You may have seen that we decided to go car-free recently. If you don’t absolutely need a car, we can’t recommend it enough! While we love the city, we still occasionally want get out of the city and enjoy all of the amazing local adventures that are just a short drive away from San Francisco, so we’ve been using Audi on Demand for our local weekend exploring.
We’ve always wanted to visit one of Italy’s famous water buffalo farms (where they make buffalo mozzarella), but have yet to have the chance. Did you know that there are two water buffalo farms in Northern California? You may have seen Double 8 Dairy’s gelato at Bi-Rite or their cheeses at local restaurants like The French Laundry, Quince, and SPQR. It’s one of our favorite local products, so we decided to head north to meet the amazing animals who make it. We ordered our Audi S5 from Audi on Demand and our beautiful car showed up on our doorstep ten minutes early.
Scribe Winery’s Andrew Mariani told us that some of his favorite things he had eaten in Sonoma were the tamales at El Molino Central, which has been on our list of restaurants to try, so we decided to head there for a quick brunch. We’d highly recommend visiting, and we can’t wait to go back next time we’re in Sonoma!
After brunch, we met our friend Kelly at Double 8 Dairy water buffalo farm where we had a tour of the property. Owner Andrew Zlot is a buffalo farmer out of passion. The property and farm was previously owned by the Catholic Church, and they actually made butter on the property before. We learned that butter making isn’t very profitable (it takes an enormous amount of milk for a very small yield), so they eventually closed the dairy.
While Italy is famous for its mozzarella di bufala (buffalo mozzarella), we learned that water buffalo are actually from southeast Asia. The water buffalo at Double 8 Dairy are originated from a flock that was brought to Florida years ago. Water buffalo actually produce 4-5 times less milk than a jersey cow, but it’s much higher quality milk. If you use it to make cheese or gelato, you don’t need to add cream because the milk fat content of buffalo milk is naturally so high.
Double 8 Dairy is known for their gelato, but they are currently focusing on making cheese for restaurants – mainly mozzarella and ricotta. They’re getting a new machine this summer from Napoli to make burrata, which is mozzarella filled with cream and stracciatella inside, and we can’t wait to taste that! If you’re interested in experiencing the buffalo first hand, we’d recommend joining a tour at Double 8 Dairy here.
After our tour we needed a little snack, so we headed to Nick’s Cove (they also serve Double 8 Dairy gelato), which is just a short drive down the road to Tomales Bay. Insider Tip: sit out on the dock and order your food from the boat house. If you’re there on a weekend, you have to place your order inside, but you can still walk it out to the boat house on a tray. It’s marvelous! We ordered fish and chips that we snacked on while watching Hog Island pull in their oysters and boats sailing by.
We were a little sad to see the Audi S5 go at the end of the day, but we’re so glad it’s always available to schedule anytime we’re in the mood for a road trip. We were actually the first people to drive this Audi S5, and between the gorgeous white color, the powerful engine, and luxurious interior, it would be one of our top picks for a another weekend trip.
Thank you to Audi on Demand for sponsoring this post.
SaveSave