Earlier today, I happened across this site while I was looking for something else. I had never heard of “raw milk” and I was wondering what the purported benefits were. I also wonder if the website is accurately portaying the safety level of the product, at least that brand’s, as well as the Health Department’s misbehavior.This thread discussed the product, but only in relation to the OP, which is good of course.
Also, I’ve noticed a number of stores and reaturants either selling goat’s milk or saying they use it in one of their recipes. What is the difference between goat & cow milk. Is one better than the other, or just weirder?
That other thread has the right info on raw milk. Since I posted much of it, I can vouch for its accuracy.
Raw milk by all reports tastes better than pasteurized milk, and may have some better nutrients. It necessarily lacks vitamin D, which cows don’t produce. There is no good evidence that raw milk has any special health value despite the claims of its defenders.
The problem is keeping the cows in an almost unbelievable state of excellent health. This can be done for small herds quite successfully. The larger the herd the more difficulty the farmer faces. That’s why raw milk lost out historically. There was no way, even on so-called “scientifically” managed larger farms, to keep the cows from getting the million diseases that cows are prone to.
Various states have various regulations on raw milk producers. You’d need to check locally to see what they are near you.
Goat’s milk is similar to cow’s milk, except that it has a different set of proteins, especially casein proteins. For this reason, some people - but certainly not all people - with cow’s milk casein protein allergy can safely have goat’s milk. There’s also going to be a slight difference in taste, which some people enjoy. That’s why goat’s milk cheeses are popular. (To answer the inevitable question, goat’s milk cheese has almost exactly the same amount of lactose as the equivalent cow’s milk cheese.) Neither one is better or weirder than the other, except as a matter of taste.
I don’t know if an adult can taste the difference between raw and pasteurized milk. As a kid I certainly could, but now? Probably not. As to the health benefits, I don’t really know.
Nor do I, but in my view there’s a big difference in taste between really fresh milk (say, 15 minutes from the cow to you) and the milk you buy at a grocery store. It’s like the difference between just-caught fish and what you buy at the grocery store - easy to distinguish.
Goat milk is no wierder than cow milk. It isn’t found as often in the U.S. largely because the cost of production is higher. It takes more goats to produce the same amount of milk, and goats are harder to keep fenced and not as placid as milk cows. Goat cheese is quite tasty and is more popular than cow cheese in many places in the world.
umm…you can’t pasteurize in 15 minutes from cow to table unless you have one heck of an inline pasteurizer in your barn and don’t mind warm milk.
IIRC from my days of drinking unpasteurized milk straight from the cow, the main flavor difference is the fat level and homogenization. Raw, unskimmed milk is fatty, fattier than whole, actually becuase whole is skimmed and then the butterfat is added back to reach the legal fat requirement.
I didn’t read that whole website, but there were some places where they didn’t have facts straight, which make me dismiss all that they have to say. Pasteurized/=sterilized, UHT=sterilized. S. aureus does not survive pasteruization, and while usually not lethal, can be deadly under the right conditions.
Most cows probably don’t have alot of human pathogens in their milk, just like most eggs don’t contain Salmonella but the problem comes in pooling. If you have one cow with subclinical mastitis and milk it with the rest of the herd, you spread the contamination from a few pounds of milk to hundreds or thousands of pounds of milk. Likewise, if someone doesn’t wash their hands well after a potty break…thousands of pounds of milk.
So, you have a few bacteria/mL of milk…no biggie. But, it takes time for the milk to cool from cow temperature to refrigeration temperature and bacteria like to grow in milk. Then you have to ship it, pack it, ship it more, stock it, it rides around in your grocery cart, goes into a bag, inot the trunk, you pick the kids up from soccer, go home, drag in the groceries, sit for 5 minutes to rest, put the milk in the frige where it takes some more time to cool back down to refrigeration temperatures. All this allows bacteria to propagate. Your chances of becoming sick are multiplying before your eyes.
IMHO (I know we aren’t in that forum) the flavor change is not worth the risk of death. Most people who have tried both prefer whatever they grew up on anyway. If you really want raw milk, you should get a cow. This would eliminate alot of the steps in distribution where things coud go wrong. Of course, you would have to know how to care for a cow and how to keep pathogenic bacteria from growing on or around it…
Public health officials have to tell you its dangerous to consume raw milk because it is statistically probable that raw milk consumption will lead to a food-borne disease outbreak.
