What We Do with 28 Gallons of MILK (Every Week)

It all starts down here milking. Lillian and I mostly. 7 days a week. About 2 to 2.5 gallons per cow. 2 cows. That's 4 to 5 gallons a day. From our stanchion, we literally walk right up through there and up to— that's our kitchen in there. That's our house. Once inside, we bring it into our cool room. Found this to be a little hack, you know. Put it inside of our coolers, inside of our cool room, and there's not as much pressure. They're empty, of course, because we just got our milk out to cream separate. But one cow in that one, one cow in that one, 3 or 4 ice packs. And then once they're done, we put them on the rack. This was slap full of milk this morning. We're cooling it off to 40 degrees within the first hour. That just helps preserve it longer. That just helps stop the breaking down process and it makes it last a little bit longer, a little bit fresher. So every week we get all the milk out of there and get about 20 to 25 gallons right now. We'll talk about the cream processing here in just one second, but the first consumption is milk. We've saved out a gallon and a half-ish. That's probably what we're about to drinking in a day, wouldn't you say, Beck? Hey, do you— does anybody want any milk right now? Just Lily? So how often do you guys drink milk a day?

What?

Probably, I don't know, breakfast, once or twice a day, probably.

Whenever you feel like it. Okay, I'll get you some. So here's some more milk. Look at that cream line on that milk. Is that Flossie or Phyllis? Yeah, that's Phyllis. She gets more cream. Let's just stir it in a little bit. That cream Alright, who wants more? Me! You haven't even had any.

I don't have any.

That's enough.

I want to see your milk mustache. I want to see your milk mustache, Mr. Brown. Oh, you don't get a milk mustache with a straw. Oh, there he goes.

I can make it.

There he goes. Lift up your hat so I can see you.

It's my hat.

Nice.

Look at mine.

Ooh, you got one. All right, Lily's working on hers. Okay, I like that milk mustache. I would guess that you guys probably drink half a gallon to a gallon a day of just, just straight up drinking. Next up, and the most easiest to do, is yogurt. So you have your milk. It's usually best to do it right after you milk. The milk's at 100 degrees. That's what you wanted out to make yogurt. You could put your milk— we put it straight in the dehydrator.

You put—

so now you gotta put—

after you filter it, then we put in yogurt starter.

That's right, I forgot that step. Whoops, that's important. How much of that?

It's 1/3 of a cup of yogurt, and I just use the previous yogurt. Yeah, you can use a starter every time. Like, so I should say this, there's different things. Like, I know that there's packets that you can put in, or you can just use commercial yogurt, or you can use your previous yogurt. Type thing. But I will say this, yogurt— homemade yogurt is not like store-bought yogurt, um, especially if it's raw. It's gonna be thinner. It will sometimes just be a little bit different, but that's okay. Like, I'm not trying to create the store at home.

Nope. We have nuts in here dehydrating, but these racks would be out. We would put our milk in there.

I'm about to clear out those nuts. Okay, because I'm gonna culture cream.

Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to the cultured cream in a second. So you would put your yogurt in there at 100 degrees for, uh, 24 hours.

It worked out well.

It's not yogurt yet, it'd be milk with a little bit of yogurt in it, and then in 24 hours it's yogurt. Super easy. And it turns to this. It's amazing. Does anybody want any yogurt right now? Maybe not as— maybe you don't like it as much as milk. Lily will take me up on it. You want some yogurt?

I'll have some yogurt.

Okay. All right, is it just Lily?

This here is that one.

You want any?

Is that enough, Lily?

Yeah.

Put your little honey on it. And a spoon. Here's your spoon, honey. You got your honey? Okay. Let's see you try it. Alright, go for it, sweetie. Yum. I'd say we eat, we probably eat yogurt every other day, maybe. How many yogurts do you think, how much yogurt do you think we eat in a week?

Well, it just depends. We kind of ebb and flow. If we make a lot of smoothies, And then we use more yogurt and if we eat— if sometimes the kids will eat more yogurt than others or if we make like frozen yogurt. So we use anywhere between a gallon to 3 gallons a week. Just depends upon our yogurt consumption. We were doing like 3 gallons every week consistently when we were doing smoothies every night. We were eating yogurt and doing that, but then we've kind of dialed it back and I would say right now we might be at about a gallon and a half.

Okay.

At this point. So it just depends.

Yeah, so I'm gonna get to that in a second. That's like the golden— we're gonna get to that. That's butter. So we get all our milks together, we put them in these 5-gallon pots. Today we needed 4. 4.

4 every time.

