Little Miss Muffet

"Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey....."

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.

Welcoming Hazel

Our little farm has added a new resident!

Hazel

We were tooling around Kalona collecting our yearly pig supply from an Amish farmer we know, "One-armed Marvin" - as though being an Amish farmer isn't difficult enough already, he does it all with one arm- we asked if he had any connections to someone who might have a heifer calf for sale and he recommended his neighbor whose cow had just dropped the first calf of the season on his dairy farm.

Her crazy calf antics and exuberance in taking the bottle have brightened our days and hearing her high pitched "Moo" from the corner of our barn makes us smile every time. My daughter is mastering the fine art of teaching a calf to lead - I explained that she had better start now while Hazel is still only 85 pounds because when she is several hundred pounds it will be a lot more challenging. Right now they are pretty evenly matched.

Can't say that buying a cow was ever on the radar, but now I find myself plotting and planning three years down the line when we could potentially have milk, butter and cheese all produced here on the farm.

I know the jury is forever out on the whole "raw milk" issue, but if examined logically it makes sense to drink raw milk rather than highly processed milk. Processed milk has had many of the good benefits destroyed in the pasteurization process which, assuming milk is contaminated, is a good thing. The main reason that milk was originally pasteurized was to eliminate most of the "bad bugs" that can live in milk - brucellosis, tuberculosis, listeria, e-coli, etc. But with the advent of testing, culling and vaccinating many of these diseases are becoming much less common. Not to say that it isn't a risk, but in general drinking raw milk is not quite as dangerous as most of the USDA would have a person believe.

Once again, it is because we are maintaining dairy cattle in less than ideal habitats, we force them to eat grain to maximize their milk output with complete disregard for the fact that they are herbivores that were designed to eat grass - eating processed food just isn't in their genetic vocabulary and it leads to health problems that then require even more medications to correct. A healthy cow out on clean pasture eating grass - it is a good bet that the milk she produces will be excellent. Having two parents and four grandparents that all grew up drinking raw milk is also a good indication that it can be done without the threat of instant death from listeriosis.

Eating processed food isn't in our genetic vocabulary either for that matter. We - like most species of animals - were designed to eat things.... and by things, I mean just about anything that our ancestors were able to scrape up. Humans are omnivores - plants and animals. This puts us in the same category as dogs, possums, raccoons, and pigs to name just a few. Yes, that's right....we are made of essentially the same parts and components as those dirty animals, but somehow we have come to the conclusion that if it isn't "sterile" we humans shouldn't be eating it.

The gastrointestinal system was designed to tackle bacteria of all sorts. Our stomach contains acids that are in the pH realm of 1 - that is highly acidic and this allows us to kill off most of the pathogens. Those that aren't killed off there go through to the intestine where the pancreatic enzymes change the pH to a more basic level of 8. All throughout the intestinal system there are ways that the body has worked out the most efficient system of getting nutrients from a food while simultaneously restricting the passage of bacteria and other germs - there are "tight junctions" in the small intestine to keep larger particles (like bacteria) from crossing over, there are lymph nodes that send out the warrior white blood cells when a threat is perceived, there are smooth muscles to help keep things moving through. All-in-all, a very complex system and yet we waste most of it because we insist on eating only "clean" food.

Our systems like to do what they were originally designed to do - it keeps them healthier and happier. There has been some discussion that diseases such as Crohn's disease comes about because the body's immune system has nothing better to do than to attack itself and, in some cases they have found that if they infest people with swine whipworms (an intestinal parasite of pigs) people with Crohn's have gone into remission -the immune system now has something better to work on other than itself. Our gastrointestinal and immune systems were established to handle unclean food and typically working with nature, rather than against it, is a good way to go.

There really is no 5 second rule at our house, nor do we use "anti-bacterial" stuff if we can help it. We are becoming a species that is entirely too clean and then we wonder at the increased incidence of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. All of those are signs of an over active immune system that is out looking for something to attack. Like a bored child, if the immune system doesn't have something constructive to work on, it will cause problems.

Polio is a good example of how being a little "dirty" can pay off. Polio was a disease that would often attack the clean, well kept children...why?....because they could afford to stay "clean". Increased sanitation led to a decrease in natural exposure to polio and then when the infection did occur it was more likely to lead to the paralytic form. The grubby kids in the dirt were more likely to be protected due to small doses of natural exposure.

Now that isn't to say that it doesn't pay to wash food and wash hands, but I don't think it is necessary to make everything sterile. I think about it this way: We are so germaphobic, we use anti-bacterial soap on just about everything these days, but if you read the label and see that it supposedly kills 99.9% of bacteria that leaves 0.1% bacteria behind with a clear field upon which to grow and thrive. And these aren't the weak bugs - these are the tough ones and now they are everywhere! I hate to break it to people, but there are bacteria and fungi everywhere all the time - and they are supposed to be there. They are commensal organisms and, in some ways, protect us from the other "bad" bugs by simply holding their turf and limiting the space upon which the pathogenic organisms can thrive.

I have digressed a long way from the fun and excitement of new baby calf, Hazel, but her residence here on the farm is a starting point from which we can further launch into self sustainability and getting back to a more natural way of doing things. Milk - unpasteurized, unhomoginized , unprocessed. Of course I am putting the cart slightly before the horse on this one - she has to grow up for a few years and then be successfully bred before we will see any milk, but a person can dream. And either way - a calf is a very nice way to start a cow.