Or, I show my tender, hippy side
Bottle of Evergreen Farm Utterly Fresh Raw Whole Milk
Since I cheated you guys out of a post last night, we’ll have two today. Milk in the morning and heavens only knows what in the evening. I seem to have somehow had my workload doubled today so I might go really wild and take a picture of some chocolate milk or something.
Anyway, I’ve heard a lot about raw milk and how delicious it is but have never had the opportunity to buy any until yesterday when I went to the Farmer’s Market at the Memphis Botanic Gardens. Tangent: If you live in Memphis or thereabouts and have never been to the Botanic Gardens you should go because it’s awesome. If you have kids, get the membership, you’ll get your money’s worth in one week.
I know some folks say that raw milk is incredibly nutritious and others think it’s a huge health risk, which I guess is the reason why I had to buy some sort of membership to buy the milk and also explains this on the back of the bottle:
I can’t say that I’m not a bit concerned about the health risks of consuming raw milk, particularly for my children, but from what I’ve read the risks are small if you get it from a small, clean farm. Honestly though, I bought it because I was very curious about the taste.
Regular milk on the left, raw milk on the right
You are probably wondering about the champagne glasses. It’s not because I’m trying to be fancy or funny, those were the only two clean glasses that matched that are left in this kinderwelt of the damned.
The colors didn’t really show through but on the left is a glass of regular, pasteurized Vitamin D supermarket brand milk, it’s extremely white and smooth looking. On the right is the raw whole milk, it was a lot more yellow and on the top, you could see little shiny slicks of fat. Sort of like when you pour whole cream into coffee and a bit of the fat breaks off and rises to the surface before the rest of the milk and you get those oily-sheeny patches. It’s not nearly as gross as the description sounds.
Top view
You can kind of see what I’m talking about here. It wasn’t off-putting in any way, but it definately had a more rustic appearance than the supermarket milk.
Wait, I take that back, I was a teeny bit put off, but that’s because I’ve done my share of expressing milk from my own teats and the raw milk looked very much like the milk I used to pump for my own babies. I know it’s kind of silly and illogical to have second thoughts about drinking the raw milk because of that, but eh, it is what it is.
Taste it I did though and I have to say it was really good, but it had a little bit of a grassy flavor. Not as strong as goat’s milk but it was there. It was also very creamy and so rich I could only drink a bit of it. It really had a very clean, fresh flavor and I think it would really rock for making homemade paneer or ricotta.
My two littlest ones didn’t like it at all, I’m assuming because the flavor was so much more pronounced than the milk they are used to. We also had some of the raw half and half in our morning coffee and I didn’t care for the stronger flavor as it clashed with my coffee.
I will definitely buy raw milk again to use for making cheese but I’m not sure if we’ll be buying it to drink on a regular basis. I am very much looking forward to trying the butter and eggs from the same dairy farm.
