Dairy foods are largely equated with indulgence. (Deep-fried cheese, anyone?) Over time, they have been alternatively vilified and glorified. The deep-fried cheese probably has something to do with that. Just a thought.
For all of the controversy, the health benefits of live cultures that you get in homemade butter, yogurt, and cheeses are undeniable. If you have incorporated a dairy animal into your backyard farm, you understand the benefits that dairy can provide, particularly when it is safely unpasteurized and cultured.
One of the simplest ways to reap these benefits is, in fact, with butter. Contrary to mainstream belief that has us drinking skim milk, the cream is the best part. It carries fats and vitamins that are essential to gut health, brain function, and the immune system, among other things. And coming from raw milk, none of the proteins that deliver these nutritional giants have been destroyed.
Even if it has been pasteurized, you might be able to find milk in the store that has not been homogenized. That is the process of straining milk through small tubes to break down the fat molecules so that they mix evenly through the milk rather than separating to the top. This separation is key to butter making, and without it you would need to purchase cream as your starter.
Butter from Raw Cow’s Milk
Straight out of the cow, your milk will separate in the fridge and set you on your way to butter making. We sometimes buy our milk straight from the Amish dairy the day it’s milked, and it makes amazing butter. You may have to look around to find your own milk source but as you get into the world of self-sufficiency and backyard farming, you’ll find an amazing community you never knew existed.
Cream itself is useful, but separated into butter and buttermilk, it will stretch much further.
(Photo courtesy of Brannan Sirratt)
OVER THE GARDEN FENCE
You may be able to buy a share of a milk cow, or participate in the dairy Community-Sustained Agriculture (CSA) to source your own raw milk more inexpensively than from a health-food store. If you don’t have room for your own milk cow, the next best thing to do is support a local organic farmer in their endeavors!
And chances are someone in that community will have fresh milk available for you to use in your butter and yogurt making. After the cream rises to the top of your chilled milk, “skim” it off with a spoon. Do this carefully until you start to see a bit of milk in it as well. Culturing this cream—leaving it covered and on the counter for a few hours—will increase the health benefits as well as the flavor of your butter.
It will take about 12 hours for your cream to be ready. It should smell just a bit sour, and be roughly 75°F, or room temperature. How do you know if it’s sour enough but not too much? The nose knows. In all seriousness, it is something you will develop a knack for over time. Fermentation manifests itself in a sour taste and smell, so there will be a bit of a tang to it. Trust your instinct to know if it smells bad and overdone.
Now, your cultured cream is ready to be whipped into shape. Put it into a jar or churner, but make sure it doesn’t take up too much room or it will not agitate properly. Leave the majority of the container empty. And shake.
When the contents feel heavy and the churning feels different—you still aren’t done. But close! The butter will turn yellow and granulated when it’s ready. If you shake or churn much after that, it will wind up very hard in the end.
Butter separates from the buttermilk as it nears completion.
(Photo courtesy of Brannan Sirratt)
Pour the butter into a fine colander, let the buttermilk drain out into another container, and set it aside. This cultured milk has lots of health benefits as well, so you don’t want it to go to waste. Rinse the butter that is left in the colander with cold water until it runs clear, and then move it to a bowl. Salt it to taste, and work the butter around to get the water out. Some buttermilk and water may remain, and that’s okay.
Put your butter in a container, or jazz it up with some herbs, such as chives or rosemary, and garlic first. Back into the fridge it goes, though you can leave it out a bit to get it soft and spreadable.
Butter from Goat’s Milk
If you are making your butter from goat’s milk, you will find that the separation stage is not so simple. Even after a few days, the cream still might not have risen to the top. Goats make incredibly rich milk for their babies, which is good for the baby goats but not so good for the goat-milking, butter-making humans. If you can get your hands on a separator, you can separate the cream right after milking. Separators can be purchased for about $200 to $300 through mail-order supply stores.
