Leaving Milk At Room Temperature & Fermentation?

[Samya]

I was just wondering how long isit safe to leave raw milk out at room temp before consumption?

I find that I tolerate warm milk much more than when it's cold from the fridge (makes me pee like a racehorse on trackday!) and would like to be able to leave it to sit at room temp for more than a couple of hours. I also find that I can read satiety signals much clearer with warmer milk. I've searched around the net and found conflicting information; I figure people that drink plenty of milk could be able to help more than the generic info on websites like livestrong.com etc.

I'm also interested in fermenting raw milk, as many cultures that consume dairy tend to do so.
If anyone has a good resource of info on this it would be much appreciated.

Thanks for any tips :)

 

[Marcus1000]

Hello Atma,

In my experience, as a humble milk drinker, as long as raw milk does not smell weird it should be fine to drink.
If you want to minimize fermentation the raw milk should be in a closed (air-tight) bottle.
I discovered a months old bottle of raw milk in the garage some time ago. I took of the lid to smell it, and it was still not smelling weird. It just had a sort of a cheese-like smell and the whey was seperated from the rest.
Had the lid not been closed tightly, it would have smelled horrible.

What kind of product do you want to make from raw milk? Yoghurt? Kefir?
To ferment something from milk you're going to need a starter of some sort.
For fermenting yoghurt you should have a yoghurt starter, for kefir some kefir grains.
Kefir is very easy to make if you have grains for them, you just add in kefir grains in a bottle of raw milk, let it sit at room temp for about 24 hours, and you drain it and re-use the grains.
Yoghurt there are many different methods, generally you're going to have to heat the yoghurt to just below boiling temperature, then let it cool down to room temperature, then add in the yoghurt starter and let it sit for like 8 hours.
You're gonna have to experiment with amount of kefir grains/yoghurt starter and time needed to ferment. It changed greatly with the type of air you have indoors and also the temperature. On Google you can also find a lot of information about it (Google: how to make milk kefir / how to make homemade yoghurt).

Regarding the milk temperature, it is known here that the best thing to do is to drink milk at/above room temperature. Cold milk is known to be much harder to digest. A cold liquid is also going to have your body wasting energy to heat it to body temperature. emoji_milk:

,Marcus

 

[Samya]

Thanks for the tips Marcus,

I usually leave a pint of milk on a radiator at home to warm it up for breakfast, then leave a bottle at room temp for an hour or so if I'm at work. Maybe some kind of electric/USB powered coffee mug warmer could work well too.

I definitely feel as if I assimilate warm milk much better than cold, hopefully one day I'll be able to try some straight from the cow.

I think I'll try some homemade kefir first, then maybe look into making my own yoghurt.