Last year I didn’t make enough Butter! The reason…. I made too much cheese. Instead of skimming my cream off I was making full fat cheeses, which I don’t regret for a second. The one trouble is…We ran out of butter! My cows dry period ended up being way longer than I had anticipated, and by December of last year I found myself buying butter in bulk. Not only was that expensive, but it just didn’t taste the same. So this year, my vow is that I will make sure I skim off enough cream to get us through the dry period!
I am asked a lot about what cheeses do well with skimmed milk and I want to answer that question for you here today. But first, let’s clarify a few things.
Facts About Skim Milk
- The type of skim milk I’m talking about here is not the same as what you get in the store. Skim milk from the store is water compared to skim milk on the homestead. As I hand skim my milk, it is virtually impossible for me to take off all the cream, which is a good thing. It means that even though I take off the majority of the cream for butter, I still have some left over in my milk and honestly, it is probably comparable to 3.25% milk in the store.
- Skimmed milk cheeses will be firmer and less creamy. For this reason, I only use skim milk for certain cheeses. I would never use skim milk for a cheese like Brie or Gouda where I was really relying on that creaminess.
- In a curd mass, the structure of it is as follows; proteins are glued together by calcium, fat is gently tucked between these proteins. Nothing is holding the fat in. There is no glue. The reason that your fat is able to remain in your cheese is that you are gentle enough with the curd to not jostle it all out. Some cheeses, such as alpine style cheeses, are made in a rough manner. For alpine cheese you whisk your curds to break them apart. This techniques cause a lot of the fat to be jostled out. You will see this as evidenced in your whey after making cheese. The cream will rise to the top of your whey and you will see a noticeable difference in the amount of cream in your whey for a gently made cheese like Gouda, verses a rough cheese like Asiago. My point here – If you are going to loose it anyway, why not skim it off for butter?!
How To Skim Cream
You may be thinking, duh?! But when we first bought a milk cow, I thought it was ok to dump my cream off. The result was I struggled with butter-making, having too much milk mixed in with my cream. To get the heaviest cream, you need to skim it!
You can skim your cream by using a ladle or a measuring cup. Skim until you start to see milk streaks coming up with your cream. At this point, I leave the remaining cream in the milk and call it a day for skimming.
You have probably heard of “milk pans” at least if you have read little house on the prairie you have. Remember in the Little House in the Big Woods, how the cakes of maple sugar were cooled in the milk pans? But what is a milk pan?
A milk pan was a shallow pan, much like a large pie plate, that was used to pour the fresh milk into. Because these pans were wide and shallow, the milk would cool, the cream would rise to the top, and could be easily skimmed off. You can mimic this at home by placing your fresh milk in a bucket, the wide surface area on the top makes for easy skimming.
I usually skim my cream off after about 24 hours of sitting. Any sooner than this and the cream is usually thinner and harder to skim.
The best cheeses to make with skim milk
1. Asiago
Asiago or any alpine style cheese such as parmesan are great cheeses to make with skim milk. These dryer type cheeses use a whisk to cut the curds into small pieces, these small pieces lend themselves well to the texture of these hard cheeses, but they don’t do much for preserving your fat in the milk.
Traditionally, cheeses like parmesan were made using skim milk from the night before milking, and fresh full fat milk from the morning milking. This gave the monks who made it, cream to make into butter, as well as a cheese that was known for its long term storage.
2. Quick Mozzarella
I love full fat naturally acidified mozzarella. It is one of my top favourite cheeses to make with clabber culture and the flavour is like no other mozzarella you will ever eat. That being said, quick mozzarella made with milk, rennet, and citric acid makes a great pizza mozzarella and lends itself well to skim milk. If I have a lot of skim milk in the fridge, and not a lot of time, this quick 1 hour mozzarella is my go to cheese to make. You can grab my recipe for this citric acid mozzarella in my Beginner Dairy Processing Booklet which is free to my newsletter community. All you have to do is join my newsletter and I will send it to your inbox!
3. Homemade Cheese Whiz
Did I just loose you? I know, most of us think of cheese whiz as a highly processed, one molecule away from plastic, spreadable cheese. I grew up on the stuff and when I began making cheese, I was very excited to come across a recipe that gave me a spreadable cheese with zero chemicals and bonus points, it works great with skim milk! Grab the recipe here.
Additional Resources
- Asiago cheese tutorial on youtube
- Parmesan tutorial in my homestead cheesemaking 101 course
- Learn how to make homemade cheese whiz with this blog post
- Join my newsletter to get my Beginner Dairy Processing Booklet