How can you tell if milk is raw? I mean unpasteurized, straight from the cow. I got a connection in my area (selling raw milk is illegal in canada) but i want to know if its raw or if hes selling me something hes buying from safeway lol. I was told that after a small period of time a layer will cream will develop on raw milk, but this has happened yet with the milk he gave me. Does that necessarily mean it isn't raw milk?
You can't really tell if milk is unpasteurized. Pasterization is when you heat something to kill of some of the bacteria and stuff. It is different than sterilization in that it is not heated to that high of temperature and does not completly kill everything. The only real way to tell would be to look at a small sample of milk under a microscope and compare how much stuff you see with a sample of store bought milk. Even than I don't think you could tell. You pretty much have to take this persons word for it or tell them to show you as they milk the cow. Also, why do you want to drink raw milk?
yes milk straight out of the cow will separate but so will single pasteurized whole milk. The best way to tell is most raw milk has a very short shelf life. If it starts to turn in less than a week, most likely it is unpasteurized
Thank you for the responses. The reason why I'm looking for raw milk is because pasterization and homgenization destroy much of the nutritional value of milk. Raw milk is among the healthiest foods on the planet. Theres actually a huge nutritional difference between raw milk and the milk you buy at the supermarket. Also, the kinds of farms that sell raw milk are more likely to be farms that operate more naturally (feed cattle grass instead of grain, don't overmilk or use antibiotics, etc.). These kind of practices result in higher quality milk. Yeah, this milk I bought didn't last very long...it went sour in less then a week. That doesn't really mean anything though; it could of been older milk. I was informed the milk is hostein, which I believe has less cream. Still, there is zero cream.
It sounds like you either got homgenized milk, though I am not sure why they would do that to raw milk, or you got skim milk. You should ask. If you don't trust your source maybe you should find another one.
haha I like these people who are all like wtf are you doing drinking raw milk. it's funny. But yeah, when we had a reliable source of raw milk the taste was the same but the texture was a lot creamier yet more watery? I guess this was from being unhomogized so the cream and milk were not bound together yet had not separated into layers. We were getting jersey milk, which is pretty damn creamy, but we never gave it time to separate because we were making kefir with it immediately. However, we also have had store bought milk that wasn't homogenized and it did separate so I assume raw milk would as well if I had given it time to.
Oh, you wanna get gross huh? I love raw whole milk, so check this out... You can milk a dead walrus, sometimes getting as much as 16 quarts of milk. You won't believe it, but the same dead walrus, an hour later, will give almost the same volume of milk. You can continue to get milk for up to two weeks after death. This is an important survival strategy of the Inuit hunter. Walrus Kifer anyone? ZW eace:
