I have several non-goaty friends who read my blog and are always wondering about one thing or another I have written - "why do you do THAT" or "how do you do that". So, I am going to work on doing discriptive posts showing "how" to do. Even if you have raised goats for years, maybe I do something a bit differently than you do - in fact, I love to get ideas and tips from others - some I use entirely, some I extract bits and pieces out to come up with my own ways - LOL.
Tonight, I am going to "show" you how I pasturize my milk. As I have mentioned before, we hand-raise our babies, taking them from their mothers at birth much as they do the calves from the dairy cows. Thre are three reasons we do this - First, the babies tend to be a bit more wild if dam-raised. Since we are marketing pet and 4-H animals, we want them as gentle as possible. Second, there is a debilitating and often times fatal disease called CAE that is passed from infected dams to their kids through their milk (that is ONE way it can be passed)- by pasturising the milk, the bacteria is killed. There are blood tests for CAE and while some of our does have been tested, not all have been, so we just go the safer route. Finally, most of our does are shown and we don't want to take a chance on udders being unevenly nursed or damaged - alot of breeders do dam-raise, but then they probably don't have our luck (or lack there of).
There are several pastursiers available and many people have had great luck with large electric canners as well. But these are spendy and therefore maybe not as practical on a small scale. I did purchase a large canner, but it seems to take forever for the milk to reach the correct temperature and I found I could do two batches of milk on the stove in the time it took one batch to warm in the canner.
So, following the photos from left to right in each row, this is what works for me:
1.) Of course we start off with a pail of fresh raw milk! If you are going to use the milk for cooking or drinking yourself, you may want to strain it before you begin.
2.) I just leave the milk in the pail - then using the "double-boiler" method, I set the pail down in a stock pot of water. I usually turn the burner right to high.
3.) A good thermometer is a must. You want to heat the milk to 165 degrees EXACTLY. I use the thermometer to stir the milk occasionaly - cool pockets can form in the milk and you want to make sure you get ALL of the milk heated. The length of time it takes the milk to reach 165 degrees will vary depending on your stove, the type of pans/pails you are using and wether or not the milk was chilled or at room temperature when you started.
4.) Once the milk reaches 165 degrees, you want to hold that temp. for 15 seconds. I preset my timer and hit start as soon as the temp is where it needs to be.
5 & 6.) When the timer goes off, I immediately put the pail of milk in a bath of cold water and ice cubes to rapidly cool it down. At 100 degrees or less, you can go ahead and feed the babies. Or let it totally cool down an transfer it to jars/jugs. For personal use, it is said that glass jars are the best for storing the milk and allowing it to maintain its flavor. I first spoon out any film or clumps (I keep an ice cream bucket for this cause my chickens LOVE it)
7 & 8.) For personal use, I would strain the milk again. I found a re-usable coffee filter at Wal-Mart for about $5. It is a very, very fine mesh and will catch the smallest thing. It also fits very nicely into my funnel.
9.) Starting about a month before the first kids arrive, I start asking friends and family to rinse out and save milk jugs for me. I pour the pasterized milk into the jugs and then taking a permanent marker I lable the jugs "Goat - Past - and the date).
Wa-la! Ready to give it a try???
