Growing a Feast by Kurt Timmermeister

Author:Kurt Timmermeister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Milk, Cream and Butter

This morning the older cows have all been milked: Dinah, Flora, Andi, Martha and 4 x 4. The last one in line is Alice, still new to the whole experience but much more competent than she was in the first few days. This morning her milk is exceptional: there is no sign of the thick colostrum, and the swelling of her udders has abated.

Although the usual procedure during the milking is to pour the fresh milk directly from the milking can into the bulk tank to cool as soon as the can is full, today I am changing that procedure. We need butter and cream for dinner tomorrow and the best way to capture the heavy cream from the milk is by using a cream separator. The great requirement of the separator, however, is fresh warm milk. Hence, I pour milk from the milking can into two large plastic buckets in the milk room. When I have finished milking the six cows, including the young Alice, I will have fifteen gallons of beautiful fresh warm milk.

The separator is in essence a centrifuge. At its core is a rapidly spinning disk that divides the milk’s components into heavier and lighter parts. Cream is lighter than milk and can be separated by this rapid spinning.

Prior to this invention the only way to capture the cream was to allow the milk to sit for hours until the heavier milk naturally fell to the bottom of the container and the lighter cream rose to the top. Today I could do this by turning off the agitator in the bulk tank. The refrigeration would continue operating but without the paddle stirring the milk and keeping the cream in suspension. By morning the cream would rise to the top, where it could be skimmed. This works adequately when a sophisticated bulk tank is involved, but on a small farm of a hundred years ago it would not have existed.

A few years ago an older man came to my farm and saw the cream separator sitting in my milk room. I knew how it worked and had used it often, but I never really understood its importance. He explained that he had grown up on a farm in rural Michigan in a very remote area. The farm was too isolated to make it possible to truck the milk from the dairy into a processor every day or every couple of days. If they had had to store the milk for an extended amount of time it would have taken the addition of large costly bulk tanks, something they were unable to do.

When the cream separator came along, it changed the nature of his family’s farm. Each morning and evening they would process the milk from their cows, separating the cream and the milk. The milk would go to the pigs, the calves and the farm family to consume. The cream would be chilled, held and then after a few days they would drive it into the nearest town and sell it or use it to make butter that they could sell.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.