Raw Milk and Homemade Dairy

finally got off the waiting list and into the regular rotation for Larga Vista's raw milk!

FYI, buying and/or selling raw milk is illegal in Colorado. It is, however, legal to drink raw milk from your own cow. So I bought a share of Larga Vista for $40 and now I own a piece of all those cows! In order to get milk, I pay for the feed and boarding of my cows. I pick up the milk at a park near my home after work on Tuesdays.

Raw milk is both unhomogenized and unpasturized. All homogenization does is break up the fat molecules in milk so that the cream won't separate to the top and people don't have to shake their milk before they pour it. No one knows what this does to people who drink milk. It does nothing to make milk safer. And I find it really annoying since I WANT to be able to skim the cream off the top. Especially since Larga Vista milk has LOTS of cream in it.

Unpasturized milk from most modern dairies is extremely dangerous and will make you sick, because the cows are raised under horrendous conditions. Larga Vista insists you visit the ranch before they will sell you a share, and their dairy practices are impeccable. Their website www.largavistaranch.com goes into their farming practices. No one does milk better than them in Colorado.

I also pick up a dozen pastured eggs from the same people as part of an "egg share" program where I bought 3 months worth of eggs at once. In this case, the egg share program let Doug and Kim (the Larga Vista farmers) buy enough chickens to replenish their flock (which had been decimated by a fox) and guarantees them sales. On the customer end, I get local, free-range, pastured eggs from chickens raised the way everyone imagines chickens are raised (but almost never are). And the price is comparable to organic eggs in the grocery store.

I brought the eggs home and cracked two of them along with my last grocery store (organic!) egg into a bowl to make myself an omlett. The difference in the yolks was amazing! Even the Whole Foods organic yellow, while the Larga Vista egg was deep orange. Yummy!

As for the milk, when I was on the waiting list, I was able to get a few jars here and there and successfully made yogurt and butter, as well as enjoying the milk plain.

I use a yogurt maker to make yogurt, though there are many techniques for maintaining the temperature that do not require one. It's just simpler for me. I use a freeze-dried yogurt culture. Making yogurt basically involves:
1) Heating the milk to a specific temperature
2) Cooling it back down to a lower specific temperature and stirring in the culture
3) Maintaining the temperature (that's all a yogurt maker does) and waiting for the culture to do it's job. This takes between 4-8 hours depending how tart and firm you like your yogurt.
4) Refrigerating the yogurt
I do not add any dried milk or other thickeners to my yogurt as I want it as pure as I can get it. When I want fruit flavor, I put a small spoon of preservers or jam into the serving I am eating. I don't flavor the whole batch because I enjoy plain yogurt and I also use it as a replacement for sour cream. Honey is also excellent for sweetening yogurt. If any liquid forms on the top of your yogurt, don't stir it in; just drain it off.

There are many good resources out there for making yogurt. It's easy and much better than what you buy in the store. I used the technique described in the book "Urban Homesteading," but most of the methods out there basically describe the same process. Making your own also saves money and reduces waste (all those little plastic cups). I highly recommend it. Now that I have a regular source of good milk again, I'm going to be making all my own yogurt. BTW, this can be done with grocery store milk, if you like.

Making butter is even easier than making yogurt. You CANNOT make it with homogenized whole milk because there is no cream to skim, so if you are getting your milk from the grocery story, you need to buy cream. This pretty much eliminates the cost savings, though you will get a higher quality butter by making your own.

Basically all you need to do is agitate the cream for about 8 minutes until you see the butter separate out. This can be done with a jar, a marble, and a hyperactive child. As I lack a hyperactive child, I use a blender. Once you see the yellow globs form, you drain out the liquid. This liquid is REAL buttermilk and can be used in baking or you can drink it. Then you wash the butter. I put the globs in a small bowl and repeatedly add water, press the butter with the back of a spoon, then drain off the cloudy water. I do this until the water is clear. You're basically washing remnants of the milk out, which will make the butter keep longer. Then refrigerate.

Because homemade butter does not have water or other ingredients whipped in like storebought butter, it will be much harder in the refrigerator than your regular stick of butter. I've heard a butter bell is a great solution to this, and it's on my list of things to buy.

I have READ that all it takes to make cream cheese is to drain yogurt for several hours. This is next on my list of homemade dairy projects to try. Last year my sister and I read how easy it was to make mozarella, but we screwed it up and ended up with farmer's cheese. Hopefully the cream cheese experiment will go better than the mozarella experiment! Now that I understand controlling the temperature of milk better, I am ready to try mozarella, and making Ricotta, again.

Once I am done with these dairy experiments (and I'm confident that I'll eventually get mozarella right) I will be able to produce ALMOST all of my dairy needs in my kitchen with organic milk from local, healthy cows. To me, this is a locavore and urban homesteading ideal. Hard cheeses are the exception, but one day I will tackle them too! So I've made good progress on dairy, and I have a plan to attack my meat, fruit, and vegetable needs. And a vague idea about flour and baked goods. If I can get all but my oils and a few luxeries, I'll be "importing" only the kinds of things people used to before refrigerated trucks ruined food in America: coffee, tea, sugar, some spices. For me, this kind of independence from an untrustworthy and unstable system that feeds us poisoned, low-quality food is worth the work.

And, like the authors of Urban Homesteading stated, there's always more power in being a producer than a consumer.