A dairy day

When you milk a cow, there are some points where things just ... stack up.

Maggie's milk output is decreasing. This is normal. A cow's lactation peaks when her calf is about a month old, and then starts a gradual decline. A couple months ago, I was routinely getting a gallon a day. Right now her calf Stormy is six months old, and Maggie is also pregnant, so both factors are contributing to a decrease in her milk output. Currently I'm getting between one-half and two-thirds of a gallon per day.

That said, sometimes things just ... stack up.

So the other day, I removed everything from our dairy fridge and sorted it out. I started by skimming all the cream. This is an unscientific process consisting of a soup ladle, which I use to ladle out the cream (which rises to the top).

Here's how much cream I get with a gallon of milk.

It's hard to see the cream line, so Don exaggerated the color for easier viewing.

Fresh milk needs to sit for at least 24 hours for the cream to properly rise. The older the milk, the heavier the cream.

Speaking of which, one of the things I was having trouble with is keeping fresh cream whipped. What I mean is, I'd whip cream into whipped cream, but within a couple of hours it would revert back to liquid form (very frustrating). Apparently commercial whipping cream is the really heavy stuff. So I thought: If I skim the really heavy stuff and whip it, will it stay whipped?

So I whipped some heavy cream...

...and it whipped up beautifully.

I put the whipped cream in the fridge. Sure enough, a couple of hours later it had reverted to a liquid state.

So I did a little research. Apparently whipped cream will stay in its whipped state with the addition of a little cornstarch.

So I mixed cornstarch with sugar...

...and whipped another batch of cream. As before, it whipped beautifully.

And as before, it reverted to a liquid state within a few hours. If anyone knows how to keep fresh cream whipped, I'm all ears.

Anyway, the next project was to make another batch of yogurt. I can't tell you how lovely it is to have homemade yogurt whenever I want! I use a Bulgarian yogurt culture, since it can be recultured over and over again.

I start by heating skim milk to about 180F.

Once it hits that temperature, I let it cool back down to between 106F and 113F, at which point I add the culture (in the small jar on the left).

I mix the culture thoroughly into the milk...

...then pour the milk mixture into the Yogotherm to incubate for about 12 hours.

Once the yogurt is cultivated, I scoop it out of the incubator bucket.

This is where I put aside a small jar of yogurt to culture another future batch.

Then I can sweeten and flavor the yogurt. Normally I'll flavor it with peach puree I canned up last year. (In fact, I can peach puree for the exclusive purpose of flavoring yogurt.)

The next dairy task was to make butter from all the cream. My butter churn holds about half a gallon of cream at a time, and I had two gallons of cream to get through. Thus, four churnings.

Cream needs to be at 60F to churn into butter with any reliability. It's also kinda boring, taking anywhere from 20 (not bad) to 60 (groan) minutes to complete. I've learned to churn at my desk and watch YouTube videos during the process.

Here's the newly made butter, still in the churn jar.

This is the paddle, laid aside in a bowl for the moment.

I pour the butter into a colander to drain the buttermilk (which I don't bother to keep)...

...then into a bowl for washing.

To wash butter, add cold water, squish the butter around, then pour off the cloudy water.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Keep repeating until the water no longer gets cloudy.

Then I weigh the butter, because the weight determines how much salt to add.

This is almost three pounds of butter.

A few days after this long day of dairying, I finally got my cheese cultures in the mail, which I ordered from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. (I've ordered from them for years.)

Starter cultures are used to ripen milk during cheesemaking. It's been so many years since I've made cheese, I hadn't realized things had changed a bit in how the cultures are packaged. It used to be I could order a culture, then reculture it in larger amounts. Now, the cultures come in individual packages, with each package meant to service the two gallons of milk necessary to make two pounds of cheese. Each envelope includes five packets of culture. In other words, five packets of culture would make only five batches of cheese.

Ah, but I'm a cheapskate, you see, so I decided to reculture the culture in larger amounts. Here's how I did it.

I started with mesophilic culture, which is used for (among other varieties) cheddar cheese. (Thermophilic culture is used to make mozzarella and other soft cheeses.)

I filled a pot with skim milk. Honestly, I didn't measure how much milk I put in; I think it was about 1.5 gallons or so. It doesn't matter; the single packet of culture can incubate as much as four gallons of milk, so whatever this quantity was, it was plenty.

I started by gently heating the milk to 180F.

Then I let the milk cool to 72F. When it had achieved this temperature, I sprinkled the culture into the milk, mixing it in quickly (I gather the culture shouldn't be exposed to air for any length of time) and covered it with a lid.

The most daunting task was keep the milk warm (ideally 72F) for the 24 hours or so it needed to culture. What I ended up doing was moving the pot of milk into the living room, not far from the wood stove...

...and smothering it in a pile of thick towels.

This seemed to do the trick, for the entire pot cultured into a very thick – almost gelatinous – mixture.

That's the stage where I am now. My next step (and I'll post photos as I get it done) is to spoon this mesophilic culture into ice cube trays and freeze them. I'll end up with an enormous bag of "culture cubes." When it comes time to make cheddar cheese, I'll pop about two cubes of culture into the milk to ripen it.

Cultivated in this manner, I'll have enough starter culture to last for years. In theory the fresh culture packets expire by next August, but as with the Bulgarian yogurt culture, I plan to reculture the cultures as often as needed.

Don is working on a cheese press for me even as we speak. I ordered some fresh rennet at the same time I ordered the starter cultures, so I'm looking forward to getting back into cheesemaking once again.