WHAT TO DO WITH RAW MILK ONCE IT'S IN YOUR KITCHEN?

hey you guys it's carolyn from homesteading family and i'm here with tilly our family milk cow because today we're gonna be talking about handling your raw milk when it gets to your kitchen so whether you're buying your raw milk from a small dairy or you have your own family milky animal like tilly you're going to want to join us for today's video [Music] all right here we are in the harvest kitchen where we're going to be talking about the different stages of raw milk but before we talk about it i want to stress the importance of working cleanly when working with raw milk when raw milk comes out of a healthy milk animal it is very healthy and very clean the problem comes in after the milk leaves the animal where it can get contaminated if we're not working cleanly so whenever you're working with anything that's going to touch your raw milk make sure it's been well washed in hot soapy water including your hands so that your milk stays good and healthy as long as possible all right now let's talk about the anatomy of raw milk when raw milk comes out of an animal it has a lot of fat in it depending on the type of milk cow and the feed it's been eating our milk cow tilly is a jersey cross cow so she actually gives quite a bit of cream now this milk was milked yesterday so it's only been sitting for about 24 hours and i don't know if you can see it on camera but the cream line comes to about here on the jar that means all of this is cream you can see that this is a lot more cream than what would be considered whole milk at the grocery store which is usually about four percent milk so cream lime milk has a lot more fat in it than a whole milk from the grocery store now when your milk especially cow's milk has been sitting for a long enough time a vast majority of the cream will rise to the top and it will continue rising for about 48 hours and it'll start thickening so you'll end up with a really thick cream at the very top and then a lighter cream at the bottom of the cream line and then pure milk below that now we like to skim our cream off of our milk to make butter and other cream bakes based products like an ice cream or cream cheese or anything good like that um but we do like to leave some fat on the milk for drinking so when we skim our milk after it has sat in the refrigerator for 48 hours we take the top layer of the thickest cream off the thickest cream is going to give you the most butter in return that's because it has a higher butter fat percentage so that top cream that's really thick would be called a thick or a heavy cream then in the middle you have something that's a little closer to what we would consider a half and half and then at the very bottom of your cream line you have something that is called a coffee cream which is going to be a very light cream but it's still cream so when skimming your milk if you're going to make a cream cheese or a butter i really recommend just taking off the top heavy and maybe even the half and half cream and leaving the lighter grade cream in there to simulate kind of that four percent whole milk that's kind of what you're aiming for so that you're still getting that really good hopefully pasture fed cream in the milk that you're drinking of course when you go to drink your skim milk like this is our skimmed milk and it has a cream line now of about here so it is not skim milk or non-fat milk like you would buy at the store this still has cream in it um but it is a skimmed milk again that makes it about like a four percent depending on how much cream you leave in there now that milk is so healthy for you you want to get some of it in your diet and drinking that higher fat content milk really helps to offset the sugars in the milk in your digestive system so it can really help your milk be much healthier and easier for you to digest okay so now let's talk about the different things that you can do with your different milk products so you can with any of your milks whether it's skimmed or it's unskimmed you can of course culture it you can ferment it or you can make it into an even more advanced culture like a cheese so a ferment would be a wild culturing that would be a clabber in milk if you leave raw milk out on the counter and it has not been contaminated by anything bad that could get into it it will actually turn into a very delicious edible product now the first time that i tried clabbering milk i thought it was crazy to sit raw milk out on the counter leave it there for four or five days or even longer and then consider consuming it but when i opened that container and smelled it and it was completely sweet and not bad at all i was completely blown away great grandma genie recalls her mother back in the great depression making cottage cheese from the clabbered milk that was the old-fashioned way of making a lot of cheese products um is by clabbering your milk now clabbered milk can be a very very healthy thing because the healthy bacteria in your milk go takes over and cultures and ferments your milk which means that it's essentially hunting down any bad bacteria that gets to it and eating it and killing it so it can be a very very healthy thing as long as you're working cleanly and you have your clean milk i have a whole video on culturing milk in a way to make it taste i'm sorry clattering milk in a way to make it taste really really good so check that video out now the next thing you can do with your milk is to actually culture it now the difference between fermenting and culturing is maybe kind of a fine line but culturing is generally considered adding a certain strain of bacteria to something in order to ferment it in a certain way that is exactly what you're doing with a hard cheese but it's also what you're doing with a yogurt or a kefir or any of the other cultured milk products now one of the challenges that we have with raw milk when culturing it is that the raw milk has its own bacteria in it and sometimes that bacteria can be strong enough that it will hunt down that other culture even if it's a healthy culture and will kill it um so if you're having problems making a raw milk yogurt or a raw milk kefir it would be the best answer to go ahead and pasteurize your raw milk before you make those products now don't worry you're going to be putting good bacteria back into it by culturing it and enzymes will come out of that culturing process so you will be returning the health benefits back into your milk they'll just be different ones because they'll be different bacteria than what you could get just in the milk itself by just fermenting it or a wild ferment now it's important to think about how you're going to store your milk products especially if you have a milk animal and you're getting as much milk as you might get right now we're getting six gallons a day from our milk cow it's really important to have your storage system set up if you want to be drinking sweet milk or keeping your milk you know in a suspended state until you're ready to use it for other things you really need to keep it in a nice cold refrigerator when kept very clean and in a cold refrigerator raw milk should last for about two weeks while staying sweet after that it's still usable it just becomes sour milk it's going to taste sour but you can use it for wonderful things like pancakes or you know your biscuits all sorts of baking applications really improve by using some of that really good sour milk some people enjoy drinking it in that state personally i'd rather use it for my baked goods at no point during raw milk should you open a jar and have it smell bad if anything ever smells bad or putrid then you know it's time to dump it something probably got contaminated and you're having the wrong kind of culturing going on in your jar where your milk is going bad so you can be sure that if you open a jar and it smells sour but it doesn't smell bad or putrid that you have a nicely soured raw milk raw milk is kind of the backbone of a country homestead kitchen in a lot of ways because you can use it for so many different things you can make so many different products out of it so if you aren't getting raw milk from a local farmer or you don't have your own milk animal i really suggest that you look into the options in your area there are different legalities in every single state some states it's illegal in other states there are ways to get it or there are loopholes for getting it like doing a cow share or herd chair so that you can actually buy into the herd and own a little part of a cow in order to get the milk in other states it's completely legal to buy raw milk directly from a farmer so make sure you know your local ordinances and um find a farmer or a milk cow near you that you can get a hold of and enjoy this amazing wonderful product take care you guys

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 59,660

Keywords: Homesteading, Homesteading Family, Food Preservation, raw milk, milk cow, raw milk benefits, raw milk recipes

Id: NB4WC0eeUzc

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020