Pasteurization, Pasteurizaaation (a la Carly Simon)

 One of the few things we still buy from the grocery store is dairy. I'm interested in changing that, but it's a little bit of a hassle at present. We got our milk from Miller Farms in La Costa, TX. It's a bit of a drive, but there are several groups that do local milk coops. Raw milk is legal in Texas and these folks are licensed for sale.

A couple of thoughts on raw milk: many people advocate drinking raw milk as is, unpasteurized. I'm not down with that. Call it paranoia if you like, but a safe milk supply was a huge stride in public health. I'm rather unwilling to give my family unpasteurized milk unless I milked the cow myself. Since that's not happening, we are only using the milk after being pasteurized or cooked in some way.  I'm not a food safety nut, but I have a healthy respect for the germs that used to take people out on a regular basis. Plus, all my epidemiology classes used food borne illness outbreaks as our sample data. It makes you aware.

Making yogurt

We made the most fabulous yogurt from this milk. Admittedly, I usually make our yogurt from 1% milk and this was seriously whole milk, but the yogurt had a cream layer on top like the fancy organic brands. Oui la la. The way I make yogurt requires heating it to close to 180 degrees anyway, so we didn't need to pasteurize it ahead of time.

Cream top yogurt

Rigged double boiler

 With all the kitchen equipment I have (yogurt maker anyone?) you'd think I would have a double boiler but I don't. This is what I've been using to make yogurt - our big cast iron dutch oven with a smaller pot inside and a cookie cutter jammed between the two handles.

 It works. To pasteurize, you either heat the milk to 150 for 30 minutes or 165 for 15 seconds. I can't ever hit the temperature quite right so I overshoot and it ends up at 165 for much longer than 15 seconds. Milk boils at 174 degrees so you have to watch it pretty closely and use a double boiler to help ward off scalding.

After you heat it all the way, you need to cool it down quickly. I put the whole pot in a sink full of ice. Notice that I use a thermometer this whole time. You are aiming to get it down to 40 degrees quickly, but that doesn't usually happen until I stick it in the fridge. Tasty, tasty. And local goodness.