once in the evening. The goats dry out about the end of December, come the beginning of March. They'll dry out completely and then we'll start milking them again when they have babies again come March next season. We have a 200 gallon tank. This usually fills up every one to two days, right about now. And then as I said, the season goes on. It will slowly start to fill up less. So before we let them in, the gate is closed. And then if you look at the white tubes, they're all full of grain. I'm going to push a button over here. The drain will drop into the feeder and then we'll lower the feeder. Then we can let the goats in. So we'll open this gate here and then we'll come in the first goat, Opa, followed by the rest. They come down the line. They should push their head right in here. The next one will come in. The next one will push their head in. The next one so on and so on. And then I'll close the gate until the 16th goat is in. I power wash each udder nice and wet, antibacterial. Goats have two teats. First cows have four. And then these automatically start to suction and I stick them on each teat. Once all of them have been milked and all the cups have fallen off their teats, at this point the teat is opened up. So to prevent any harmful bacteria entering their udder, we use Xanadine. It's like a, so you see all these blue udders that are popping out. And this helps prevent any harmful bacteria into the udders when they get out into the field. And our milk tank fills up every one to two days right now. Jesse will come with the milk truck. They bring it straight to the free range and we'll make cheese and gelato. We pretty much make chèvre three times a week and then gelato as well every day. So we go through all the work but we eat it. The final stop on the tour was a cheese tasting where we tried six different types of cheeses that they make with the goat milk. Chèvre means fresh goat cheese in French. This is like a cream style cheese, great on a bagel. This is one of our biggest sellers around Door County. We also have about 12 other different flavors that we add into the plane. It reminds me of like a mild cheddar. And you can't name a farmhouse brick unless you make it from your own milk from your own farm. You can't buy milk in and make this cheese and name the farmhouse brick. After enjoying the delicious cheese, we unfortunately had to say goodbye to our new goat friends and headed to the creamery to try more delicious food. The tour was amazing and we learned so much about goats, how they make cheese and just about the farm in general. The best part though was when all the baby goats came running at us. That was the cutest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. We did try some samples of cheese and gelato on the tour but it was really hard since we were in such a group setting and trying to listen and learn along the way to describe what we thought of them and what they tasted like. But we just headed back into town just a few minutes away to Door County Creamery which is their actual restaurant to get some lunch items. But one thing that surprises about this place is it's not only a restaurant and they have gelato here, don't worry, but they also have so many things for sale. There's like home decor, there's goat related stuff, they have all their cheeses for sale, they have little knickknacks. It's a very, very cool spot. For lunch, I got the birria burrito. Got two burritos on here. I'm not sure what the deal is with that but I'm happy about it. And it comes with a chile consomme and inside the burrito is braised beef and goat, rice, beans, red pepper, onion, cheddar, and feta. And then this is a cilantro lime cabbage and a radish. I'm not really sure why there's two burritos. Very confused over here. Yeah, but like I said, I'm happy about it. There is so much flavor going on in here. It's just very smoky, spicy, as in like spices and flavors. Oh, there's so much cilantro, beans, rice, all the cheese. You can just see it dripping so much. All the meat juices. This is excellent. And I got the BLT, which is what our tour guide highly recommended. I'm actually not really a tomato person, but I'm gonna give it a shot. But it's normally with a non-flat bread, but I got the gluten-free bread instead. It has bacon, baby tomatoes, arugula, aioli, and a farmhouse brick, which is one of the cheeses that we tried on the tour. They were all so, so, so good. Oh, God, it's a little messy, huh? It's just a tad messy. The smokiness of the bacon with the freshness of the tomato, and then that sauce is so good. And a little bit of kind of like the earthiness of the arugula. It's very, very, oh, and it's falling apart even more now. It's very messy, but it has a ton of flavor. And now for the real reason we came here, the gelato. So on the tour, we had the raspberry panna cotta, but we had to try some other flavors. So I got the cashew caramel crunch. I think it's this one. And the roasted almond fig. Oh, man. So I started with the roasted almond fig. Oh, man. It's so creamy. It's just so creamy. It's so good. There's just a little swirl of, I guess, some kind of roasted almond fig sauce in there with the ice cream. You can really taste like the figginess of it. And it's just kind of like that fall spiciness to it. And you can feel kind of the grit of the fig. There's actual figs in there. Really awesome flavor. I got the coffee toffee and then the cashew caramel crunch. And I just tried the coffee toffee first, and it was so creamy. It's made with goat milk, but you really can't tell. Like it doesn't have like a goaty flavor to it. It's just incredibly just rich and creamy. They were saying the kinds of goats that they have, they have them because they have like really good like butterfat and kind of like a creaminess. You can totally tell when you're eating the goat milk products. Door County Creamery isn't the only spot in town with adorable goats. Just a couple minutes down the road is Al Johnson's Swedish restaurant, which is famous for having goats on the roof. It all started when Wink Larson, a friend of Al Johnson's, gave Al a goat for his birthday named Oscar and put him up on the roof. And now there's always a handful of goats on the roof every day, except for in the winter and in bad weather. And if you're not here and you want to check out the goats, you can watch them on their goat cam. Al Johnson's is a Swedish restaurant. They also have food, but we are so full from our Door County Creamery adventure, but we could not come to Sister Bay and not check out these super cute goats. We are continuing our farm adventures for today and made it to our home tonight, Waseda Farms, which is located in Bailey's Harbor and is a harvest host. We shared a little bit about harvest host last year, but basically it's a yearly service we pay for that allows self-contained RVs to stay at all kinds of places like farms, wineries, museums, golf courses and other businesses for free with the rule that you support the business. We've stayed at an alpaca farm, golf course, farms and a sculpture park and they have all been really fun. But this may be the best view we've ever had at a harvest host. They drove us out to this land that they have across from the farm and we're right on Kangaroo Lake. We have this whole area to hang out. We can get in the lake and swim if we want to. The best part is no one else is here. So we have it all to ourselves. But the farm itself is also really nice. They had goats. So we've now gotten to see goats at three different places today and they had baby cows and they have a store where you can buy local meats, produce and other items. So we grabbed a bunch of items to make for dinner tonight and dinner in a couple nights. But I think for the night, we're just going to hang out here, maybe go for a swim and we're actually leaving Wisconsin tomorrow, which is a bummer because there's so much more we want to do here. So we will be back. But next up, we're headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.