I have known this nursery rhyme since I was tiny. Being the arachnophobic kid I was, however, I never really gave a thought to what "curds and whey" really were - I was much more concerned about the eight legged beastie that came to sit beside her. I always assumed that curds and whey were some gloopy thing that kids back then ate - kind of like oatmeal.
I have since come to realize a few things....spiders are not that frightening, and curds and whey are really kind of cool. The former has taken me many, many years to learn and the latter happened a few weeks back while experimenting in the kitchen.
We have a very young milk cow on our farm, Hazel. She is too young yet to breed and milk, but in preparation for that, I have started doing a little experimentation with milk in all of its many forms.
Milk
Cream
Butter
Butter Milk
Cheese
Yogurt
Whey
Ice Cream
If you would have asked me a few weeks ago to list all the different forms of milk this list would have been much shorter. Milk was always just milk, in my mind. You pick it up in the dairy section of the grocery and then you walk around and get all the other things individually wrapped and packaged. What a weird sort of disconnect.
Both of my parents grew up on farms in South Dakota and milked cows - my dad tells many crazy tails of milking the cow and then simply straining out the dirt before drinking it, and shaking a quart jar with cream in it that would then become butter faster than a wink. I was curious just how much of this might be true and I wanted to experiment a little before I completely committed to the apparent insanity that is milking.
Finding a good source of milk that has not been ultra-pasteurized can be one of the most challenging things, but with a little work, a source was procured and a gallon jug of "milk" obtained. Let me explain something here - milk, in its pure form, will contain a certain amount of butter fat based upon what type of cow it is. This particular milk came from a Jersey which has one of the highest percentages of butter fat. What that means is that given a day of sitting in a cold fridge, the milk and the cream (aka butter fat) start to separate naturally on their own.
My first experiment was the "butter in a quart jar" story that my dad had repeated many times. I pulled all the cream off the top and put it into a quart jar. Then looked up the directions for making butter - one of the first steps is to let it age and warm. This seemed to go against every principle of "good milk technique" but given that it was only 2 cups of cream, I wasn't going to sweat it if it went bad. Actually, one of the recipes said that soured cream actually makes butter quicker than sweet cream. So.....it sat on the counter all day and got warm. After my husband had picked it up several times throughout the day and looked at it and then looked quizzically at me as if to say, "are you sure about this?" I decided to give it a try. Chilled a different quart jar for 30 minutes in the freezer and then poured in the cream and started shaking. This is one of those things that I wish I could slow the reaction down somehow and actually see what is taking place on a molecular level, but it quietly and quickly shifted from cream, to thick cream that sticks to the glass, to whipped cream that barely sloshes from side to side...and then, with 15 more shakes of the jar and as though I had said, "Hocus Pocus!" ....into butter. Bright yellow, beautiful butter.
The butter was in the jar along with a liquid - butter milk. Butter milk is what you get in the production of cream into butter and it went into a different jar to be saved and used in making pancakes the next morning. The butter was an incredible color - many of the recipes said something about adding yellow food coloring if it was too pale, but given that the cows are grass fed, there was clearly enough beta carotene in this butter to make it a lovely yellow color....no artificial anything added. I kneaded it with a fork to "wring out" all the excess buttermilk and then washed it in cold water to rinse any remaining butter milk out of it. A little salt, a little more kneading it with a fork and from 2 cups of cream I obtained half a pound of butter.
The next gallon of milk led to the cheese experiment. We had recently been down to Kalona and were perusing a few new stores when I happened upon a box of do it yourself cheese making equipment. Citric acid, salt and rennet enough for 30 batches of mozzarella cheese. At our house, the mozzarella cheese gets used by the pound, so this sounded like a great place to start.
Here again, it felt like some amount of magic that took place - a gallon of milk mixed with a little citric acid and then heated to 90 degrees. Add a little rennet, which is essentially something that is produced in the stomachs of most baby animals that allows them to make a curd from the milk that they drink. Most of the rennet available today is produced through other means. There are other vegetable/plant sources and some genetically modified bacterias and fungi that have been "built" to make rennet. At any rate, I used the rennet that came with the cheese making supplies, a small amount of which was dissolved in cool water and then added to the warmed milk. Five minutes later, I had a pot full of cheese curd.
This was cut into smaller curds and then stirred and warmed to 110 degrees. Another two minutes of stirring with it off the heat and it was ready to stretch. The curd that is formed is warmed to approximately 135 degrees and then stretched like taffy to lengthen the proteins in the cheese.
Add a little salt and herbs, then shape into a brick .....Hocus Pocus....cheese! The left over whey, which is very high in proteins, gets used when we make bread or pizza crusts and works very well. Milk is very much like the pig - you can use everything but the oink of the pig - there isn't really anything wasted from milk either. Milk has to be one of the most versatile foods. I know there is much discussion about why we, adult people, continue to drink milk from an animal. The only thing that drinks milk typically are babies, but we, as a species, have adapted it in many ways - made it more complex and tasty, made it more solid so that it can be added to recipes and melted, grown cultures in it that help with intestinal health. Milk has evolved with us and when broken down into it component parts of fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and trace minerals, milk really is quite an amazing food. When you think about the fact that an animal, by eating grasses that are completely undigestable for us, turns those grasses into a liquid that can be formed into so many different foods....very cool indeed.
My latest experiment with milk has been to make yogurt which is essentially a very soft cheese. This is perhaps the easiest thing of all. One quart of milk and three tablespoons of plain organic yogurt - mix well and let sit somewhere warm for at least 12 hours. (Mine stayed in a slightly warm oven). Strain off the whey and then flavor with whatever you want - fruit, vanilla, etc. This yogurt, unlike all the ones that you will find in the stores, doesn't have any sugar added so initially will take some getting used to or will necessitate putting some sugar or honey into the mix to sweeten it just a bit. I would love to say that I know how tasty it is, but my husband ate it all before I had a chance to taste any. If only a spider could have frightened him away.
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