marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Milk
For anybody but a Swiss it might seem odd, how picky I am when it comes to milk.
For 7 years, ever since moving to the US, I have been on a quest, trying to find a milk which I can and like to drink without repulsion or my body revolting. Milk has been part of my life since childhood and I would drink easily 1/2 - 1 liter of milk in a day, even as a grown-up. This has always been my source of calcium and additional vitamin A and D and I’d really enjoy a glass of milk - fridge cold and 2% fat content - at many occasions. In my opinion such a glass of milk is even the best friend to a meal of smoked salmon, toast, horseraddish, capers, onions and lemon wedges.
But, milk produced in America always seems to have a tangy, sour after/under/by-taste - to me, it tasts like exhaust.
I thought it’s the way the milk gets pasturized here, that it might be at a higher temprature, because UHT milk in Switzerland has a similar icky taste, and UHT means nothing else than Ultra Hight Temprature - UHT products can even be stored outside of a fridge w/o turning bad and need to be refridgerated only after opening.
It need to be noted, that many people have no problem drinking any type of milk and they do not notice the slightest difference.
Finally, up in Minneapolis, I found milk I really liked produced by Land-O-Lake. Only Super Target and then also Cub’s would carry it, but I was very willing to go the extra mile for this. Somebody told me that this was milk known not to use milk of treated cows, so I assumed this might be the difference. Then we moved down to Kansas City and guess what, Super Target here would not carry it, nobody would carry this brand. So the quest began a new.
Bad milk is disgusting and an insult to my taste buds.
After almost a year I finally, finally found good milk made by Promised Land. The cows are also untreated. The milk is HHST pasturized - and obviously I was wrong about the taste turning sour due to higher heating temprature - because their milk is not pasturized at a lower temprature, it is higher but shorter heating time.
Some things I learned during the research:
HHST means higher heat shorter time pasteurization of milk, milk products or dairy products at temperatures of 191°F. (89°C.). HTST means high temperature short time pasteurization of milk, milk products or dairy products for 15 seconds at temperatures between 161… (trunctuated text, sorry - blame it on this blogging software which can not translate my symbols into HTML).
But PASTEURIZATION REQUIREMENTS of Milk, skim milk, or buttermilk: Batch Pasteurization 145°F. (63°C.) for 30 minutes -or- HTST Pasteurization 161°F. (72°C.) for 15 seconds. And: an ultrapasteurized dairy product shall be thermally processed at or above a temperature of 280°F. (138°C.) for at least 2 seconds in order to destroy microbes in the dairy product.
Heated for 30 minutes!
After all of this, I do not know if its how cows are treated or the milk pasturized to cause the differences in taste, but in the end I do not really care - all I yearned for was good tasting milk which I could enjoy for taste and health benefits and this is what I found.
created just before lunchtime - it was 11:34 am to be exact | trackback |
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Its been so good to read about the milk story, that this time I could not resist to leave my comment here in your blog. I can fully understand your feel about the bad milk, because the same happens to me. One of my strong recalls from being a small child (less than 3 or 4 years old) includes the “Milkers”, or “Milk Shops”. I do not know if this exists/existed in other countries, but here in Catalunya we had them. Now, unfortunately, all the “milk shops” (”Lleteries”) are vanished. The goverment, at one point in time, using as a flag the healthy issues prohibited this kind of shop, dating from several centuries ago. The truth is that the goverment just agreed something with the biggest bottled or canned milk companies..plain and simple, and the shops dissapeared. So, anyway, in these milk shops, the milk arrived daily directly from the nearest cow farms, boiled inside the shop and sold to people. The shops closed before noon, because no more milk was there to be sold, and open the next day, early morning to receive the next reload of fresh milk! We even had a special recipient for just the milk. Wah!! Good milk is one of the “tastes of infantry” for me :-). All the usual milk that one can buy nowadays is just water + white shit (LOL.-sorry for the word my lady :-) ). I remember being to the milk shop with my grandmother, carrying out my small metal milk-recipient, and she carrying the big one for the family (mine was more like a toy, but real anyway). Just a few streets before the milk shop one could smell the flavour of the boiling milk…yuuummmmmmmm…
After the milk shops dissapeared, I never tasted a milk like that until may be 10 years ago or so, when my parents got a stone house in the mountains, near the pyrenees. Our neighbour has a cow farm with endless grass fields!! hey! and he IS a kind man!! So, every time I go there, I love to wake up early (around 4,30 or 5 in the morning) and knock his door. He’s always glad to receive me, to let me get 5 or 6 milk liters directly from the cows while he smokes his pipe and stares funny at me (the city guy), and then arrange in a cool coversation until 7 or 8…then I get back home with my metal bucket full of milk, boil it, experience that flavour again, remember about my grandma, and of course, enjoy the good milk again!!
Well, that’s my small contribution to our milk taste. I hope that you like my recalls…your blog surely transported me again to infantry without drinking milk :-)
cheers
David
Comment by David — Monday, June 28, 2004 #
Great memories, great stories. Thanks David from Catalunya for your comment!
Comment by marlyse — Monday, June 28, 2004 #