“Not the Same Milk”

This profound statement came from Bug milliseconds after the first taste of goat milk touched her lips. It was followed with “Gross, nasty, I don’t like that milk.”

Daisy is 1 ½ and Lilly is 6 months old. Daisy is currently fresh, which means that she has milk from her kidding this past spring. Lilly has never kidded so she has no milk, but she is Daisy’s companion. Goats are herd animals, so I learned that one goat is a noisy goat and one that tries to escape.




I decided that I wanted goats because of research that I stumbled on, which led me to more and more reading on the subject of milk and its nutritional benefits (more on that later). When I stepped foot on the farm where we purchased the goats, the closest I’d come to a goat was my hand through the fence at the zoo. I’d never milked anything and I’d never tasted goat milk. But I was convinced that this was a better choice for our family.

All of my research said that goat milk does not have a “goaty” or “off” flavor if handled properly and is actually quite comparable to cow’s milk….Wrong!!!! My first taste – yuck! What did I do wrong? I was bummed and back to research mode. I already knew that it must be chilled very quickly in order to kill off any “yuckifying” bacteria.

Through trial and error and a fortunate accident, I can say that it finally tastes good. There is still a slight difference in flavor from cow’s milk, but one that is very easy to get past. I’ll spare you the trial and error and get to what has worked:

• I milk into a stainless steel pail.
  
• I cover the top of the milk pail with a sack flour cloth that is rubber banded in place, so I’m milking into a “filter.”
  
• I come inside immediately and poor the milk through a filter into pre-chilled quart jars.
  
• I then put my jars into a gallon ice cream bucket that has a semi-frozen solution of 50/50 vodka/water. The alcohol doesn’t allow the mixture to freeze solid, but it’s still at a frozen temperature. I can’t take credit for this idea, but I also can’t remember where I found it.

The fortunate accident came one day I had to leave the house immediately after milking so I put the ice cream bucket with quart jars of milk in the refrigerator. This was the first milk that we had that just tasted like milk. The milk actually froze slightly – in the refrigerator. Wow!!

Through this method, I can chill milk from 85° to 40° in about 30 minutes. Which I’ve learned classifies it as Grade A milk.

And the best part of all of this is Bug will now drink the milk by itself, without so much added chocolate that it completely negates the benefits of drinking milk.