Raw Milk Cheese

It’s been a regular cheese factory around here this weekend. It’s also baking season, and I’ve been loving cooking with the pie pumpkins. I finally plugged in the freezer to hold the last of the tomatoes, the green beans and the many loaves of zucchini and pumpkin bread I’ve been making. It’s the perfect thing to do while watching the Vikings!

About a month ago, I was buying eggs at a local dairy farm and asked the young farmer if he ever sells raw milk. He does, and you just have to call ahead. You also have to bring your own containers. I took a 2-gallon thermos and a couple half-gallon pitchers I’d bought for the purpose and run through the sanitizer at work.

A local farmer was just acquitted last week of charges related to selling raw milk. It’s a tricky thing around here and the law says basically that farmers can directly sell raw milk in small quantities from their farm. No bottling and selling in stores. Thursday I called to make sure it was a milk pick-up day and went out to meet Matthew on the farm.

The milk is beautiful and he dipped it with a half-gallon pitcher into my containers. As soon as I got home, I made the 30-minute mozzarella.

I’ve made a lot of mozzarella and it usually works great. The thing I have the hardest time with on all my cheeses is forming the first curds, the ones you cut with a knife before you start the hard-core heating and stretching to make cheese.

After letting the 86-degree milk sit five minutes with the rennet and citric acid, however, this mozz was taking off! It was actually forming beautiful curds as I stirred it, and the whey seemed to fully and clearly separate. That’s the stuff!!

However, once it got going, it just wouldn’t stop. I heated it in the microwave and started folding and stretching it. Basically, it was the right consistency and gorgeous cheese, but then it kept shedding milk. As you can see from this photo, it was leaking (it made me think of poor breast-feeding mothers leaking, actually). I put it in cold water, but it didn’t abate the process. By the end I had something more rubbery, more like string cheese, than the fresh mozz I’m looking for. I still carried through and made a pizza, with whey crust and topped with garden veggies, but something was off there, too. I declared the pizza and mozz an “epic fail,” although really it was quite edible.

Next was creme fraiche. The milk had separated a bit so I could ladle off from the top, the creamier part, and I heated it, added the culture, and left it overnight. In the morning it was a beautiful, silky substance. But the same thing kind of happened. Once the whey was strained off, the “cheese/sour cream” sort of collapsed and kept shedding milky substance. I put it in a container and will just mix it up before using.

Last came my lactic cheese. This is my favorite cheese, similar to the Rondele and Allouette brands in the grocery store. It’s delicious on crackers or bread and you can add herbs or radishes to make it even more tasty.

Again, I experienced the most beautiful curds I’ve ever seen. After time sitting with the rennet and culture, it was a silky,  gelatinous substance. Now I will admit I only let it sit from 3 p.m. until 11 p.m., instead of overnight. But it looked exactly as it should. Then I put it in the butter muslin and left it to drain until morning. So I did in effect switch the time of these two stages (it should drain about 6 hours). But what I found in the morning was more cottage-y cheese, dry curds, and the whey was not clear but milky.

I put the salt and herbs in it and it is fine, but it is not the cheese I’m used to. I need to do a little trouble-shooting to see if the issue is too much rennet or maybe I should “pasteurize” the milk first by heating it on low for a while so it won’t separate so dramatically. Or maybe I should just go back to buying pasteurized milk from the grocery store!

People recommend raw milk because it builds your immunity. I think it’s mostly about nostalgia for when we could eat right off the farm and people’s basic paranoia about what hormones are shot into cows (though this is not an organic dairy farm). The eggs I bought from Matthew were still warm from the chickens sitting on them that morning. There is something to that. Getting one’s milk dipped directly out of a cold, deep metal container in the milking room was a delightful experience. I’m just not sure it’s going to get me the cheese I want!