What is it actually about?
When we say fresh milk, most of us imagine a tasty glass of cold milk. In reality, it is a specific term used for milk treated by gentle pasteurization. Among the three types of milk, it is literally the golden mean. Let's talk more about it now.
Surely no one needs an explanation of how we get milk. However, fewer people know that milk after milking can be processed or sold directly to the end customer. Nowadays, vending machines or various mobile "fresh" milk shops are common. We deliberately put the word fresh in quotation marks here because properly, such milk should be called raw. Raw milk has not undergone any treatment and goes directly to customers after milking. Such milk should never be drunk directly but always heat-treated at home.
The most common heat treatment is boiling the milk, i.e., sterilization. Today, the so-called UHT method is very popular, which is a very rapid heating of milk to 135°C but only for a very short time of 2-3 seconds, then quickly cooled. Such milk is known as long-life and lasts several months. The price for this is that we consume safe but completely dead milk. From such milk, you will never make cheese, yogurt, or curd. It also lasts outside the refrigerator and tolerates 24°C, but if it spoils, it becomes just an unpleasant smelling mass.
So the golden mean is gentle pasteurization. Raw milk is heated in the dairy or at home to 72°C for at least 15 seconds. Due to the lower temperature used, there is a significant difference in protein breakdown compared to UHT heating; pathogens are destroyed, but life in the milk is preserved. Such milk must be stored cold and lasts about a week there. The advantage is that if it sours, you can prepare curd from it, for example. Such curd will not have the sensory characteristics of store-bought curd, but do not worry. The change is caused by the fact that during fermentation, you do not use a noble mesophilic culture as done, for example, in the SABI dairy, but a slightly different fermentation, so-called wild fermentation, occurs. This does not mean that such curd is inedible. It has a slightly sour taste and smell, but since curd is usually mixed with other ingredients, it should not be a big obstacle.
