This past week i had the opportunity to milk my friend's dairy goat. i was so excited!! i have never milked before, and being that we now have goats we intend to eventually milk, i thought it was a good idea to learn milking.
Honestly, i'm a bit surprised how easily i took to it. This is an Alpine ( i forgot her name) and she was an extremely good milker. She was very cooperative and she has large teets that make milking easy. i can already tell that milking Delilah, my Dwarf Nigerian, is not going to be this easy. She has very small teets, and is still a bit skittish. It will be interesting to see how she does.
Makes me really wish we had a slightly larger goat shed, so that i could get a full sized dairy goat. Sigh....maybe one day.
So this is the finished product, raw goats milk. :)
i've tasted goats milk in the past, but it had a strong 'musky' smell that i could not handle. i was told it was because the buck was kept with the female, and goat milk normally does not taste so....eh...goaty.
We each sampled it, it had no smell. The flavor was very similar to cows milk with a slight 'tangy' aftertaste. The kids didn't like it, and Kenan couldn't taste the aftertaste at all. i'm not a fan of milk to start, but found the flavor different but not unpleasant. Definitely something i could get used to.
So this is the part of the blog, where i give a brief tutorial on making goat cheese. i made homemade Paneer cheese last summer, when i had raw cows milk. It is extremely easy to make and pretty much no fail...or so i thought. :)
Start by heating your goats milk to 185 degrees. Then turn off the heat. Let it cool down to about 100 degrees, and slowly add 2 tsp of apple cider vinegar or lemon juice. At this point, you should see the milk separate from the whey, and form small curds. You strain it through cheese cloth...and what you are left with is a soft cheese. Easy enough, right?
So this was the process i followed, but when i added my vinegar...nothing happened. So i added a bit more...and still nothing. So i looked online to see what could cause milk to not separate. i found very little info, but did find a cheese making thread where someone mentioned that if the milk is too colostrum-y it would not separate. So that does make sense, as the goat had only given birth the week before.
So my first time milking was a success, however my first time making goat cheese a definite fail!
Ah well, live and learn.
Makes me really wish we had a slightly larger goat shed, so that i could get a full sized dairy goat. Sigh....maybe one day.
So this is the finished product, raw goats milk. :)
i've tasted goats milk in the past, but it had a strong 'musky' smell that i could not handle. i was told it was because the buck was kept with the female, and goat milk normally does not taste so....eh...goaty.
We each sampled it, it had no smell. The flavor was very similar to cows milk with a slight 'tangy' aftertaste. The kids didn't like it, and Kenan couldn't taste the aftertaste at all. i'm not a fan of milk to start, but found the flavor different but not unpleasant. Definitely something i could get used to.
So this is the part of the blog, where i give a brief tutorial on making goat cheese. i made homemade Paneer cheese last summer, when i had raw cows milk. It is extremely easy to make and pretty much no fail...or so i thought. :)
Start by heating your goats milk to 185 degrees. Then turn off the heat. Let it cool down to about 100 degrees, and slowly add 2 tsp of apple cider vinegar or lemon juice. At this point, you should see the milk separate from the whey, and form small curds. You strain it through cheese cloth...and what you are left with is a soft cheese. Easy enough, right?
So this was the process i followed, but when i added my vinegar...nothing happened. So i added a bit more...and still nothing. So i looked online to see what could cause milk to not separate. i found very little info, but did find a cheese making thread where someone mentioned that if the milk is too colostrum-y it would not separate. So that does make sense, as the goat had only given birth the week before.
So my first time milking was a success, however my first time making goat cheese a definite fail!
Ah well, live and learn.
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