Have you ever heard of clabbered milk?
Neither had I until I set out to make homemade yogourt from my fresh raw goat milk.
If you’re the crunchy homesteader type, I don’t need to explain to you why I’m excited about having access to raw milk. But if you’re anyone else, you might be thinking “are you sure drinking raw milk is really safe?”
To which I would say, yes! It’s as safe as the milk you buy at the store as long as you milk your own animal and do it in a sanitary fashion (cleaning the udders before milking, using a clean stainless steel bucket, and filtering and properly storing the milk afterwards).
Unlike some people, I do believe there is an important place for pasteurization in our modern age. The way the diary industry works with mass production and distribution across the country to thousands of grocery stores, using raw milk would be disastrous. It’s just not possible to maintain the proper cleanliness standards to avoid contamination with production on such a mass scale.
But believe it or not, raw milk is much better for you than pasteurized milk. The pasteurization process breaks down a lot of the valuable components of the milk–enzymes, nutrients, and good bacteria (ie, probiotics). It helps heal your gut, cultivates healthy gut flora, and is easier to digest because of the enzymes it still contains.
So it’s not that pasteurized milk is bad for you. It’s just that it’s kinda lame compared to the amazingness of its natural raw form.
Which is why I was dismayed to find that using yogourt starters with raw goat milk required me to scald my milk in order for it to properly work. The natural raw milk bacteria competes with most yogourt starters and leads to a less thick, weaker yogourt. Goat milk is already a bit trickier to work with than cows milk and often creates a less thick yogourt. I also didn’t like having to order in yogourt starters in the first place–they didn’t used to do that way back in the day, so why should I have to rely on it now?
That was when I stumbled across clabbered milk.
Clabbered milk is a fermented dairy product that’s basically just yogourt by another name, and can also be used for making cheese, butter, and acts as a natural leavening agent in baking. It’s also wonderfully healthy for you. And it was a daily household staple for centuries prior to the 1930s.
So why hasn’t anyone heard of it today?
You can’t make it with pasteurized milk.
Clabbered milk is made by placing raw, warm-from-the-udder milk in a clean covered (but not air tight) jar on the counter and allowing it to sit at room temperature until it thickens. Depending on the temperature of your home, this can take a day or two. The natural good bacteria in the raw milk allows it to naturally ferment and turn into a mild, creamy yogourt with a gentle tang. (If you’re using goat milk, the process takes a bit longer to reach the goal, but it’s still very doable. You can read up on it here.)
If you try to do this with pasteurized milk, it will go sour and rot. It’s impossible to make clabber with pasteurized milk because it doesn’t contain the necessary good bacteria anymore.
I was excited to try this because it sounded so much easier than making yogourt. But I was a little wary, since the bulk of my dairy experience has been with pasteurized milk, and we all know how disgusting store bought milk gets when it’s left out at room temperature and turns sour. But to my delight, I followed the directions in the above-linked blog post and it worked! Nice creamy yogourt without any fuss or muss.
Clabber is a lot like having a sour dough starter. Once you get it started, you have to keep feeding it with fresh milk. I don’t have a ton of extra on hand right now since I only have one Nigerian dwarf goat in milk at the moment. But once I get a couple more does in milk I’ll be making a bunch more clabber and experimenting with cheese and butter making from it too!
So there you have it. A dairy product that everyone used to make and consume that no one’s even heard about these days. Makes me wonder what other wholesome, common place practices we’ve forgotten as a society over the years…
But that’s a subject for another day.
