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| French milk, Ukrainian technology |
Milk used to appear on the
doorstep. A square wire basket with a moveable arrow lived outside the front
door and, as if by magic, each day when we woke up, four silver-topped milk
bottles sat waiting. Unlike Father Christmas, the milkman really does exist. The
more modern habit is, of course, to buy your milk at the supermarket.
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| The other end of this tube is connected to a cow |
This has felt increasingly
strange to us as we can see cows from our house and there are four dairy
farmers in our small village. A couple of times a week, a huge tanker arrives
to take the milk away to a processing place (I don’t know where) then it’s bottled
up and transported again to supermarkets, where we drive to buy our milk, cream,
yoghurt and butter.
The recent row between farmers and supermarkets in the UK made us think about this again and a video on Karl O’Melay’s homesteading blog
provided the answer. We ordered a cream separator from Katya in the Ukraine
now all we needed was a steady supply of milk, so I cycled off see Hubert, who
has a dairy herd of around 40 Holsteins.
We agreed a price and,
once a week I visit him during evening milking and fill up two 5 litre
containers with unpasteurised milk, fresh and warm from the cow. Meanwhile,
Gabrielle has assembled the cream separator and run some warm water through to
bring the internal mechanism up to temperature. About ten minutes cranking
gives us 600ml of cream and 9.4 litres of semi-skimmed milk. The downside is
having to clean all the components of the separator afterwards.
Hubert’s family have been
drinking unpasteurised milk for years without problems. The flock and the milk are
monitored by the authorities and the coop he sells the milk to, so we feel
there is minimal health risk; in fact we wonder whether it might actually be
more healthy containing beneficial bacteria, enzymes and vitamins that
pasteurisation would otherwise remove. It even seems to taste better, in our
opinion. The entry in Wikipedia shows both sides of the argument, and is worth
a read.”
Our next project is to
give the butter churning attachment a go and Gabrielle has yoghurt making on
the list as well. If you want to have milk delivered to your UK door, this site
might help. And, if you’re reading this in France and wonder whether they have “un
homme du lait” read this article (in French) of a French milk producer who’s
looked across the channel for inspiration and decided to try delivering their milk
“à la façon du « milkman » anglais”.
