I'm not complaining about the use of (AI) tools per se, which is fine I guess.
Something feels off. Somewhere between a little-off to a bit-more-off. Sorry. I'm trying to find the right words... Perhaps a bit too polished? (Can there be such a thing?)
The diagram is almost 1:1 the same except the cheese layout which it chose to do a bit differently. The mobile version of the diagram is an AI driven layout restructure - however still true to my source material.
The writing of the article is entirely my own. I'll choose to take it as a compliment that you think it's too polished haha.
Another pathway is to start with 35% fat cream or crème fraiche and make butter. Then you use the buttermilk to make cheese. Then you use the whey to make Norwegian cheese OR if you started with crème fraiche you take the sour whey and make sorbet by mixing it with some fruit juice and shaking the container every hour or so as it freezes in the freezer.
It's not nearly as time-consuming as it sounds and the rewards are better than anything you'd buy. The butter is better (less water within), the paneer and ricotta are so much better than factory-made, and the sorbet is... well probably about equal to sour cream sorbet you'd buy (assuming you buy movenpick :).
I also grew up on a cattle farm and have made many other products when I was younger from raw milk. There are /some/ things that require raw milk because they are wild cultured, but most food products are not wild cultured when made at home so you can pitch the correct yeast or bacteria with pasteurized milk just fine. One thing that is hard to find in the US and impossible to make without raw milk is Serbian/Turkish kajmak/kaymak.
I even make my own butter at home using ultra processed heavy whipping cream. Raw milk is a great thing in some ways, but it is not in others and in any case not really a requirement to make milk products at home.
For example, if you want to make yogurt then grab a little bit of the leftover yogurt in your fridge, drop a dollop of it in, and viola, it'll start the yogurtification process.
You can also rely on the open-air bacteria for some culturing, but the results can be all over the place. This is how a lot of sites suggest starting sour dough.
Toned homogenised milk is just a thin watery gruel colored white. For me Half'nHalf is about the right consistency but you can't get it unhomogenized.
That said, cannot not post this mandatory calvin and hobbes strip
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3Qdxv...
Milk mixes from all-cream to no-cream are available, after all.
I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
In all of the presentations we used to have 3.3% and 1.5% fat content, but since a few years we have 3%, 2%, 1% and if you are very unlucky 0% that taste like water with watercolor. I'm not sure why we changed, probably some weird Big Cow conspiracy :)
All of that is pasteurized and homogenized.
Anyway, 3% is more tasty than 1%. I'm not sure about the difference with 3.3%. But the low fat one is recommended for diets.
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When I was young, my grandfather has a small summer house like 1 mile away from a town that is like 10 miles away from the capital city of one of the provinces in the northwest of Argentina. We use to bought raw unpasteurized unhomogenized milk from someone that had cows nearby. But we obliviously had to boil it and then remove the big layer of cream at the top, that we used for cooking (as a replacement of butter).
The problem of boiling milk at home is that it must boil for 10 minutes or something and that changes the flavor. In a factory, they can boil milt at ~150°C (300°F) for 1 second instead, that kills the bacterias but does not change the flavor.
>Even boiled milk is awful What does this have to do with homogenization? I wouldn't want boiled milk either unless it was to be used in a soup or something.
Are you confusing homogenization with pasteurization?
— Carl Sagan
That said, if you don't want the calf, there's almost always going to be someone that does. We'd raise and then butcher the male calves from our milking cows. (We did milk the cows for commercial purposes).
Let's also not forget that the article basically skips what rennet actually is just naming it an enzyme.
Is that... controversial? Obviously a cow normally gives milk without being pregnant. It wouldn't be able to feed its calf otherwise.
But there's so much to the linguistics of animal husbandry and dairy that many folks don't know. It goes way deeper than just the milk-oriented terms in the article: Heifer versus cow, freshening and calving, steer versus ox versus bull, AI (not the LLM kind) versus natural service, the barn, parlor, and pasture, and more. Plus plenty of technical knowledge. If you're not hand milking, how many mmHg of negative pressure should you use? Do you use a surcingle, or a claw, or a robot?
Even in the milk-oriented terms, there are others not covered by the article. HTST and UHT aren't the only options, there's also LTLT. Pasteurization can be done in a pipeline, or in a vat. Smaller vats for home and small farm usage can be multi-purpose: I pasteurized milk and cultured yogurt in mine. Some folks even care about the specific proteins (A1 beta-casein versus A2), which is genetically determined by the cow (and can be bred for).
I got a cow in 2020 and there was a lot to learn.
Cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs.
Consider how imagery of a farmer inseminating a cow with his arm disappearing up some tract or fitting a spike to the baby so it can't drink its mom's milk -- or farm conditions in general -- are basically shock footage that people are insulated from until they maybe chance upon a movie like Dominion.
I think a lot of people don't realize we're hijacking their reproductive systems, instead assuming cows constantly produce milk.
One could argue there's more suffering in a glass of milk than a steak, which makes ethical vegetarianism flawed despite its good intentions.
But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.
Alta-Dena Dairy in Southern California used to be the nation's largest producer of raw milk, but too many people died.[3]
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...
[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing...
[3] https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...
If people were drinking raw milk directly out of the udder, in a clean environment and blessed with a baby cow's immune system and microbiome, that would be pertinent, but they aren't. Even human breast milk extracted in a clean environment with sanitized tools gets risky very quickly when stored.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearl...
I'd liken it to claiming an anti-measles-vax person is aware of the risks of measles. They might not believe in the risk at all.
The cow is the index case of microbiome über alles, that is the cow cannot digest grass at all but rather it is colonized with bacteria that eat the grass and then the cow eats the bacteria and the volatile fatty acids made by the bacteria.