If you do manage to get some goat milk cream and culture it, the next step is to heat the cream in a double boiler. As soon as it hits 146°F, cool it to the 50°F to 60°F range by setting the pan in cool water. It’s now ready to be churned, a process that will likely take around half an hour. After churning it to pea-sized granules, pour off the liquid milk that is left to be used elsewhere, and pour in fresh water. Churn a bit more, drain, and refill. Do this a few times until your rinse water is clear.
Now, you can spread your goat butter into a dish, salt it to taste, and knead it with a spatula until you can’t squeeze any more liquid out of it. It should conform into any shape you “knead” it to (Ha!), just don’t forget to keep it in the fridge.
Leave your refrigerated goat milk uncovered until it chills. Warm goat milk will produce condensation on a lid, and that will affect the flavor as it drips back into the milk. Of course, you will want to cover anything else in the fridge so that the milk doesn’t pick up those flavors. (Unless you like garlic goat milk!)
OVER THE GARDEN FENCE
Butter freezes well, so if you are making a large batch and don’t plan to use it all, wrap it in plastic wrap, and then put it in the freezer for use at a later time. Butter will store for about five to nine months, and salted butter will last longer than unsalted butter because the salt acts like a preservative.
Tools You Can Use
At the most basic, all you need to churn butter is a jar big enough for your cream. Shaking the jar can be a family affair, one that even the littlest can enjoy. In fact, you could wrap the jar in towels or bubble wrap and have kids roll it back and forth on the floor until the butter forms.
Kids get a kick out of shaking a jar to make butter, and as a bonus, it gets some of their energy out, too!
(Photo courtesy of Brannan Sirratt)
A churn is not necessary to butter making, but it might make your life a bit easier if you plan to make a lot. Churns have taken many forms over the years. The most interesting might be the rocking chair churn, which no doubt made for some happy mommies as they rocked their babies to sleep without neglecting their butter-making chores. Even today, you can buy electric churns, hand-crank churns, plunger-style, dasher-style, cylinders, and more.
ON A DIFFERENT SCALE
Just experimenting with butter? Put your cream—even store bought—into the blender and let it go. After a few minutes, you can pour the buttermilk out from beneath it, salt and blend a bit more, then rinse under cold water while kneading and squeezing it together. Voilà! Yummy, fast butter that will whet your appetite.
A little creativity goes a long way. You can certainly think outside the box to get your butter made. Among the more intriguing ideas, I find the idea of a gallon paint mixer to be absolutely inspired. If you can get a container to fit inside it, this could be a really efficient and creative way to make butter!
Milk is a somewhat delicate product that can spoil quite easily, especially in the days when there were no refrigerators or preservatives. For that reason, it didn’t take long for people to learn to control the “spoilage” via fermentation and use cultured milk to their advantage. And advantages there are! Not all bacteria are bad bacteria, you see, and some are actually vital to our well-being. Yogurt is an age-old example of this, and surprisingly simple to boot. Buttermilk is also a fermented/cultured milk product.
The difference between cultured products and simply milk-gone-bad is temperature and environment control. Introducing the right bacteria and then keeping it at a favorable temperature turns the sugars in milk (lactose) into acid (lactic acid). As the neutral milk turns into acidic yogurt, the milk-protein casein reacts and thickens it.
Because of this, the ingredients needed to make yogurt are simply milk and a starter. If you have not yet made yogurt or do not have access to someone who has, Dannon Plain is a good starter. Whatever brand you use, be sure it has active live cultures. Be careful to not open it until you are ready to use it. We only want to introduce the good bacteria—not any foreign intruders.
As for the equipment and tools you need to make yogurt, it depends on your method. Because temperature is such a vital factor, you should have a dairy or candy thermometer on hand regardless of the method you choose.
Before fermenting, combine the starter and milk. It doesn’t matter for usefulness if you use whole milk, skim milk, or anything in between. Practically speaking, it would make sense to use the milk left after you skimmed the cream off for butter.
OVER THE GARDEN FENCE
Store-bought yogurt is congealed with pectin, so you probably won’t be used to it being very thin at all. The texture will be a little different. If you prefer thicker yogurt, try adding in a few tablespoons of powdered milk. It should thicken the yogurt without changing your recipe or process at all.
