How do you chill your Goats milk quickly? I was having a major problem with off tasting milk until I started really focusing on the chilling. I've found that if I can get the milk down to 40' within 30-45 minutes that it doesn't have that goaty flavor. I've been using 2 splatterware metal pitchers and placing them in gallon ziploc bags ans packing ice around them then adding a bit of water to the ice to fill in the little places. This is working ok for now but I'm using a Ton of ice and if I start milking another doe it's not going to work because I won't have enough pitcher space for the extra milk. Does anyone have any suggestions on a different setup? I did some research online and haven't gotten much info. People talk about putting the milk in the freezer and stirring it but I don't think that will chill the milk as quickly as I'm wanting. It's really important to me that I can figure out how to make this work as both my daughter and I are intolerant to cows milk and goats milk is working great for both of us now.
You need to be a member of Nigerian Dwarf Dairy Goats to add comments!
Replies
Bad taste in milk is either caused by bacteria or nutrient deficiency. The only thing that chilling does is slow the growth of bacteria, so the milk won't start to taste bad until after a couple of days. I'm not talking about a bad bacteria, so don't worry about getting sick. My daughter just finished her PhD in biological chemistry, and one of her projects was trying to improve the taste of milk in Kenya because the bottling plants get their milk from a bunch of small dairies that don't pay attention to hygiene. AND they don't chill the milk quickly, so the bacteria starts to grow rapidly. The milk is pasteurized, but that does not get rid of the bacteria -- it only kills it -- so the milk still tastes terrible because it has dead bacteria in it. I also spoke to someone who used to live in Africa, and he said that it pretty much tastes horrible all over the continent because of the lack of hygiene and not being chilled until it's transported to the bottling plants. My daughter was basically trying to filter out the bacteria that was causing the bad taste, which she could do, but the filter also trapped the butterfat, so the milk would be skimmed. Unfortunately, they wanted whole milk, so her filter was not used.
I've also read that vitamin E deficiency can cause bad tasting milk, and some people say that their goat had bad tasting milk because it was cobalt deficient, although I haven't found anything published that verified that. Vitamin E is plentiful in green forage, so you would probably only see a deficiency in that if your goats are not on pasture. Late winter is prime time for vitamin E deficiency as stored hay ages, and the vitamin E level goes down. Sweetlix minerals have the highest level of cobalt I've found in any mineral, including the so-called "cobalt blocks," which are really just glorified blue salt blocks. Here is more info on vitamin E and cobalt:
https://thriftyhomesteader.com/vitamin-e-goats/
https://thriftyhomesteader.com/goats-cobalt/
I don't have a real answer to this, but where I am we are in the 90's through the day and all I do for my milk is bring it in and strain it and put it in the freezer for about 30-40 minutes and I have had no goat taste at all. Even when it is sitting in the fridge for days it is still just as delicious and tastes sweet and wonderful and can't tell the difference from that or cow's milk. We do have our nigerians from milking lines so I don't know if that makes a difference in quality of milk, but I will always have a milking line nigerian dwarfs. Also yes, you could try putting immediately in ice water. I haven't had to do that.
Ice water immediately initially. You don't need pitchers, use a bucket if you have more than one jar to put in there (or any large deep pan).
In the beginning, I put it in the freezer for half and hour because I read that was what to do. UNTIL my son pointed something out. Putting it in ice water cools it faster because of the transfer of heat. Putting it in the freezer does not transfer but only cools the outside which takes much longer to lower the temperature. That physics we learned in high school we thought we would never use - this is one of those uses.
I actually have an insulated ice bucket (without lid) that I keep in the refrigerator so it is always cold and often the water still has ice in it from the day before. Also, while the bags with frozen water seem great, they will not cool the water as quickly as ice, again a physics thing. As the ice melts, the melted water stays around the ice rather than dissipate into the entire container of water and reduces the effectiveness of the ice itself.
I have not done it myself, but adding rock salt to your iced water might bring the temp down faster (think making ice cream). I'll be curious of anyone has tried that.