It’s taken me a while to sit down and post this, but Serena blessed us with a beautiful Jersey Bull calf on Mother’s Day! Not only do we have a fine, healthy calf, that will eventually become steaks and hamburgers, but we also now have a massive supply of fresh, raw, MILK! The excitement is only dimmed slightly when the alarm sounds at 5 a.m. every morning…EVERY MORNING….we milk her at 5 in the morning and 5 in the evening everyday…rain or shine.  She is sharing a minimum of 6 gallons of milk a day with us…and feeding baby “Bullet”. He is growing nicely…full of spunk!

You might wonder what in the world we do with 6 gallons of milk everyday….30 gallons a week.  There are days we wonder that, too!  We do offer it to friends and family for $3 a gallon, but still usually have 10-20 gallon each week that is not spoken for by others.  I use this to make yogurt, cottage cheese, butter, sour cream, butter milk, and cheeses. I am still learning the cheese process which has many variables but is actually a fairly simple process.  I will share posts with these processes as I learn them.  Separating the cream from the first step of many of these processes. We also drink the milk with most of the cream removed, reserving it for sour cream and butter, although Papa likes to eat his Corn Flakes soaked in cream rather than milk. 🙂  I will show you my simple and inexpensive technique of separating the cream from the milk in the following pictures.

By using a siphoning system, I let gravity do the work an the only purchase I made here was the clear tubing, costing around 50 cents.

The surface for my original container of whole, raw milk is propped up slightly so that the liquid goes into one area. The end of the tube sits in the lowest point so that the milk is drained as much as possible without getting much of the cream.

Some of the cream invariably sticks to the side of the container, but can be scraped into the cream container when finished. If you look closely, you can see the line where the cream has risen to the top of the milk. The milk is siphoned from the bottom of the milk until only the creams remains in the container.

The milk is drained into another container for storage in the refrigerator or use for yogurt, cheese, cottage, cooking, etc.

I will share here the reason that you don’t leave the milk that you are separating to take pictures of the cottage cheese in another pot! Took me more time than I want to admit to clean up this mess!  I still need to pull out the stove and check for the damage under it.

There’s not much modern equipment that I use for this process, but there are some things that are a bit more modern when it comes to making our dairy products.  The whole idea of a milk cow and making our own dairy items goes way back to our ancestors’ way of life and true Pioneering and I love every part of it.  I will post more products that I use our raw Jersey milk for over the next few days, adding more as I learn new processes.