Have your nose go on red alert: “alarm, alarm, bad milk, do not drink!”
Have your mother swear it’s not bad (this step is optional, people whose mothers are not handy or have sensitive noses may skip it).
3b) Tell nearest brother to smell milk. Brother goes “it’s BAD!” and glares at mother.
Leave the bad milk back in the fridge for about 24h; if it’s winter, the balcony is a better option as it will avoid cases of Brothers Spewing Bad Milk All Over Kitchen.
Pour out, separate the solids and the liquid. The solids are the requesón. Some people like it by itself, some with a sweet item for contrast: quince preserve (the kind you have when your tummy is, uhm, overactive) and honey are favorites in Spain, I figure maple syrup has to be a good one too.
I find some sites that talk about making requesón from milk whey and say that “in Italy it’s called ricotta”, but both the use of whey instead of whole milk and the organoleptic differences tell me it’s actually a different thing. Since queso means cheese and requesón would be something like “second cheese”, apparently ours was the newer version…
If it were like ricotta and made with whey, the name “second cheese” would make sense, as ricotta is made with the leftover whey from cheesemaking (the first cheese.) I wonder if requeson is like ricotta, in that a lot of homemade recipes for ricotta are just like your recipe for requeson, in which whole milk is taken, curdled, strained, and the resulting product is called “ricotta,” when true ricotta is made from leftover whey from making some other cheese. The Mexican styles of requeson–or at least some of them like this one–are made from whey, for instance.
Also, this scientific study on aflatoxin published by a group of scientists from a Spanish university describes Requeson as a “traditional Spanish whey cheese,” so I suspect that it is like ricotta, in that home versions of it are made by curdling whole milk, while traditionally they’re made from leftover whey.
Just a thought.
I cannot put plain milk to my lips, let alone sour. But I guess I would cook with it, but sour milk in my coffee would spoil it.
I know a lady who raises goats for their milk and she feeds the milk straight to her kids. Once in a while she says they get a goat hair in their milk but it doesn’t sour them on it.
Yes, truly soured milk (like unpasteurized raw milk that is left to sour) is closer to what we know as cultured buttermilk in the US. Soured milk tastes fine on its own (if you like buttermilk-like flavors, that is.) Spoiled pasteurized milk is kind of nasty. As I said above, if it’s just starting to turn (where it’s a little too funky to drink, but not exactly wretched), I’ll use slightly spoiled milk in baking. As mentioned above, it is NOT the same as the “sour milk” that is called for in recipes. A better substitute would be buttermilk or yogurt or a mix of buttermilk/yogurt and regular milk.
I will occasionally drink the milk when it is creamy but doesn’t taste sour. And I will definitely use it. I won’t use it after it goes sour. Sure, it’s not bad for you, but it hurts my stomach.
Rarely does milk last that long in my house, anyways, unless my dad gets a case of 4 gallons from work (only when it gets really high retail). But, when it does actually go sour, it’s usually well before the expiration date. And we get them behind the glass, and keep our fridge at the recommended 35 degrees Fahrenheit.
Pasteurized milk tastes weird, and still goes bad two weeks after opening–although it will last a year or two unopened.
I have to do the sniff test beside the sink. If it is even the tiniest bit sour I will barf immediately. It will make me barf even before I can consciously smell the sourness.
