Barrel milk
In the markets and streets of small provincial towns and summer cottages, barrels of milk from a collective or state farm often appear in the summer. On the one hand, this is a good alternative to store-bought milk “from a bag” – after all, it’s real. But it should be treated with caution: on the one hand, there is veterinary control at the state level, on the other hand, there are a lot of cows on the farm; What if one of them got sick? What if they have mastitis? Better not to risk it. In addition, the collective farm produces milk by machine milking, and the care of animals often leaves much to be desired. Therefore, there is no choice, there is only one way out – to boil such milk.
Boiling rules
When in doubt about the quality and safety of milk, just boil it. How to do it correctly?
1. Boil in a saucepan – stainless steel or enamel. The main thing is that it must be clean so that the milk does not curdle. If you are unsure if the dishes are clean, you can rinse them with a mild solution of regular baking soda.
2. It makes no sense to bring milk to a boil. It is enough to heat it until it starts to rise – and immediately remove it from the heat: this way you can preserve both the taste and most of the useful qualities of milk.
Cow’s milk: taste and color
How to tell good milk from bad milk?
1. Rustic cow’s milk should be opaque, saturated white, sometimes even “creamy” color, because its fat content is quite high – from 3 to 6%.
If the milk you bought is thin, watery, “cyanotic” in color, it means that it was diluted with water. Of course, you shouldn’t buy such milk next time. To determine whether milk has been diluted or not, you can do this: drop it into a glass of clean water: a drop of good milk will gently descend to the bottom of the glass and will not dissolve immediately.
2. In good milk, after a while (after 5-8 hours), thick, heavy cream forms on top. A hostess selling a little standing, and not just milked milk, can either stir them again in the milk, or remove them. In the first case, after a while, the cream will again float to the surface in an even dense layer, in the second – there will be very little or no cream at all.
3. Good milk should smell like fresh milk. It cannot smell sour. And most importantly, milk should not smell like manure. The only exception will be freshly milked milk: it sometimes has a light, barely perceptible smell of the barn, which, however, very quickly disappears.
4. Good milk should turn sour – turn into sour milk. This is totally normal. Lactic acid bacteria contained in real milk are responsible for this process.
If you want to speed up the souring process, put the milk in a warm place for four hours, after putting a crust of black bread in it or stirring a spoonful of sour cream, kefir or natural yogurt in it.
If, on the contrary, you want the milk to stay sour longer, store it in the refrigerator. Spring and summer milk does not sour during the day, autumn () is stored longer – it does not deteriorate within three to four days.
Boiled milk can be stored in a cold place for a whole week.
Goat milk
Goat milk is very, well, very, very healthy. Everyone knows that. But not everyone likes goat milk. The culprit is a specific smell and taste. It is given by volatile fatty acids secreted by the sebaceous glands of the goat udder. They get into milk, as a rule, during milking. If the goats are kept clean and the udders are thoroughly washed with them before each milking, milk practically does not have a pungent smell and specific taste. When well cared for, milk has a minimal goat smell and tastes almost identical to cow’s milk.
The smell and taste of milk is influenced not only by the cleanliness and neatness of the hostess, but also by what the goats eat. In Crimea, for example, goats are often grazed on mountain slopes overgrown with lavender – they produce surprisingly sweet milk with a very pleasant aroma. And there are breeds of goats that give milk without any odor at all, almost no different in taste from cow milk.
So the lack of smell is not a reason to accuse the hostess of deceiving you by passing off a cheaper cow for an expensive goat. The real “origin” of the product in this case will give out only the aftertaste, which does not appear immediately. If you are still in doubt, goat or cow milk is in front of you, pay attention to its color. Goat milk has almost no yellowish creamy hue, and the cream never floats to the surface, remaining distributed throughout the volume.