4 every time. Well, when we have 2,000 milk, we get it up to 100 degrees and it comes over here to our cream separator. Grandma comes and helps us. This is a— this is a lifesaver. You pour the milk in, it separates the cream, it comes over here, and Grandma and Jonah's handy dandy pipe down to a food-grade bucket that catches the skim. I would say for every 5 gallons of milk you get what, a quart? At least a quart of cream.

At least different pastures produce different amounts of cream.

Yeah, different cow.

Like Phyllis gives more Well, because Phyllis's wean— because Phyllis's calf is weaned, we get more cream. When we— we're gonna wean Flossie's calf next month, so then we'll get more cream from Flossie for sure.

So Rebecca, how much of today's cream do you think— oh look, there's a whole nother— how much of that do you think we'll save for actual like cream, like we'd like it in our tea?

I've been saving this for tea and ice cream, and that for cultured cream.

Ah, so how much is that?

It's a half a gallon.

So you'll save a half a gallon for ice cream and 2 quarts and cream for our tea, and this is for cultured cream. Hey Rebecca, do we have a jar of cultured cream?

No, I buttered it all. Okay, so you buttered it all, and so then we start fresh on Saturday with a new week.

So yeah, so We would cultured cream. All you gotta do is put some cream in a quart jar, again 3 tablespoons of yogurt, in our dehydrator on 100 for 24 hours. How much cultured cream do you think we save every week?

How much do we do? A half a gallon.

Okay, okay, yeah, we do that half a gallon. And then here's the good part. You turn that cultured cream into butter? That's what you're doing right now?

Yes.

Oh my word.

So you can use— you can turn that into butter.

Okay.

That would be called sweet cream butter.

That's sweet cream butter because it wasn't cultured.

And then this is cultured, which just means that it was fermented.

Yeah, so okay. So let's say our cultured cream was in there because it was.

This is what— yeah.

And we might use it as a dip. As a sour cream.

When we were on GAPS diet early on, we ate a lot more of it.

Yeah.

I'm noticing that we're eating a lot less of it.

We put it in our soups.

We put it on tacos. We— in the beginning—

pancakes. Let's get them pancakes.

We put it on so much. We used to mix it with honey and freeze it for a treat and put it in applesauce. We've made ice cream from cultured cream. I mean, you can, you can use cultured cream in any dish that you would use cream in.

Yeah.

And so it's a little bit different.

Whatever we didn't use is cultured cream though. It's what's cool is you take whatever we didn't use as cultured cream as a dip. You want more milk? Yes, I'll get you more milk in one second.

Hey, I dropped it into my milk.

Oh, okay. Josiah, can you help him get some more milk?

Thank you, my man.

So What we then use this cultured cream— is it like a dip or a topping? We then turn it into butter. Well, that was 8 sticks of butter right there. Right now we're currently not having to buy any butter. Now what do we do with all this skim milk? There's like 4 full buckets. There's actually a little bit more in there. We're gonna let it finish dripping. What do we do with all this skim milk? All right. Well, I'll show you. So we have 4 plus a half buckets of skim this week. We have a half a bucket left, so that's gonna be 5 buckets. If we did that half a bucket every day, that would last 10 days. So we can give a little more than a half a bucket. We can probably give about that much. You can estimate that way, about 8, 8 pounds a gallon. And so that's 2.5 pounds. So 16, 20 pounds. Let's say, let's count it as 10 because it's scraps. It's not the, the, uh, completely balanced pig food. So that's, that's 10 pounds of their diet, guys. That could feed a 5-month-old pig. Our pigs in the woods that are a little bit older we just supplement with a little bit of our food screens, a little bit of grains, and that is a significant part of our pigs' diets. All right, look, I got a significant— I already poured them some over there, but look, do this. Skin milk with some grain and a lot of our food scraps. That is a significant portion of their food. Actually, skim milk, food scraps, and a little bit of grain is their only portion right now. And only recently have we started to supplement with grain because Well, they're getting bigger, 160-ish, 70 pounds. So hopefully you see just how valuable our family cows are to us. They're, you know, I was, I was someplace and I saw it, it was a classic photograph. It was an old-timey man and it was black and white and he was holding a family cow outside of his house and, and his family was in the background sitting on the porch like barefoot And the title of the photo was "Prized Possession." Yeah, and it's not just— look guys, it's not just the, the milk, the yogurt, the cream, the cultured cream, the butter, the ice cream. It's— look at this too. Boom! Do you see that? 40 pounds of manure a day. That's compost to be put back on pasture or in our gardens. Prized possession. It's a lot of work. It's a big startup cost. Oh, and by the way, they give you a calf every year too. Yeah, that's valuable. Bit of maintenance, but totally worth it. The price of homegrown, 100% grass-fed raw milk for all those products, the price of that, what is that? It's priceless.