h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I mean trying to improve on it's fundamental nature...

impertinent twit

I have been insulted. Bloo-hoo-hoo.

I meant to say nit, dunno why that slipped in there, sorry!

Don't worry, I can take it.

Just don't try to filter my milk

I wouldn't dare!

I wonder how well filtered milk works as butter. I bet all the 'impurities' make it butterfy better... (heh, I like that word... butterfy...)

Butterfy - that's when you filter the "L"s out of a butterfly

As far as I can remember, in America they have two types of "semi-skimmed", 1% and 2%. Skim milk is basically no fat at all, 1% is one third of the way between skim and full, while 2% is two thirds of the way between.

Which one has 'L's in it... ? I want to filter them out...

Filtered milk tastes "dead".
Vile stuff

*spit, spit, spit

When I was a kid, we used to go to a remote wee cottage up a remote wee glen for our holidays. No electricity, paraffin lamps etc. We had to walk a mile to the farm to collect raw unpasteurised milk every day. It was ambrosial. Nothing wrong with a wee bittie sharn in your milkchurn

>>So what do they filter out? Anything that's not, well, water?<<

I can answer that, we use these filters in our labs to sterilise things we can't sterilise by just autoclaving them (heating in a giant pressure cooker).

They are filters that will remove anything that is big enough to be a microbe such as bacteria. So they remove the bugs that send milk off.

Yes I'm sure you would have a lot of trouble making yogurt from this stuff (not sure about butter) as yogurtification (to coin a techibubble phrase) requires a bacterium to process the milk into yogurt.

I have to say I do love the Cravendale adverts as they are very silly (which is one of the things I love in comedy ) but the word 'purer' in there is just a load of old cods testicles.

I wouldn't mind trying to make yoghurt out of Cravendale milk though. Because we make yoghurt (about 3 or 4 litres a week) and you boil the milk first - which probably kills most bacteria?

Then you cool it to between 39 and 45°C and stir in a spoonful of last week's yoghurt. So I've always assumed that is where the bacteria come from. After that it goes into an insulated jar - to stay at that temperature for 8 hours.

And it's scrummy.

Gah - what I meant to say is, that if you boil the milk anyway, would it matter that you've used filtered milk? Or are there indestructible bacteria in milk?

You might need to boil the milk to change its structure to be able to make the yoghurt.

Oh really? I have no idea why I do what I have to do - but the yoghurt is fantastic.

Once again 20seconds of googling: yogurt milk boiling - gives

http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/yogurt.htm

"Heat the milk:

Heating the milk is done for a few reasons:
To sterilize/pasteurize the milk so that the yogurt bacteria/culture as a hospitable place to grow in. It is not desirable to also incubate possible "bad" or contaminating bacteria that might be present in the unsterilized milk.
Boiling the milk helps to a smooth thick yogurt.
Boiling the milk also helps stop the whey from separating out quite as much. (The "water" you sometimes find on the top of your yogurt is whey.)"

Luckily, living in the Somerset countryside I can get locally produced, unhomogenised, whole milk at the local shop. Yes, it costs slightly more than the messed about, flavoured slop-water that the supermarkets sell these days but it's worth the extra cost to get 'proper' milk. I've never understood why people would willingly drink semi-skimmed milk and have never bought into the lower fat milk thing being anything other than a sales campaign to push milk sales.

on the hand, apart from my liking for all things yoghurty and cheesy, I don't understand why human adults (or children, come to that) drink something that is produced specifically for baby cows.

Especially putting it in tea and coffee. (and I like a so I'm including me in there)

Thing is, I find full fat milk too greasy, just acquired taste I guess. I like it occasionally for luxury (bit of Gold Top if I'm doing coffee for a nice breakfast or using it in baking for scones etc, though I prefer single cream for that! ) but I get very stuffed up and snotty ifI drink milk so it's an occasional treat and I dont drink much T & C...

Fair enough Sho, I bow to your superior knowledge of yogurt making

That process is remarkable like the way we culture bacteria in our labs actually. You make a nice friendly nourishing soup for them to grow in, sterilise it to kill anything competing and then innculate with the bacteria you want to grow.