5 Uses for Milk Past Its Prime

If you’ve had raw milk for some time, likely you’ve opened a jug you forgot about of didn’t have time to drink and caught a whiff of a sour scent. Your normally sweet farm fresh milk has now gone bad. Or has it?

Raw milk, unlike it’s pasteurized counterpart, sours instead of spoils. the milk will lose it’s sweetness at varying rates. Raw milk is sweetest when it first comes out of the cow. Pending on proper milking procedures and care by both farmer and consumer, The beneficial bacteria in raw milk causes the milk to sour and thicken as it ages creating what is called clabber. The lack of bacteria in pasteurized milk makes it perfect for mold and spoilage.

Hopefully, if it’s our milk, with proper cooling and handling, it shouldn’t go sour for a week or two! We wrote a blog, Raw Milk Safe Handling, to help go over how to keep your milk from souring for as long as possible.

Sour milk, while maybe unpleasant to drink, is still safe to use in other ways if produced by a farm that focuses on quality! I know some use clabber for cheese making but as I am not experienced in that, I’ll leave it to others to explain how the cheese making process works with clabber. Some of these points will pend on how sour your milk is. Use your discretion on what level of sour milk to use for what purpose.

5 uses for sour milk

• Buttermilk

  You know how buttermilk is a little thick and sour when you buy it from the store? Well, so is soured raw milk! You can replace sour milk for buttermilk in your recipes.

• Yogurt/Kiefer/Cultured Butter

  These foods are designed to ferment! So not the freshest milk is great for these. I wouldn’t maybe use overly sour milk, but it’s great for milk that’s a bit older.

• Cooking

  Again, maybe this is best for milk that hasn’t made it all the way to clabber, but cooking with milk that is a little older is great. Add it to soup or any recipe that calls for milk.

• Pets or livestock

  Don’t personally want to consume it? Share it with your furry (or feathered or whatever) friends! The probiotics and enzymes would be good for them too! Be sure if you give it to your pets, you ease them into it as you would do for any other new food. You can feed it to chickens or pigs too! They’d love it!

• Plant fertilizer

  This one I’m excited about. We’re going to try this on our pasture and alfalfa. Just do either 1 part milk, 1 part water or 1 part milk 2 parts water. I read an article, Milk as Fertilizer, where they explored this. The enzymes and protein in the milk enrich the plants. It also makes the soil more permeable for water and sun to reach it.

This is one of the many amazing things about raw milk: even when it’s past it’s prime, there’s still so many uses for it! Don’t dump your sour milk! Put every drop of that milk magic to use!