Post by Olga on Feb 9, 2014 14:59:21 GMT -5
Growing up in Moscow, Russia, the milk we drank was different from what I find in local stores now. European refrigerators being so much smaller than American, our milk came in much smaller packages - the biggest one being 1 liter (1 quart). I don't know for sure, but I think it was pasteurized and probably not homogenized. Either way, when our milk went sour, it was just sour - not rancid like the American store-bought milk. Mom always made stuff from sour milk - a fresh cheese of sorts. She would put in a spoonful of kefir or riazenka or prostokvasha (all traditional sour milk products in Russia) into the milk and let it sit in the warm kitchen. When the curd would start forming, she would put the container with it into another pot with water in it and start gently heating, until the curd firmed up and floated up in the whey. Then she would pour it into a cheesecloth and hang it above the sink, where it would drip all night. Then she would get the curds out, mix it with some sour cream (and a bit of softened butter perhaps?) and sugar until it formed a smooth mass and then add raisins. Delicious!
We really valued fresh milk. In the summer, out in the countryside, mom would find someone who had goats or a cow and buy milk from them. We would go out into the woods everyday and pick wild strawberries, blueberries and raspberries; we would eat a bowl of berries with milk for breakfast and with every meal.
In the crazy times of Perestroika sometimes the milk truck, instead of going to the bottling factory, pulled up on the walkway and sold milk straight out of a nozzle in the back. A great commotion would arise, people would run home for bottles and stand in line for the opportunity to have real full-fat milk. I now wonder how really safe that was!
During our life in Algiers, when I was around 10, mother found a source for fresh cow milk too. Every week we would take a mile-long walk to a little rectangular shed with little square windows. It was no more than a concrete building with a roof, open on one side, and an isle in the middle. There were cows in individual stalls, each had a little window to look out of. As far as I know, they never left the shed. The only thing I saw them eat was day-old bread (and I mean that, it was 1 day old; the French culture was strong in Algiers, there was no "store-bought" bread; there were real bakeries that made bread every morning - bread that smelled like heaven; and so the bread that didn't get sold by the end of the day was discarded).
Now that I have my own cattle, I like to experiment with making things out of milk. Some years back I was on a kefir kick - the real kefir, made by the putting kefir grains into milk. Unfortunately, I was the only one drinking it and I was making way too much - my kefir grains were very vigorous. It ended badly for my kefir grains - I tried to starve them for too long and ended up killing them. I have better luck with freezer-kept LAB cultures that I bought from www.getculture.com years ago, they are there when I need them.
But just the other day I remembered reading about "viili", a Scandinavian yogurt. In fact, there are several "northern" types of yogurt, all of them mesophilic. That means, no heating of the milk is required, it makes at room temperature. Eureka! That's how my mother made it! I don't know why it never crossed my mind before.
So now I'm off on an adventure of rediscovering!
We really valued fresh milk. In the summer, out in the countryside, mom would find someone who had goats or a cow and buy milk from them. We would go out into the woods everyday and pick wild strawberries, blueberries and raspberries; we would eat a bowl of berries with milk for breakfast and with every meal.
In the crazy times of Perestroika sometimes the milk truck, instead of going to the bottling factory, pulled up on the walkway and sold milk straight out of a nozzle in the back. A great commotion would arise, people would run home for bottles and stand in line for the opportunity to have real full-fat milk. I now wonder how really safe that was!
During our life in Algiers, when I was around 10, mother found a source for fresh cow milk too. Every week we would take a mile-long walk to a little rectangular shed with little square windows. It was no more than a concrete building with a roof, open on one side, and an isle in the middle. There were cows in individual stalls, each had a little window to look out of. As far as I know, they never left the shed. The only thing I saw them eat was day-old bread (and I mean that, it was 1 day old; the French culture was strong in Algiers, there was no "store-bought" bread; there were real bakeries that made bread every morning - bread that smelled like heaven; and so the bread that didn't get sold by the end of the day was discarded).
Now that I have my own cattle, I like to experiment with making things out of milk. Some years back I was on a kefir kick - the real kefir, made by the putting kefir grains into milk. Unfortunately, I was the only one drinking it and I was making way too much - my kefir grains were very vigorous. It ended badly for my kefir grains - I tried to starve them for too long and ended up killing them. I have better luck with freezer-kept LAB cultures that I bought from www.getculture.com years ago, they are there when I need them.
But just the other day I remembered reading about "viili", a Scandinavian yogurt. In fact, there are several "northern" types of yogurt, all of them mesophilic. That means, no heating of the milk is required, it makes at room temperature. Eureka! That's how my mother made it! I don't know why it never crossed my mind before.
So now I'm off on an adventure of rediscovering!
....it was nasty gritty and sort of spicy as well.