You may have heard me talk about adjustment periods and cheesemaking before. What does that mean?
What Is An Adjustment Period?
I define adjustment periods for cows and goats – anytime when things are not as they normally would be.
Some common examples of adjustment periods include;
- A new home
- A new diet
- Postpartum
- Illness, trauma or after medications like antibiotics
- Late lactation
- Changes in milking schedule such as a new milker, switching to once a day milking or weaning
What Do These Adjustment Periods Do To The Milk?
These are just a few of the times your cow may be going through an adjustment period and when they are going through these changes, their milk is different than it usually is. Standardly milk comes out of the udder with a few key structural and chemical points that allow cheesemaking to progress as normal;
- Ph of 6.8
- Mineral balance
- Bacterial balance
As a cheesemaker, it is helpful to anticipate these adjustment periods, and either abstain from cheesemaking during these times, choose fresh cheeses rather than aged cheeses, or accept that failure is a higher risk than normal.
Will It Turn To Cheese?
As you have heard me say before, milk is meant to be made into cheese. Its very structure has been created to facilitate this process, and really no matter what, it will eventually follow a path of decomposition and turn into cheese, whether it is edible or not. So that brings me to my first point, just because it turns to cheese, doesn’t mean it will make good cheese.
Establishing A Baseline
As homesteaders, we are at a huge advantage in the fact that we are able to make cheese with milk that comes from one or two dairy animals. Our small herd means that we become very in tuned with how our milk acts, and it doesn’t take long for us to establish a baseline of how quickly things happen and how you can expect it to act. As your cow goes through adjustment periods it can be knocked off of its baseline and its sometimes difficult to troubleshoot around these milk changes.
The Adjustments To Watch For
A New Home
Bringing a new cow home creates a lot of stress on the cow; Dietary stress, physical stress and udder stress. Not only will your new cows diet be different, but the physical stress of long travel, the holding back of milk during those first few milking will all effect the milk quality and structure.
For example, I used some of my first milk after bringing my new cow home to make mozzarella. When I opened the pot lid after only 30 min I found that the entire curd mass had sunk out of site below the whey. I have never seen that happen before, but following my jingle for mozzarella (if it sinks below the whey, it is probably ok to stretch right away), I went ahead and heated the whey to see if it would stretch. It stretched beautifully, but that could have been a very different story, had a I waited a little longer.
A little bit of sinking is normal with milk that is on the slightly acidic side, but I have never seen it sink so far below the whey. This tells me that the acidity of the milk must have been significantly lower than 6.8 on the ph line. I also noticed that after putting the mozzarella in cold water to harden, it started to degrade very quickly and turn slimy and almost to mush. This is a common thing that happens with prolonged submersion in water, as the calcium (which is the glue that binds your cheese together) is pulled from the cheese to create a calcium balance within the cheese and the water (diffusion). This process is usually much more gradual. For example, if I normally leave cheese for 20-30 min in cold water, I won’t notice this. My adjustment milk was in the water for 5-10 min and it was almost mush. This tells me that the calcium content in the milk was probably a lot lower than it should have been which can be caused by the diet adjustment and stress.
Late Lactation
As cows enter late lactation (late lactation refers more to how close your cow is to having their calf, verses how long they have been in milk) you will notice changes in it. These changes can affect the acidity, the fat globules, and the calcium content.
My old milk cow Rainbow was coming to the close of a near 2 year lactation, bred and approaching her calving date, I found it near impossible to make cheese with her milk. I could never get it to coagulate! I finally resolved to add in calcium chloride, and was able to achieve coagulation. A few months later when we started eating some of that cheese, it was terrible! The milk not coagulating had been telling me something, the structure of the milk was no longer conducive to cheesemaking and I should have listened. So often we feel this urge to step away from the natural process of milk and so often we are burned because of this.
Fun fact of the day, this cheese was the poster child for Cheese From Scratch in the first few months of my business. It was one of Rainbows late lactation cheeses and was disgusting. Its the only way I could justify packing around a cheese to take photos of!
#fraud
As a cows body approaches her calving, not only is her body working overtime to grow the baby ( calves grow something like 70% in the last 3 months) she is getting ready to produce milk that will serve the new calf, rather than the old calf. Newborn calves don’t need milk, they need colostrum and colostrum is not meant to coagulate into cheese. As well, the cows body is pulling minerals to grow the calf, meaning less for the milk. Often times even people who do not make cheese will notice late lactation milk changes. For example, butter can become almost impossible to make in late lactation!
Postpartum
How many times have I tried to make cheese in the first week of a postpartum cow, only to have my coagulation fail, or my cheese become contaminated. Calves do not need milk in the first week, they need colostrum. Even as the colostrum starts to look like milk, it is still heavy with the properties of colostrum and has been created that way to serve the little calfs dietary needs.
Not only do I sometimes struggle with coagulation issues during the first postpartum week, but I often struggle with contamination issues. The somatic cell count of postpartum milk is a lot higher than regular raw milk, whether this is just from postpartum shedding or bacteria, who is to know, but all I know is that every time I have tried to make cheese with milk that is less than a 5-7 days postpartum, I have regretted it and I scrape my contaminated cheese into the chicken bin.
I always wait until at least day 5 before using my postpartum milk for cheese and I usually break the postpartum cheesemaking fast with a fresh cheese like mozzarella.
During Illness, Trauma or After Medications
This one is pretty self explanatory, you obviously don’t want to be making cheese from milk that comes from a sick cow. Milk cows are delicate creatures and the safety of their milk, depends on their health. Things like udder trauma should always be watched carefully as they open up the milk to a higher risk of contamination, with udder trauma I would be testing for mastitis often.
I would love to hear some studies done in the future relating to raw milk and antibiotic treatment. My guess is that antibiotic therapy will greatly affect the bacterial balance in raw milk. This will create more of an opportunity for contamination, as well as a more difficult time starting a clabber culture. This is just a theory, but I would be very interested to know if there is a correlation between cows that have had antibiotic therapy and clabber success.
Diet Changes
If your cows diet significantly changes, I always give it a few days to even out. I know that milk changes during significant diet changes because I have seen it! As I said above, milk cows are delicate creatures, every time something is switched up, it affects that milk structure slightly until everything adjusts or evens out. For example. This cream line below was the first day that my milk cow Rainbow went out on fresh grass after a winter of hay.
To me, I take this as physical evidence of the importance of waiting out the adjustment periods. If I had tried to make cheese with this milk, it would not have worked very well. The fat content would have been too high and the coagulation of my milk would most likely have been weak.
Other Adjustment Periods and Thoughts On When You Should Make Cheese
Things like weaning your calf, changing to once a day milking, a new relief milker; there are so many things that can throw your cow for a loop. Should you not make cheese during all these times? The answer, is it is up to you! I have made cheese during all of these times and I have learned a lot! Every time I make cheese with adjustment milk, I tend to learn at least one thing I shouldn’t do. Sometimes it turns out – just as my stretchy mozzarella from my new cow did – but sometimes it doesn’t like my late location milk from Rainbow. If you are keen to learn and accept the possibility of fails, make away, but if you really want to monopolize on your time and give your cheese the best chance, don’t make aged cheese with adjustment milk!
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