Now, about the goats. There are slight chemical differences milk table, but more importantly, the fatty acids produced in goat milk and cow milk are different and small and medium chain acids impart alot of flavor to your food. Goat’s milk tastes…well…goaty, that’s the official descriptor.
The big thing is that raw milk just isn’t suited to large scale distribution because of the way milk is handled. It would be just too expensive to keep milk segregated. If you mix the milk of hundreds of cows into one giant tank the milk from one sick cow will infect the entire tank. Pastuerization is the only solution for large scale dairying. We drink raw milk all the time, that milk comes from neighbors who have one cow. If that cow has a problem they’ll notice when they milk her. It isn’t so easy to keep track of hundreds of cows as you hook them up to a milking machine.
I haven’t ever had raw milk myself, but I notice a marked difference in flavour between cheeses made from raw milk and those made from pasteurised milk. Raw milk cheeses have much more flavour.
I remember buying raw milk at Trader Joe’s years ago - in the 70’s or 80’s I believe - and can testify that it tasted WAY better than pasteurized milk. It was sweeter, cleaner, fresher tasting (hard to describe). I’ve not seen any for sale anywhere for years and years.
And ascenray, I agree with you about the raw milk cheeses. I’ve eaten the French “lait cru” cheeses and they are far more tasty and complex than other cheeses.
Yeah, milk fresh from the cow is raw milk. There’s no difference between the terms. Real farm fresh food tastes different - and to most people better - than supermarket food partially because food tastes better when fresher and partially because foods have been selectively bred to stay good longer when shipped and this almost always creates a tradeoff in taste.
I should have checked the OP’s location before posting, but you can’t do that from the preview pages for some reason. I know raw milk is available in western New York from many local farms. You normally have to go to them to pick it up, however.
True! and there is science to prove it. The bacteria that are killed in pasterization do some nifty chemical reactions that make some nifty organic acids that, according to my earlier post ('cause I’m an authority) create flavor. Kill the bugs, kill the complex flavors.
I have heard, from a person who raised goats, that goat milk can be consumed unpasteurized because the goats don’t carry the diseases that cows do. According to this individual, the only diseases that goats carry are ones that humans don’t get, whereas cows can carry, for example, tuberculosis.
That would not handle the whole sanitation issue, though.
In the town where I grew up, there was one farm with about 25 cows that sold raw milk. No, the cows didn’t sell the milk; the farmers sold the milk from the cows. They put it in plastic, one gallon milk jugs (then a relatively new invention), and stuck them in an old refrigerator for people to stop by and toss some change in an old coffee can as payment. If we got there soon after the milking, the milk was still warm. Since it wasn’t homogenized, the cream seperated and rose to the top (hence the expression), requiring shaking the jug to mix it up before pouring a glass.
I found it an acquired taste, but once I acquired it, I pretty much stopped drinking any of the usually processed milk. The flavor of the raw milk was grassy, slightly gamey, and even a little musty, very different from the bland, uniform stuff in the grocery. As I said, it was an acquired taste but, as already posted, definitely more complex than the usual stuff.
The authorites eventually shut the sales down. Maybe due to possible health risks, maybe someone actually got sick. I’ve tried a few brands once it starting appearing in groceries again, but none even approached the taste of that milk from Faulkner’s Farm, in that seedy old fridge, in Wilton, CT, in the mid-70s.
My guess would be that this person is misinformed. There is no reason why the same bacteria that grow on and around every other mammal wouldn’t grow in and on goats. Their milk is probably safer because of the small size of their herd. The bacteria carried by a certain species is usually more due to exposure and environment than to species of host. Cows, being a very large, very interconnected industry, tend to all have the same organisms present. Goats, being more of a family farm enterprise are more likely to be born, raised and die on the same farm, so the chances of a herd being infected are relatively small.
I remember hating the taste of milk in India when I was visiting as a kid. I don’t know whether that was because it was raw milk. Actually, maybe not, because later I asked whether it was pasteurised and they said it was. The cow’s milk there just tasted different. Or maybe it was buffalo milk, not cow’s milk.