We have friends who own a Jersey cow and they occasionally give us a gallon. Don't know much about freezing it because we drink it as fast as they give it to us. You are in for a real treat !! Fresh milk is a real blessing that most folks never get to experience.

We've toyed with getting a milk cow of our own, but I worry about the committment they require. You don't get a day off without someone willing and able to do the milking for you. Just a tad more involved than simply gathering the eggs :-) Enjoy your two gallons !!!!

hi roberta - both milk and cream freeze well. I've frozen both fresh and pasturized cream when I've had any left over. It looks a little glumpy when it thaws, but it works just the same as before freezing. If you leave your couple of gallons to sit (in fridge) for a day or so, the cream will form a layer on top of the milk. You can suck it up with a turkey baster (like we used to) or some other ingenious method ;)

And homemade ice-cream with fresh cream is the ultimate best ever!

Haven't checked in here for some time but this caught my eye.
Re: Your own cow. How much milk will you use weekly? We used to use about 5-6 gallons when the kids were home and had our own Jersey. I loved it!

You can always raise her calf and then let the calf have what you don't need or just turn it in to her 24/7 if you are going to be gone a couple of days. Just remember if you let her go unmilked or the milk isn't all milked out by you or the calf she will dry up. When the calf gets older he or she can probably take it all.

We loved that skimmed milk and home-made butter. Ah for the good old days.

Well, the ice cream was absolutely wonderful, the butter tasted like butter, the cream was great. Maybe I removed too much of the cream, but we really couldn't taste much difference between "cooked" milk and the raw milk. In a blind taste test, we could just barely taste the difference.

Once interesting thing though is that with most of the cream taken off the top, the result was compared with whole milk from the store. They were equally as rich. I doubt we would buy it again (it was $6 per gallon!) but it was a great experience.

Cant raw milk make a person very ill,If I remember right a young girl died a few years ago from virus she got from drinking raw milk???Is that rare

Many people my age grew up on raw milk and I expect most people who own cows don't boil their milk before they drink it. But -- yes, you could die from a virus doing just about anything. I'm sure this is the reason we now have "pasturized" milk.

Dairy accounts for only 1% of all food born illness and of that, pasteurized dairy is the biggest culprit. Commercially produced milk has many MANY more opportunities to become infected along the way to your fridge than the smaller organic raw-milk farms. They are allowed to have more bacteria in the milk both before and after pasteurizing and their somatic cell count (puss and blood) is often 5-6 times higher than in raw milk.

Pasteurization was necessary before we knew how to sterilize holding tanks and equipment. Now it's used mostly to extend the shelf life of milk, which incidentally is silly since raw milk lasts 10-17 days when properly chilled, and even after souring it is edible. Pasteurized milk doesn't sour, it putrefies and isn't safe to consume. It's basically a dead food waiting to rot. Real raw milk is still alive and full of enzymatic activity and wonderful healthy flora. Check out realmilk.com for more info. My family and I travel two hours each way for raw, grass-fed organic milk. There's nothing like it!

I think there is still some kind of law in England that cheese must be made from pasteurized milk. However, top chefs have made such a huge deal about the superiority of raw milk cheese, that it's in huge demand.

A couple of years ago, I was fortunate to visit a HUGE market in the south of England where they sold unpasteurized cheese. The market opened at 8:00 a.m. - the UNpasteurized cheese was sold out by 8:15 a.m. (we got some - delicious). Those markets are regularly inspected by the government, so maybe there was an exception for farmer's markets? I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't the risk of getting tuberculosis, the reason why governments world-wide first demanded pasteurizing milk?

The other thing that I'm curious about is that in England, milk is pasteurized, but not homogenized. Milk in England lasts one day in the refrigerator. Therefore, I can only conclude that it is the homogenization that extends the shelf-life. Is this correct?

In my childhood (in England), milkmen delivered milk every day to your house before dawn. The cream would rise to the surface, so people would pour the top part into their morning coffee, the rest into their cereal, and would refrigerate any unused portion. Most milk would be silver top, but extra rich, such as comes from Jerseys would be gold top - the very best.

Like paleo huntress, I would not hesitate to use raw grass-fed, organic milk. Dairy conditions are very, very clean, and the udders are properly washed, etc.

Actually, I did succumb to temptation with one of my sheep. I had to hand milk her to feed an orphan lamb until I could get milk replacer. The ewe was NOT used to that kind of treatment, and highly objected, and kicked and thrashed knocking goodness knows what into the milk.

Sorry - this is gross.......I spooned out anything I could see immediately, before the contamination had a chance to spread, plus a lot in the surrounding area, and then drank it. Oh my......I don't actually like milk....but I LOVED this! Rich, creamy, sublime...

If you're as fortunate as paleo huntress, to be even two hours away from a source of raw milk - go for it!

I will get food-poisoning at the drop of a hat, but never, ever from food purchased from small farms, no matter if they're in the US, Canada, UK, or France. However, I've got really, really sick twice from Subway, once from a fried chicken place, several times from restaurants, and a few other times from gatherings like picnics that serve food that has been out too long, etc.

Despite all the risks I've taken on my farm, and other's farms, and unpasteurized, this and that - NO illness - JUST delicious taste.

Let's face it - small farm equals less crowded conditions, often better care for the animals, and therefore, better taste, and less incidence of infection.

I'm sold!

We have gotten raw milk before and it was a real treat, I made homemade butter with it and it was wonderful, as well as the cream for coffee...

My mother grew up traveling all around the country and they would often stay at small bed & breakfast type places with small farms/cows, ect.. (WWII era) and when she was older, her TB test would always be positive but she didn't actually have it ... guess it was just enough to give her immunity or something so the prick test would turn positive but it wasn't ever contracted. Never caused any problems and she had no qualms about raw milk - cow or goat even later on in life.

Personally, I like goats milk better than cow ... but not exactly easy to come by.

I have some raw milk that has been sitting in a pot in my fridge for awhile waiting to be made into cheese. When I pulled it out the layer of cream had thickened quite a bit and turned the color of butter on top, but undeneath the layer the milk has thickened, and upon tasting it (just a tiny bit, since it only smelled like souring milk)it really does remind me of yogurt. Is this safe to eat like yogurt? Could I really have accidentally made yogurt in my fridge?