Meat, milk, and pasteurization..Mooo

Hi everyone!
I'm taking a brief break from straight recipes to tell you a bit about where our food comes from. Over many many years we've been breeding cows for the traits we want. More meat! More milk! No horns! Make them taller! Make them smaller! Make them eat less but gain more! Seem like unreasonable demands?

All of these considerations have gone into what we eat and collect milk from mostly through the watchful eyes of our farmers. Because of these different desirable traits, we have some very different looking cows depending on what their job is. Most people can maybe name one or two breeds of cattle, but I'm super special in that I can probably name over 20 with each one having one or more traits that make them special or different. Yesterday I had the privilege to get to know JW from Queen acres farms and a few of his cows. These ladies are a bunch of Jersey cows which are known for producing milk with more protein and more butter fat. Cool, right?  I am particularly fond of these ladies because their milk can make some of the best ice cream and cheese because they have so much fat and protein in their milk. Below is one of the ladies I spent some time with.

These ladies are some of the prettiest cows on the farm because they are bred to be extra pretty for showing. JW told us about how he tries to breed not only pretty cows, but the prettiest producers, so these ladies can compete with their ugly step-sisters. Its kind of like Miranda Lambert's song, "Only prettier." So, back to the art of cows. Milking cows look like they are starving all the time, but they really are not. They're healthiest when you can see their hip and pin bones (butt bones) sticking out and maybe a rib or two. They should still have a bit of fleshyness to the rib, but not too much because a fat cow won't breed back and won't milk well. This is a bit different for beef cows where they remind me of solid rectangles on posts. They are much blockier and bulkier because we are eating them for meat. Here are examples of both:

MmmmmSteak! Notice this girl is built a bit down-hill and very stocky. Her face is a little shorter and you can see the whites of her eyes, so she's paying attention to what is going on. I would not say this is the most conformationally correct girl, but she's what I saw at the fair so I took her picture.

This girl is much more of what I like to see in conformation in a dairy cow, but I could be wrong since I don't do this for a living. But notice on her you can see her hip bone, her pin bone and the ribs. She also has her udders nice and tight to her body so she will not step on them. She is fairly young as well. Nice straight line across her back! Just one sharp looking cow!

This I pulled from the internet. She is a Holstein cow which are what you normally see at commercial dairies. Look at that udder! This girl can give some serious milk! She is also quite a bit taller than my Jersey girls. Also notice that you can see her pin bones and hip bones but she's sleek and shiny. If a farmer doesn't give his girls adequate groceries, then they do not produce enough milk and therefore he or she makes less money. So it is ALWAYS in the farmer's best interest to do what is right for their livestock!

So from the above pictures you can really see what I mean by BIG difference between what we have on our plates versus what we put in our glasses. Can you eat a dairy cow? Yes. But they're lean and will not have the same marbling as you get from a beef breed. The exception to this is if you raise a dairy steer (fixed boy)  like a beef steer. You won't get as much meat off because they are not bred for that, but you may have a better chance of having nice marbling. Can you milk a beef cow? Yep! Apparently my mother-in-law did this for a while, but decided it was much less hassle to buy milk at the store. In general, beef cattle are not handled as extensively as their dairy cousins because they don't get milked 2-3 times a day. Beef cattle usually only see us when its time for shots, ear tags, weaning and castration, none of which are their favorite activities. Now onto milking!
When I would milk my friends goats we would make sure to wash the teats with warm soapy water (Yes, warm. How would you like somebody feeling you up with ice cold hands and water?!? I thought so!). Rinse them thoroughly, pat dry and then begin milking... by hand. I usually got to do this the coldest and hottest weeks in Missouri. But it was fun so I readily agreed each time. JW was a bit more high tech than that. He had a vacuum driven milker and a disinfecting spray made just for cows to keep the udders clean and sanitary. This is not just for us milk drinkers, it also keeps bacteria out of the udders which can cause problems like mastitis. Here is a picture of one of his girls hooked to the milker.

"What are you looking at? Haven't you seen a cow milked before?" The blue thing in front of her udders is not part of the milking machine, its a waterer that she's standing in front of, don't worry!

She has a milker attached to each teat which leads to a central line for the vacuum and a central line for the milk to go into the stainless container. Once you get the milker on, these girls settled down really quick because it feels good once the pressure has been released down there. I know, I know.. it looks like she's giving it the stink eye, but that's just my photography skills.

After JW filled up our container of milk I took it home to pasteurize. Again, I do this because I want to ensure that anything that might have gotten into the milk during transport, etc. gets killed. If you do not pasteurize milk you run the risk of getting sick from E.coli, Coxiella, and other nasty bacterial infections. When you pasteurize you can do it one of two ways. Low temp:long time (145F for 30 minutes) or High temp:short time (161F for 15 seconds). I tried to do it the low temp long time, but got my milk too warm so we went with high temp short time.
Pasteurization is done best with a double boiler so you don't burn the bottom or scald the bottom of the pan. Since I had 3 gallons of milk, I had to improvize.

Big pot + bigger pot = double boiler!

About 4 inches of water in the biggest pot. I wanted the bottom of my smaller one to touch the water but not to float.

Tada! Pot in a pot! It worked out GREAT!

This is what I originally used as a thermometer. It is a candy thermometer, BUT it kept sliding to the bottom of the pan so I decided to go a bit more high tech...

I jimmy-rigged my meat thermometer which has an alarm on it when it gets to a certain temperature! This way I could make sure the thermometer didn't land on the bottom AND it would tell me when stuff was getting to the right temperature.

Close up of my thermometer. I think I got this at Wal-mart for $25? They are cheap but a total life saver! You can put the lead in your oven and it continuously monitors the temp. This is PERFECT for Thanksgiving! Once it read 161F I waited 15 seconds and then...

Put the small pan in the sink with cold water and ice. I then stirred the milk consistently until it reached ~40F. This took longer than I wanted because my ice melted too quick and my sink kept draining so it was a never ending process of fill sink, stir milk, fill sink, stir milk... SO, my recommendation to you is to buy 2 bags of ice to have ready for this process and it should only take 20 minutes

 After the milk has cooled to 40F, you can then put it in jars, bottles, cleaned out milk jugs, etc. and store in your refrigerator! I was looking on line and it said that milk pasteurized this way can last in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, but I'll probably go through all 3 gallons quicker than that :-)
Hope you've enjoyed this segment and feel free to ask questions! If I don't know, I'll find out. Also if I've put something in here that is not correct, drop me a line and I will fix it!
Happy Eating, or in this case... Happy Drinking!