In the summer of 2009, after a successful heart surgery my father asked me to help him carry his luggage back to his home in the foothills of the Venezuelan Andes. I stayed six weeks and helped him on his dairy farm while he fully recovered. I woke up at 4 a.m. each day, walked down through lush and beautiful rainforest and helped his local employees turn fresh raw cow’s milk into cheese. Even with all of the hard work, I was having lots of fun making cheese. Still, back in Austin, Texas, my beloved was missing me and employers were wondering when I would be back. I left a well-trained team at my father’s dairy and came back to Texas.

As I got back into my routine in Austin, I began to miss the cheese - both the process of making it as well as the deliciousness and health of it. So, I decided I wanted to start such a business here and began my search for raw milk in Texas. After lots of looking around, I found a wonderful source in Schulenburg, Stryk Farms. Bob Stryk and his family have 60 cows that graze on grass, roam in the sunshine and make incredible raw milk. With enough milk sourced to make a business of cheese, I began doing tests to replicate the taste of my father’s recipe that I love so much. 

His recipe was for a queso freso, but the current FDA-USDA laws require a sixty-day aging process with raw milk, so the whey that would normally drip from a queso fresco gets re-absorbed into the curds of my cheese. Hence, the birth of our creamy Dos Lunas Cheese