To open up the milk proteins and heat away any unwanted bacteria, strongly consider scalding the milk. This is heating it in a heavy-bottomed pan or double boiler until it reaches 185°F to 195°F, then immediately submerging the pan in cold water to cool the milk down to 120°F to 130°F and no hotter. In effect, this is very similar to high temperature/short time pasteurization processes used by commercial dairies.
Cooled to this temperature, the milk can be combined with your yogurt starter. For 1 gallon of milk, you need 1 cup of yogurt. Mix 1 cup of milk with the starter first, and then slowly stir that mixture into the rest of the milk. At this point, the milk and yogurt blend is called inoculated milk.
Now you have to keep the yogurt at the proper temperature for the next several hours. Too hot, and the bacteria will be killed. Too cold, and it will not ferment properly. There are many ways of accomplishing this:
Slow cooker. Actually, the entire yogurt-making process can happen in the slow cooker. You can heat it to scalding on high, then after cooling and inoculating with the starter, turn it off, unplug it, and cover with a beach towel so that it holds temperature overnight (12 hours).
Thermos/cooler. Pour your inoculated milk into sterilized jars. Cover them, and place them in a cooler of water warmed to 120°F to 130°F. Or for a smaller amount, pour it into a thermos and wrap the thermos in towels. Leave it for several hours. After five or six hours, the yogurt should start to gel.
Sun. If you have a spot where kids or animals will leave it alone, you could set your mixture in a covered glass dish in the sun. Keep an eye on it so that it is left alone and in direct sun the whole time. After five or six hours, it should be ready. But that is a long time to go undisturbed in the sun, and you should be careful on hot days that it doesn’t get too warm.
Oven. Preheat your oven to 100°F, then turn it off. Set your inoculated milk blend in a covered dish and in the warmed stove. Let it sit (with the oven closed) overnight, and you should have yogurt ready for breakfast. A slow cooker can be used as an alternative, or you can set the milk blend over a lit oven pilot light.
However you choose to make yogurt, the most important thing is to maintain temperature control until it has set. Towels are great insulators to help this process.
(Photo courtesy of Brannan Sirratt)
If you want a thicker, Greek-style yogurt, pour it into a cheesecloth or towel to drain off the whey. If the grain is too open in the fabric, it will not strain selectively enough. A simple, thin towel or handkerchief is just what you are looking for. Keep the whey for smoothies and cooking, though—that’s good stuff!
A very basic cheese is made by taking the Greek yogurt method a bit further. Drain for a full 24 hours, and then chill it in the fridge overnight. The texture should firm up so that you can mold it into a ball. Congratulations! You have made labneh.
DEFINITION
Labneh is a soft cheese made from strained yogurt. Sometimes it’s called yogurt cheese or Greek yogurt.
There are so many different kinds of cheeses that it is hardly possible to give you a complete guide for making cheese here. Each type of cheese requires its own chemical reactions, technique, and time frame. It also takes a bit more precision to make cheese than it does to make butter or yogurt. For example, while you can use pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized milk for yogurt, those processes change the structure of milk too much to allow for good flavor or general success. If you must use pasteurized milk, you will have to add calcium chloride to ensure that a good curd forms. Pasteurization neutralizes the calcium in milk too much for it to curd properly. (Doesn’t that tell you something about the benefits of unpasteurized milk in general?) Raw milk is your best bet, though you do need to allow for extra curing time if you are unsure of the possibility of any pathogens in it at all.
Because cheese making is a kind of fermentation, you need to control the bacteria and temperature just as you do for yogurt. This requires a starter as yogurt does. Buttermilk and plain yogurt can work, but depending on the type of cheese you want to make, you might need to purchase one or grow a bacterial starter.
