Does anyone have any ideas where I could source some unprocessed milk?

Here you go..

Stryk Dairy

Don't do this. I used to make homemade cheese and wanted raw milk. My wife was working for a large metro area public health department at the time and she had some of the lab folk talk to me and they told me how many failures they got and each one swore they'd drink poison before raw milk.

There's nothing wrong with raw milk cheeses, and any other cultured or fermented product, as long as it's done properly. No one is suggesting that you drink raw milk.

Ag98 is a very well respected poster on this board and this is in no way a contradiction just my two cents. I have a colleague who is an avid cheese maker, she uses pasteurized non-homogenized milk. She knows her microbiology. I indirectly deal with raw milk as part of my job. I would suggest a good understanding of the risks and an understanding of what you are doing if you choose to use it. Again just my two cents.

Oh trust me, I know when you do things like this that your sanitation and handling procedures have to be spot on. I made a bresaola this year, and I took that first bite with a little trepidation.

MarylandAG said:

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Ag98 is a very well respected poster on this board and this is in no way a contradiction just my two cents. I have a colleague who is an avid cheese maker, she uses pasteurized non-homogenized milk. She knows her microbiology. I indirectly deal with raw milk as part of my job. I would suggest a good understanding of the risks and an understanding of what you are doing if you choose to use it. Again just my two cents.

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All of my wife's coworkers were microbiologists as well. Funny how so many of them are anti raw milk...


The risk/reward just isn't there.

What's the worst that could happen?!

HTownAg98 said:

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There's nothing wrong with raw milk cheeses, and any other cultured or fermented product, as long as it's done properly. No one is suggesting that you drink raw milk.

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The problem is that there's a lot of potential for circular logic in the "as long as its done properly" part.

That sad, since I love raw oysters ...

HTownAg98 said:

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There's nothing wrong with raw milk cheeses, and any other cultured or fermented product, as long as it's done properly. No one is suggesting that you drink raw milk.

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I love me some raw milk.

Used to buy it at Layla farms in Plano.

If done properly, do the good microbes push aside the bad microbes? Like I imagine you can tell if a cheese is bad before you eat it, right? It's going to have a bad smell or weird color or strange taste?

Not so much. Supposedly cheese (and Ice cream...) that's infected w listeria tastes just like uninfected.

Interesting. Is listeria the bacteria that normally causes sickness from unpasteurized milk?

schmendeler said:

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Interesting. Is listeria the bacteria that normally causes sickness from unpasteurized milk?

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The answer is somewhat complicated but overall, I'd say no.

Is it normal to get sick from unpasteurized milk? Probably not in the sense that the Russian roulette stats are that pathogenic bacteria are found less than half the time in dairy samples, based on what I've found by doing some pubmed searches. But "uncommon" for listeria in milk is something like 3% so it's not like getting struck by lightning either.

Is listeria just found in raw milk? Absolutely not! It was the pathogen for the infamous Blue Bell recall and it has been associated with food borne outbreaks in all kinds of dairy and non-dairy sources. And see below:

Is it the most common pathogen from dairy food poisoning? No.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443421/

This is from 2009-2014, so I think it does not include the Blue Bell outbreak.

Quote:

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We used a total of 87 outbreaks causing 750 laboratory-confirmed illnesses and 215 hospitalizations in this analysis (Table 1). The incidence rates of STEC, Salmonella spp., and Campylobacter spp. illnesses and hospitalizations per 1 billion servings were higher for unpasteurized dairy product consumers than for pasteurized dairy product consumers. Illnesses and hospitalizations caused by L. monocytogenes infections were more often attributed to the consumption of pasteurized cheese than unpasteurized cheese (Table 2). Assuming no change in the consumption of unpasteurized dairy, dairy products contaminated with STEC, Salmonella spp., L. monocytogenes, and Campylobacter spp. were predicted to cause 761 (95% PI 598994) outbreak-related illnesses and 22 (PI 1332) hospitalizations in 2015.

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So, more cases of Listeria were from pasteurized products than unpasteurized dairy products, but we have to normalize for the vastly larger consumption of pasteurized in the US. The fact that this happens for Listeria but not the other pathogens might reflect that Listeria is harder to kill with heat than the others.

From what I can tell, milk risk >> cheese risk, but the latter varies a lot based on the kind of cheese. Not surprisingly, raw milk outbreaks have been associated with things like queso fresco, which is similar to ricotta in that it's just made by curdling the milk with salt and acid so there are no other bacteria to eventually outcompete the bad ones. Acid and salt are both antibacterial to some extent, but how effective is going to depend on how much was used among other factors.

This is not an area where I'm a real expert so take the above with appropriate caveats.

Maroon...

I've worked in the "industry' for38 years. Masters in FoodScience and Technology from A&M in 1981. Moving forward with non pasteurized milk is a grave mistake. Just don't do it. All imo.

Interesting. Thank you for the detailed reply!

I've bought some from Healthyway Dairy in Santa Fe that I used to make cheese from. It turned out ok, but it had nothing to do with the milk. It was my first time making cheese so I had nothing else to compare it to.

It was pretty cool to go to the Dairy and see the names of the cows that gave the milk on the bottle.