Home-Dairying, Banana Milkshakes, and Spare Egg Whites
About a 3 minute read
14th Feb, 2022
This super-short post is not an in depth how-to post. It has commentary on home-dairying, a tongue-in-cheek recipe for raw-milk banana milkshake, and something easy and useful to do with your egg whites when you only need the yolks. There are also a few links to related resources that I hope you'll find helpful.
More...
I love home-dairying. I love the calm, steady presence of cows, I'm as much a sucker for cute calves as anyone is, and I love the thrill of our own real, raw milk, produced as ethically as we know how.
I'm acutely aware of what a privilege and a luxury it is to watch my kids make themselves a milkshake using ingredients that all came from right here on this farm. I don't know how to feed them any healthier than that.
But. Yes, there is a but. Home-dairying is hard work. It's time-consuming and it's occasionally discouraging and even heart-breaking when you make a mistake or things just don't go according to plan.
Just sayin'.
In this post I'm not sharing any how-to's on home-dairying, no magic bullets to make it easier or less time-consuming, nothing special at all, really, just those few thoughts, and the following steps (below the pic) that sprang to mind recently when I took this quick snap of my daughter making banana milkshake.
Raw-milk Banana Milkshake instructions:
- Put your cow with a bull, wait 9 months, then deal with the huge workload that a new calf brings to a small family farm. Add "cow-calf management" (here's a really great "how-to and why-to" read on ethical "cow-calf dairying") and "milking" to your daily chores.
- After you've milked the cow, bring that precious liquid to the kitchen and strain it through a fine mesh strainer (don't use cloth strainers or you'll have to add washing milky cloth strainers to your to-do list, which you do not want to do).
- Chill the milk fast to discourage the growth of unfriendly bacteria, but not in the freezer unless you remember to set a timer to prompt you to get it out before it freezes. (Un-homogenized milk that has been frozen develops little lumps in the cream when you defrost it. To me it makes no difference, but many people, my kids included, strongly prefer their raw milk unfrozen.)
- Rinse all your milky stuff immediately and thoroughly with cold water, then wash it all with hot soapy water, then rise it thoroughly to get rid of all the soap, then dry it hygienically (no damp, germ-ridden tea towels!) so as to have clean equipment ready next time you need it.
- FINALLY we get to the yummy part. USe a stick blender or blender to mix a bit less than 2 liters of your milk (which by now is worth its weight in gold) with 4 to 6 yolks from today's eggs and about 6 ripe bananas. YUM. (Or use mulberries and a drizzle of honey instead of ripe bananas.)
You could skip steps 1 to 4, which I'm frequently very tempted to do. But then you might not have access to raw milk.
I'm making the assumption, since you're reading here, that you know full well why having access to raw milk is a big deal. But just in case, here's some extra reading on the topic.
Raw eggs in milkshakes
Raw egg yolks are super nutritious — a complete package of everything needed for a fertilized speck to develop into a miraculous little chick. If they come from happy, well-nourished chickens and are super fresh, you can feel pretty good about adding them to milkshakes.
Raw egg whites are not quite as digestible as the yolks and eating a lot of them on a regular basis isn't a great idea (read more here). A whole raw egg here and there won't hurt you at all, but since we drink quite a lot of smoothies and milkshakes with raw eggs in them, I leave out the whites.
My favorite no-fuss way to use up the egg whites is to fry them up...
...and feed them back to the chooks.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading!
Please leave a comment about home-dairying, using raw eggs, or anything else that comes to mind 🙂