Squirted out of a cow

[drdoug]

I'm a compromise consumer of dairy produce. On pure ethics, I'd be vegan, but for convenience, taste and nutrition I have milk, cream, cheese and butter from time to time. Happily, I carry the exciting new genetic mutation that means I've retained lactase production in to adulthood so I can eat this stuff without gastric distress.

I keep trying to get the fat content of milk products straight in my head, because they do fall neatly along a spectrum. So here, mostly for my reference but in case anyone else is interested, is a complete-ish list.

Fresh milk:

• Skimmed (red, or red striped top): 0.1% (0-0.5%)
• 1% fat (purple): 1% (duh)
• Semi-skimmed (green): 1.7% (doesn’t vary much)
• Whole (blue, or silver top): 3.6% (legal minimum 3.5%, have seen 3.7%)
• Jersey/Channel Island (gold top): 5% (or thereabouts; often not homogenised)

Interestingly, until 2008, “milk” had to be either skimmed, semi-skimmed, or whole milk; anything else was “milk drink”. Nowadays, you can sell milk with any fat content you like, so long as you show it clearly on the label. Hence "1% fat" becoming a thing only in recent years. Presumably in honour of the financial crisis.

Pasteurised is rapidly heated for a brief period to kill off pathogens, then cooled rapidly. You can buy raw milk that hasn't been pasteurised, but frankly I wouldn't. I have had raw milk a few times when staying on a farm when it'd come out of a cow in the shed next door that morning, but if it's hanging around long enough to go through a sales process I want it pasteurised. TB is just the most obvious of the diseases we just don't get these days (at least, not nearly so much) thanks to pasteurisation. UHT milk is heated much hotter (ultra-high temperature), so it keeps much better, but tastes disgusting, particularly in tea. (The French appear not to drink much fresh milk, and what they do tends to be UHT. Which is another factor making it hard to get a decent cup of tea there, on top of their appalling habit of serving the tea bag and hot water separately so it can't possibly be hot enough to brew properly.) Cravendale milk has been ultra-filtered before it's pasteurised, which gets rid of more pathogens and makes it last longer. If I had a problem with milk going off before I could consume it I might be tempted, but I don't so I'm not, and it does taste slightly funny. Standardised is blended to make sure that the fat content is the fixed amount listed above, adjusting for the variability of what comes out of the animals; almost all milk for sale is standardised. Homogenised is mixed up (I think by squirting it through very, very small holes) so the cream doesn't separate and rise to the top. I think you only ever get unhomogenised milk that's whole or richer, and these days most whole milk is homogenised. I remember the blue tits getting to the milk bottles left by the milk man before we did, piercing the silver foil tops to get at the 'top of'. Which seems like another world and bygone age.

Buttermilk in even more ancient days was the stuff left over when you'd made milk in to butter, hence the name. But these days it's milk that's been fermented to sour and thicken it (bacteria metabolise the lactose in to lactic acid). Allegedly you can drink it on its own, but it tastes revolting to me, but you need it in soda bread as a source of acid to release carbon dioxide from the sodium bicarbonate to make it rise without yeast. It can come in any level of fat content you like, but most of the stuff I've seen in shops is badged 'low fat' and less than 0.5%.

Cream:

• Single cream (red): 20% (min 18%)
• Whipping cream (green): 40% (min 35%, the least you can have and it'll whip up properly)
• Double cream (blue): 50% (min 48%, have seen 51%)
• Clotted cream: 64% (min 55%)

Sour[ed] cream is the high-fat equivalent of buttermilk: cream fermented to turn lactase in to lactic acid to sour and thicken it. Most stuff you get seems to be the same fat content as single cream, but it's much thicker thanks to the lactic acid.

Total aside: sour cream always reminds me of an over-told family anecdote involving my late Dad. We were at a restaurant, and he'd ordered a baked potato. After serving our dishes, the waitress came over with a pot of cream, plopped a spoon in, and got ready to splurge some out. She asked brightly, "Would you like some sour cream on your jacket?", and I and my brothers fell about laughing because it looked like she was about to splat it on his suit.

You can also thicken cream by heat treating it. Clotted cream is always heat treated this way, and you can get extra-thick double cream that has the same fat content but has been heat thickened to make it extra gloopy.

When I was a kid, cream was this amazing expensive luxury that we only got on high days and holidays. So I'm perpetually shocked at how absurdly cheap it is now. I mean, seriously - a double-size pot (300 ml) of double cream is only 85p! In my head it's at least a fiver. Mind you, milk itself it absurdly cheap too. I get slightly annoyed at the 'do they know the price of a pint of milk' shibboleth for politicians - almost nobody who has to care about the precise price of milk buys it in pints these days, because that's a really expensive way of buying it. But it seems like the going supermarket rate for 4 pints is £1, which is frankly staggering.

Elmlea fake cream:

• Single: 14.5% (vs 19%)
• Whipping: 29.9% (vs 40%)
• Double 35.7% (vs 50%)

I’m really not a fan of Elmlea - it doesn’t taste as nice, and I have a strong suspicion that this sort of barmy ‘reduced fat’ product will turn out to be worse for you rather than better. It's not a massive reduction in fat anyway, and palm oil is rather sus as well. On the plus side, it does keep forever, but that's part of what makes me suspect it. If pathogens can't metabolise it, I doubt my insides will do very well on it.

Butter:

• Butter: 80% or thereabouts
• Ghee/beurre noisette: 100%

I'm always surprised how much butter isn't fat. Ghee or beurre noisette is butter melted and then heated so the water content boils off and the solid bits brown a little to give it a nice nutty flavour. (I think to count as really proper ghee you have to start from fresh milk, but I'm not sure.)

Wacky things (found here):

• Breakfast milk: 4.7% (this is a brand from the Channel Islands I’d never heard of - it’s basically homogenised gold top http://breakfastmilk.co.uk/)
• dairy cream (extra thick): 23.5% (I suspect this may be heat treated as well as having slightly more fat than single cream)
• UHT canned spray dairy cream - full fat: 24.2%
• UHT canned spray dairy cream - half fat: 17.3%, rather challenging the usual definition of “half”

Most people I know call this latter stuff ‘squirty cream’, or in coffee shops simply 'cream' without qualification, which caught me out a couple of times until I learned. The French often call it 'crème Chantilly', or just 'Chantilly', which is a travesty because actual crème Chantilly is delicious and only superficially resembles this stuff. In my family-of-birth, we call it ‘whipped product’. (We've not had it in my family-of-choice, but it's a tradition I hope to pass on.) It was the 80s, in the run up to the ozone hole crisis, and anything in an aerosol can was exciting and modern. (And with the help of the wonder product that was CFCs, it was no longer a lethal fire hazard in the hands of pyromaniacal teenagers.) We examined our first can of the stuff with some interest. I suspect the rules about what you could call cream were tighter then, because it didn’t actually say it was cream on the tin. Come to think of it, it probably wasn’t actual cream at all but some eldritch food technology cream substitute. The stuff you buy these days definitely has had considerable attention from the lab folks, but also from the marketing folks, to hide the work of the former through careful lobbying about labelling laws. Anyway, we noted that the packaging said it “makes X ml of whipped product”, where X was some eye-popping multiple of its weight in grams. We decided that the white stuff that comes out of the can must therefore be ‘whipped product’. This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/294225.html, where there are
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