Cream Cheese

I have recently begun acquiring raw milk. I live in North Carolina where raw milk cannot be sold legally. This is not true everywhere. In some states you can legally purchase certified raw milk, in some places they don't sell it in the stores but you can buy a share in someones milk producing cow, and in other places you can buy raw milk "for your pets". Not so in NC. Like midwifery, it's just plain illegal here. But you can get certified raw milk in South Carolina and it makes its way back to this mountain town. In my house we call it the Black Market White Milk.

One of the problems with the Black Market White Milk is that it is only available every two weeks or so. Initially this left me with the problem of trying to figure out how much milk to get. My partner and I are rather erratic about our milk consumption. We've been trying to avoid unfermented pasteurized milk and instead we purchase our dairy in the form of raw milk cheese and good quality yogurt and kefir. So now we're trying to relearn milk and its many culinary uses.

The first step to understanding how to use raw milk is to realize that it is totally different from pasteurized milk. Its nutrient content is different, it tastes different, the cream sits on the top, and it does not sour in the same way. Instead of becoming absolutely fetid and foul, it sort of mellows in a (literally) cheesy kind of way. I loathe rotten pasteurized milk to the point that I am a compulsive milk smeller. Every time I open a carton of milk or cream I have to smell it before I pour it, even if I just bought it, even if I just smelled it ten minutes ago!

So I was confused when I read in Sally Fallon's book (Nourishing Traditions) that one way to make homemade cream cheese is to allow raw milk to sit out on your counter (!) at room temperature (!) for 1-4 days (!!!) until it separates. I let it sit for about a day and the cream rose to the top and I smelled it and it was ripe. I was freaked out. Black Market White Milk is expensive! And here I was letting it sit unrefrigerated. I felt like I should make the cheese immediately before things could go really wrong (I was anticipating the rotten curds that are created by pasteurization). Although I couldn't figure out how the very much liquid milk would magically become cream cheese, I set up my strainer, cheese cloth, and bowl and poured the milk through it. As it had not yet fully separated, the milk, except for a little bit of thickened cream, went straight through the cloth and the strainer. I had ruined the milk and failed to make cheese. I poured it back in the glass jar and set it next to our compost bucket.

But fortuitously, it was extremely cold the next few days, and I neglected to take out the milk with the rest of the compost. (When you've got a baby in one arm you can't carry out the compost bucket and the half gallon of ruined milk without making more than one trip into the cold!) It was probably day four when I looked at the milk and realized that it had truly separated. There were now three distinct layers to the milk: the cream on the top, and then the milk solids, and then the whey on the bottom. I poured it through the cheese cloth, separating the cheese from the whey, and then hung the cheese in the cloth from a wooden spoon to drip the rest of the whey into a jar. The byproduct, whey, is very useful in the kitchen, for example, it is a great acidic medium for soaking grains.

After a night and the better part of a day the cheese stopped dripping. I cautiously unfolded the cheese cloth to reveal my "cream cheese". I was very proud, but it certainly was nothing like cream cheese. It was clumpy and didn't exactly smell fresh. Not that it smelled bad, it just smelled like a cheese of some kind and definitely not your mild store bought cream cheese. I wasn't so sure about it but I decided to try a recipe to turn it into a cream cheese spread. This is really the key, I think, to this sort of of homemade cream cheese. You blend it with flax seed oil and your choice of seasonings and flavorings. I highly recommend smoked salmon, green onions, and unrefined sea salt. It is delicious!

For Further Reading:

realmilk.org
A campaign to legalize raw milk

Learning to Maximize the Use of Your Raw Milk and Cream
An article with information and recipes for souring raw milk or cream