Real Milk
There are two brands of organic milk commonly available in supermarkets here in Portland -- Horizon and Organic Valley. Horizon is a mega-dairy based in the Midwest, and its products are usually ultrapasteurized, which creates a cooked taste I don’t like.
Organic Valley is also a national concern, but it uses local dairies -- in Portland’s case, dairies in Washington state. The product I’m in love with is non-homogenized milk. It has a (very) thick layer of cream at the top.
I don't need all that cream, so I use a demitasse spoon to pull as much of the cream as I can out of the 1/2-gallon bottle, which is plastic and has a screw top. I put the cream in a jar and keep it in the freezer, adding more cream as I buy more milk.
When the jar gets full, I make butter using my food processor. Basically, I dump the cream in, add some water, and process. It takes no time at all (less than a minute), because there’s hardly any liquid in it. In fact, I have to add the water to make the mixture viscous enough to churn. There’s a Web page (link to webexhibits.org/butter/doityourself.html) that describes the general process, although it takes far less time to make butter with this concentrated cream than with the whipping cream used in the recipe there.
The result is like Plugra, or European-style butter. Because it has more fat and less water than conventional butter, it makes superior baked goods. And of course it tastes great. I divide the butter into 1/2-cup portions and freeze them.
Anyway, the remaining milk must still have some fat in it, because it tastes rich even after it's skimmed, it tastes like the milk you get in Ireland, very creamy and fresh.
I’ve bought it at Zupan’s and New Seasons, but the folks at New Seasons must make a point of shaking the bottles, because the one I bought there didn’t have the layer of cream.
If you don’t want to mess with the non-homogenized milk, Organic Valley sells homogenized milk with various fat contents in gallon jugs. Also, Alpenrose cows aren’t treated with BGH/BST, so you can buy that brand. Safeway has recently decided to ban BST from the milk that goes into its Lucerne dairy products. And Trader Joe’s has a pretty good organic milk that’s not ultrapasteurized, as well as conventional milk that is BGH-free.
I was fine with the Trader Joe's milk until I discovered the superior taste of the Organic Valley non-homo milk. Without a second thought, I jilted TJ's for my new love, and it's been a honeymoon ever since.
There was a time when I didn't work evenings. When I could come home and cook. I made everything from scratch. Cooking was easy and ideas were fresh (like the produce) and everything tasted good. My daughter Maggie was still living at home and her sister Lyza was in town, as was my mother, Pearl. I started with the shorthand food diaries I had kept in the late 1990s. Then I kept finding things to say about food.
1 comment:
Butter in a Cuisinart what a concept! I haven't seen top cream since England! Here and around all I have is Albertson's (now going) and Safeway to shop at. I'm not sure either have any organic milk with top cream. (By the by, in England my buddy who got the milk delivered to his flat like to use the cream at top for his coffee and the rest for his cereal. He had to fight the local cats for the bottle because they were the old glass bottles with a paper plug. The cats liked to pop the plug and slurp up the cream! It was a never ending battle. I just wish I could have gotten him a milk box like we used to have in Minnesota for our milk. The milk did freeze in winter in England and yet milk boxes were not common out in East Anglia).
Fran's Brother Mike.
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