When the milk is acidic, the addition of rennet will change the consistency of the milk so that it becomes a thick gel. Remember the casein reaction when we made yogurt? Rennet will intensify that process even more. Casein, a milk protein, is water soluble. In acid, it is not. Because this transformation causes such thickening, you need to make sure your milk and starter do not thicken before the addition of rennet. Rennet can be purchased at grocery stores or from a cheese-making supply house. Natural rennet comes from rennin, an enzyme in a young animal’s stomach that helps them digest their mother’s milk. In theory, you can extract your own. It might be an interesting undertaking, but I’m thinking a quick stop by the grocery store or a call to a supply house will be just fine in most cases!
Inoculated milk with rennet stirred in should be left overnight, maintaining temperature control much like you do with yogurt. By morning, the consistency should be completely gelled. You are looking for what is called a “clean break.” A finger pressed into it and lifted out should break the solids cleanly. What you have now are curds, and the liquid still in it is whey.
The milk should congeal to the point that it breaks cleanly around your finger.
(Photo courtesy of Brian Boucheron)
If milk has started to turn before you begin the process, the bacterial balance will be damaged and you may not get the chemical reaction you need for a clean break.
Hum the nursery rhyme and pretend you are Miss Muffet, because now the curds and whey must be cut. Each recipe will vary, telling you how to cut or stir the curds. Often, you will slice it with a long knife, making parallel lines until you have cubes of the directed size. Sometimes, you will be directed to simply stir them.
After straining the curds, retain the leftover whey to be used in other capacities.
(Photo courtesy of Brian Boucheron)
Next, the curds must be set. This is achieved by reheating them just a bit—the warmer, the firmer, but not much more than 100°F or you will kill the enzymes—and gently stirring by hand to ensure that it heats thoroughly without burning anything at the bottom. The warming will contract the curds, changing the consistency again.
When the desired consistency is reached, remove them from the heat, and the curds should sink into the whey. Now, they must be separated and salted. Salting the cheese inhibits the bacterial process and helps eliminate the moisture from the cheese. It is at this point that you have cottage cheese, and can reserve some before moving on with the rest of it.
Some cheeses can simply hang in cheesecloth to allow the whey to drip out. They will not be very firm, but they are good to begin with to get accustomed to the process. Others will need to be pressed. For $100 to $200, you can find a cheese press. Or you can fashion one yourself out of PVC pipe, a wooden block, and some other odds and ends. The goal of the press is to remove as much whey from the curds as possible. Firmer cheeses will require more pressure.
Time and pressure will condense your curds into a solid block of cheese.
(Photo courtesy of Brian Boucheron)
After a night hanging or pressed, some cheeses will be ready, and others will need to cure. This is often just a matter of wrapping with gauze “bandages” and leaving in the refrigerator as long as you can stand it, changing the wrapping as it dampens.
With all of that work behind you, the hardest step is the waiting. After a few weeks in the fridge, the outside should be hardened and yellowing. You could eat it now, but remember that cheese gets better with age. Because air causes mold to grow, you have to protect the cheese from drying and molding as it ages. To do this, melt wax over very low heat in a pan large enough for your cheese wheel to roll in it. When the wax is melted, very slowly and carefully roll the cheese in it to coat all sides. Dry (which happens quickly), and do another coat. Repeat until you have a smooth, waxed surface that you cannot see through. This will seal off the cheese as it sharpens, and maybe make it less of a temptation to nibble at!
Making your own butter, yogurt, and cheese is a truly satisfying craft. Not only is it beneficial for your health, but it is like making a gourmet dinner from the garden harvest. There is something very special about bringing all of that work into your kitchen and onto your table—especially if you haven’t been raised on a farm or homestead environment. What once was limited to the supermarket, you have now made with your own hands.
The longer you cure cheese, the better it will be. That is, if you can wait at all.
(Photo courtesy of Brian Boucheron)
Start slow. Blend up some butter, make some slow-cooker yogurt. Try your hand at cottage cheese and some labneh. If you enjoy yourself and the food you are making, then really explore the possibilities. Find recipes, try new things. Herbed butter, kefirs, flavored cheeses. Everything happens one step at a time, and you never know what is possible until you give it a try.
