Milk is amazing stuff. Full of protein as high in quality as any meat, and laden with delicious cream and sweet milk sugars, formulated by Great Nature herself to be a perfect food. Fresh raw milk, the kind straight from a healthy cow or goat, is a true "super food", incomparably better than the stuff you get in a carton or plastic jug, from the super market .
Fresh milk straight out of the cow, is warm, sweet and creamy, effervescently alive, it comes with it's full compliment of enzymes in tact, to help digest it, plus it is full of beneficial bacteria that protect it, from pathogenic invaders, like a kind of "mini army". If you pour fresh milk, the top of the milk glistens with golden sparkles of cream, when you pour it, the surface literally jumps with energy...bing, bing, bing. The cream naturally swirls on the top in delicious little creamy curls, yum. One sip, and you are hooked.
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| Add a milk cow or goat to your farm! |
Processed commercial milk gets really beat up, long before it gets onto our table. As soon as it leaves the cow, it begins a long journey. First it is pumped from the cow through long lengths of pipe, swirled through an in-line filtering system, on its way into huge storage tanks, where it is cooled and agitated along with the all the other milk, from multiple cows at a big dairy.
There it awaits pic-up by the creamery truck. When the truck arrives the milk is pumped into the creamery tanker, through yet another set of pipes. On its journey to the creamery, it is sloshed along in the truck, then pumped out of the truck once more into an automated creamery system. (To learn about how commercial milk gets to the creamery click on the link below.
After being tested for purity, the milk is pasteurized in the creamery; a process, designed to kill any bacterial contamination it may have picked up from being exposed to so many surfaces during all that pumping, mixing with other milks, lying in bulk tank storage, & sloshing around in the tanker truck transit (one does wonder how how thoroughly all those pipes, pumps and various tanks are cleaned, personally, I think about the potential human error factor here). This process is quite important to commercial milk production profits, because it extends the sell-able shelf life of commercial milk, well beyond that of natural raw milk, which would sour, rather quickly, after all that contamination. Really, pasteurization is all about making money.
During pasteurization milk is cooked at very high temperatures, which effect it in many ways. Cooking hardens the milk on a molecular level, it gets chalky, looses it's effervescence, high heat destroys its enzymes and kills any bacteria it may contain, beneficial and pathogenic alike.
After pasteurization the lifeless white fluid is pumped through a series of pipes again, centrifuged at high speeds so the cream separates out from the skim milk, from there the skim and cream are piped some more, finally, the skim and cream are mixed back and beaten together under incredible pressure to homogenize the milk so that is has a uniform texture.
Homogenization changes milk structure, in this unnatural process, the fat globules in the milk, get coated on the outside with protein, this is done to make milk texture "look" better and to give it a smooth "mouth feel". Coating the fat molecules with protein allows the cream globules to stick to, instead of repel, the watery part of the milk and thereby stay emulsified in suspension, instead of floating to the milk surface, in a thick layer, as cream naturally does.
The recombined cream/milk it is then pumped through even another set of pipes, cooled and then its filled into cartons and plastic jugs, which are jostled down conveyor belts, boxed, stacked and tossed onto trucks, bounced down the road for miles, unloaded, put into a grocery store and finally put on the shelf for the milk consumer to buy. We put it in a cart, pay for it, haul it home to our houses and put it in the 'fridge, so we can have it on our coffee and cereal come morning. After all those temperature changes and all the pumping, bumping, whirling, swirling, whipping, cooking, killing & cooling, is it any wonder that commercial modern milk is tasteless, flat and chalky, by the time we drink it, cooked and altered molecularly, as it has been, to the point that it sometimes makes our stomach hurt after drinking it?
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| Curds and whey, home made cheese in the making. |
What is milk anyway? What is it made of, how does it become cheese, yogurt or kefir? Why does it change from a liquid into a solid?
Milk is composed of water and "milk solids". While we all know what water is; what are milk solids? Milk solids consist of two kinds of protein, known as casein and albumin, plus of course, fat in the form of cream and also milk sugars or lactose, along with various enzymes and micro nutrients.
A good source of calcium, casein is what makes milk white, it is a flexible protein that becomes harder and tougher with heat. Casein is the main component of your average cheeses, like cheddar, cottage cheese, mozzarella, Monterrey Jack etc. the word "casein" is where the name "Cheese" comes from. Albumin on the other hand, is the same protein as is found in egg whites, which also turns white and toughens, but only a little, with heat, it is the main component of whey cheeses like ricotta.
Milk becomes solid when it coagulates, this can happen in various ways, through enzymatic action, by acidification of the milk, or a combination of both. Most cheeses are coagulated by rennet, an enzyme which occurs naturally in the stomach of all mammals, Rennet can also be synthesized from some mushrooms. Other enzymes found in sap of many plants also coagulate milk, these saps are usually thick and white, like in "milk weed" or "milk thistle" or even the fig. Adding these enzymes to milk will cause it to coagulate. Another way to coagulate milk is with acid, add enough vinegar or lemon juice even citric acid will coagulate milk very quickly. The beneficial bacteria in raw milk produce lactic acid, given the right temperature and enough time the lactic acid they put off will also coagulate milk. Cheese makers the world round have learned to combine various enzymes and acids to create the whole range of different tasting cheeses.
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| A "broken" milk coagulation, see the yellowish whey in the break? |
From coagulated milk we get both "curds" and "whey". In coagulated milk, separation between the watery part of the milk and the milk solids happens easily. When the solid jell of the coagulation is "broken", the casein proteins naturally draw together with most of the fats, forming clumps which we call "curd", they are isolated into lumps, because where ever the coagulant is "broken" the albumin proteins readily precipitate out, into a watery solution, taking along with them most of the milk sugars, this forms a clear yellowish liquid called "whey", the "whey" simply leaves the "curd" behind. Little Miss Muffet of nursery rhyme fame, like many children of by gone eras, ate a combination of curds and whey, a very tasty (especially with a little honey), nutritious snack. It was something mothers gave their children, while they were in the process of making their family's weekly staple: farmstead cheese made from RAW MILK they got from their own cow.
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| Little Miss Muffet |
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| Louisa Miller McCarty, my Great grandmother, Victorian 'Lady" & a graduate of Vassar College. |
Let us recoup. Raw Milk is a quality food. Delicious, healthy, and nutritious if handled correctly. It was an everyday staple of early Americans, and it's unregulated private use is part of our American heritage.
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| Feeding the calves the extra milk. |
