Monday, October 20, 2008

The 7% Solution


My daughter Blue Umbrella, aka Baby Blue, aka Blue, is certainly the prettiest of the regular milkers and obviously the smartest, and her milk tastes the best. The farmer uses Blue's milk as the daily latte milk, since it is the sweetest. But the farmer didn't want to put her on regular milk test since she is a first freshener and only had a single kid, so she is just milking once a day. On test everyone is milked twice a day.

So the farmer decided to do a one-time test on Blue's milk just out of curiosity. All the other milkers average between 3.5 and 4.5% with their butterfat. They do go up some in the winter, to give them credit for their mediocre efforts, but usually they average around 4% for the year. The butterfat is what makes the milk taste good, and it is what the cheesemakers want to make beautiful cheese.

Sheep have high butterfat, maybe starting around 6%, and this is why people milk sheep, because why else would anyone milk sheep? No offense to the sheep of the world, but if you think the Nubians are low on the IQ totem pole, what until you see the sheep.

There are sheep out there that make Boo look like Stephen Hawking. And that isn't easy.

Anyway, the test came back and of course Blue had the highest butterfat of anyone, and almost double some of the big girls. That's right, 7%. One of her great-grandmothers milked 11%, so we will see what happens in the winter, she may go up even higher.

But anyway, ha. Meanwhile the big large bossy girls fill the pail with water. Yum, delicious, tomme de l'eau, save me a piece, I bet it goes good with gruel.