7 Interesting Ways To Make Fermented Milk Products In Your Own Kitchen!

For most of human history, most humans who had access to dairy animals consumed fermented dairy products. The reason is simple: cooling was scarce.

Photo: Goat milk kefir and kefir grains

Do you ever wonder what to do when your raw milk starts to sour?

Unlike pasteurized milk, raw milk doesn’t spoil. It sours. This is the beginning of the natural fermentation process of milk-all kinds of milk.

Body temperature of a cow is about 100-102 degrees F. And body temps of sheep and goats, is 101.5 to 103.5 F. To cool the milk down and keep it cold takes a lot of energy. This was not practical for most of history. Putting yourself in the place of an ancient human, could you imagine even considering it? Most humans, for most of history, did not have access to the kind of cooling and refrigeration that we take for granted.

Cold milk was not the norm. In fact, different cultures, using different types of milk, relied on more reliable preservation methods to store the abundant calories and nutrition available to them in milk. Food was valued, not wasted.

Among these preservation methods were clabber, yogurt, kefir, butter, and cheese! Cheese offers enormous options based on the environmental biome where it was produced and access to specific coagulation enzymes.

So get this…

Ancient humans were smart enough to learn how to preserve their milk! Best of all, they taught future generations through normal everyday activities, stories and writing things down once writing became easier.

Because of our ancestors’ ingenuity, we have thousands (millions?) of cheese varieties to enjoy, hundreds of cultured milk delicacies from all corners of the world, and now, refrigeration to preserve unfermented milks for days to weeks. We are so fortunate.

One of the best outcomes of fermented milk products is that this process naturally reduces the amount of lactose in the milk while increasing the enzyme lactase!

Bottom line is this: you never have to throw away “spoiled milk.” At every stage of fermentation, milk is useful for different things. We will go through a few here.

1. Clabber – clabber is what you get as cow milk naturally ferments. The best way to clabber milk is to get it straight from the cow, uncooled, and allow it to sit in a glass container for 6-12 hours at 70-90 F. By the end of that time, you will have a stable, drinkable yogurt-y like drink. This clabber is chock full of probiotics and some of the lactobacillus bacteria in the milk have worked to digest some of the lactose and casein in the milk giving you a product that is easier for your body to digest. Use clabber for smoothies, or as a replacement in any recipe that calls for cultured buttermilk.

2. Curds and whey– If you leave the clabber out for several more hours, in the next stage of fermentation, the curds separate from the liquid and you get curds and whey. This takes another 12-18 hours at 80-90 F. At this point, the cream will be on the top and possibly slightly bubbly. You can scoop the cream off to make a cream cheese or mix it back into the curds. The whey is clearly separate from the curds. Now you have two products. The whey is great to add to water as an electrolyte drink or use it for extra protein. The curds are similar to a ricotta or to a cream cheese spread. Add a few spices for a savory spread or honey and berries for a sweet spread. This cheese keeps for a few weeks in the fridge.

3. Soft cheese–alternately, once it separates from the whey, you can use the curds to make your own soft cheese. Bundle the curds into a cheese cloth and allow it to drip into a bowl overnight. You’ll get a thick, delightful soft cheese. This cheese, even unaged, is full of healthy lactobacillus bacteria that have helped to digest the lactose in the milk leaving behind the enzyme lactase to help you digest the rest.

4. Yogurt–if you notice the milk is just starting to have an off taste or smell, you can easily make yogurt. There are two simple methods to this giving you slightly different end results. Method 1: heat the milk to 160 F and quickly cool it, add two spoonfuls of plain yogurt and let it sit at 80-90 F overnight. Heating the milk to 160 before adding the culture will give you a thicker yogurt in the end.
   Method 2: Heat the milk to 110 F to keep all the organisms in there, then add the culture and allow it to sit overnight. Either way, you are going to get a highly digestible, delicious yogurt. Experiment with the amount of starter culture that you add and find the flavor and texture you like.

5. Kefir–This is a prized probiotic drink in many cultures. Kefir is propagated through kefir “Grains” which are not really grains, but symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeasts that have formed over many centuries. This incredible cultured milk seems to offer us the best diversity of probiotics for our bodies. You’ll first need to find a source of kefir grains. Among those who love kefir, many of us are in the culture of gifting these precious grains to others who want them. You can also order them online. Start with about a tablespoon of the grains and add them to a quart of milk. Allow the milk to get up to 75-90 F and sit for a few hours or overnight. The kefir gets stronger the longer you let it ferment. But, the grains are living organisms and they need the milk to live. So be sure to transfer them to fresh milk before it gets too strong and they have nothing left. Once you are ready to strain it, add fresh milk to the kefir grains and keep going. To take a break from kefir, store them in the fridge in a jar with milk.

6. Soured cream– If you find yourself with extra cream, this might be the best for you. Soured cream is great in many recipes. It is not the same flavor as what we call “sour cream” so I would not recommend trying to use it in place of that. It adds something extra to some of your baked goods or cooked recipes that call for cream. This one is a little harder to explain. I can tell you stories though of times I did not want to waste cream that was turning sour and so I used it in meatloaf, or biscuits, or quiche/frittata and everyone LOVED it. The funkier the cream was, the more it seemed that my family loved it. It must have been all those slight, delicate flavors in there.

7. Butter and buttermilk–If you’ve got too much milk or too much cream, one of the BEST ways to preserve it is to make butter! It’s a little harder than it sounds, but much easier with modern equipment. To make butter, start with the heaviest cream you can find. Mix that in a stand mixer with the heavy duty paddle. When small curds start to form, you will notice that some of the buttermilk is splashing out. Keep going. The butter will form into larger and larger clumps, eventually forming one large clump. Once it is clearly formed, there will be a pool of buttermilk all around. Drain the buttermilk into a jar or drink it right away. It is delicious and refreshing. Or save it for buttermilk biscuits, pancakes or other favorite baked goods. Rinse the butter by pouring filtered water over it and squeezing the rest of the buttermilk out as you go. Add salt if you want salted butter. Wrap and refrigerate quickly. If buttermilk remains in the folds of fat in the butter, it will get a strong flavor quickly. It is best to make butter in small batches and use it quickly.

These are 7 tried and true home kitchen ways to use all your milk so you never have to discard any. I’ve used them all at different times over the past 20 years of culinary raw dairy adventures. They are fun ways to learn more about food and food preservation and our ability to practice food preservation.

If you get really adventurous, you can try your hand at more complex cheese making – remember, humans have made cheese for millennia, long before we had access to the modern tools we have now. It all came from experimentation, patience, and working with the natural microbial biomes of their environments. Find an easy recipe to start and see what you can learn along the way! If they could do it, so can YOU!

Happy milk adventures.