Mischief Baking

Nummy Cow

I’ve gotten interested in raw milk lately, since it was added to the product list of my meat & dairy buying club. I’ve found a lot of interesting articles on the topic and I feel very comfortable with the ‘risk’ involved. I will add a quick caveat here to say that all my supplier sell me clearly labeled milk that is for pet food consumption only. If I decide to do rogue things (like drinking it) once I get home, that is on my head. Once I decided to make it a permanent staple of my diet, I started searching for local, cheap(ish) milk that would be available on a fairly regular basis. The Weston Price Foundation provided me with the first few resources, but the more I searched the more local resources I found. Polk County has a lot of agriculture so Tampa Bay is lucky in that regard. Below is a map with some of the sources I’ve found. Because some of the groups are relatively private I have listed general locations. If you’d like more details, get in touch with me.

I asked Jeanell, who used to work on a raw dairy farm, what I should do with the raw milk. Whenever I get a real high quality product I want to *make* something with it. But part of the beauty of raw, grass-fed milk is that it’s delicious in its pure form. And if you use it for baking then it’s probably no longer raw (depending on the heat). None the less, she came up with a great post on what to do with it and sent me a couple auxiliary links on what to do with raw milk and also what to do when it sours.

I made my favorite pancakes with soured milk instead of buttermilk this weekend. I thought the sour taste was a bit strong, especially as I often eat them without any syrup on weekdays. I think next time I would mix in more fresh with the sour. I expect there’s enough acid to react with the baking powder even if I add fresh. I’m currently soaking rolled oats in the rest of my sour milk to make another kind of pancake in the morning, and after that I’d like to try this one from the NY Times.

Sour milk with whey seperated out