High Quality Dairy? Still a No.

Using local foods for baking? Fine with me. Finding only the best ingredients? Great. Saying that high-quality makes dairy okay? Whoa. That's just not so.

Lea Calderon-Guthe wrote an article on a new Vermont chocolate shop in the Middlebury College student weekly. She quoted Stephanie and Andy Jackson about their store.

The simplicity of Middlebury Chocolates' truffles stems mainly from its all-natural, mostly local ingredients.

The Jacksons use no refined sugar — only Vermont maple syrup and honey as sweeteners, and most of the truffles are made with coconut milk for a smoother texture and a lower dairy content so that they are more agreeable with dairy-sensitive diets like Andy and Stephanie's. Most truffles need butter, however, so the Jacksons still pay homage to the local dairy industry.

"They're not completely dairy-free, but the dairy quality up here is so high that we can handle it a lot better, actually," Andy said. "We also want to keep everything incredibly fresh and just nurture the natural flavors, and the best way to do that is to keep things as local as possible."

This is what I hope they meant. Butter is naturally low in lactose. If you use a dairy substitute to take most of the lactose out of the recipe, what remains in any given truffle would be low enough so that most people with lactose intolerance could undoubtedly have one with no symptoms. That would be true no matter what the quality of the dairy. (And how many chocolate gourmet truffles are made with low-quality butter in the first place?)

For those with dairy allergies, butter remains off limits, period. Same for vegans.

Quality is a good thing. I'm all for it. Quality is more an issue for our taste buds than for our intestines, however, which stubbornly persist in reacting to individual molecules. I'd have a truffle made with no dairy except lactose. I just wouldn't advice someone with an allergy to do the same.

Lebneh and Lebanese Cuisine

Low-lactose products were first made in the Middle East, where, no coincidence, herding and milking of animals began. To keep the dairy products from spoiling in the heat, they were often "soured" or acidified, by using bacterial cultures to turn the lactose into lactic acid.

Rami Zurayk of SlowFood.com tells us more about these products in the course of a fascinating article about Lebanese cuisine.

The processing of milk first started in the Middle East for the purposes of preserving it for long periods of time. Milk yields different products with increasing shelf lives: fresh milk yields yoghurt (laban) then labneh, then cheese. Milk can also be further processed into drier cheeses such as shankleesh. Labneh, since it contains less water, represents a later stage of processing than yoghurt.

Labneh is characterized by its white/cream color and its soft and smooth paste. It is easily spreadable and has a clean and slightly acidic flavor. In households throughout Lebanon, labneh is consumed on a daily basis. It is most commonly eaten fresh drizzled with olive oil and scooped with pieces of pita bread. It is also used as a filling for sandwiches.

Labneh can be made from cow, goat or sheep milk. It contains around 10% fat, 10 % protein, 5 % lactose, 15 % milk solids, and 25-35 % total solids. It has a pH ranging from 3.5-4 (Bodyfelt, 1988).Good quality labneh requires a starter culture consisting of strains of Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus. These bacteria are crucial to a fermentation process that transforms lactose to lactic acid and thus makes labneh more tolerable to lactose-intolerant consumers.

Shankleesh is the only mold-ripened cheese native to the Middle East. It is believed to be of Kurdish origin. Shankleesh is essentially concentrated, skimmed milk yoghurt which is hand-molded and given a smooth outer surface, then ripened and coated with thyme and other herbs. It can be consumed after ripening for a couple of days or it can be stored in containers (traditionally clay jars) at ambient temperature. It will then be colonized by yeasts including Debaryomyces hanseni and Penicillum. It is this development of this micro-flora that gives shankleesh its distinctive taste and increases its shelf life while decreasing the risk of contamination by pathogenic organisms. High salt and low moisture content also contribute to the preservative effect. This was especially important under conditions where refrigeration was not available.

Shankleesh can be made from cow, sheep or goat milk. The type of milk will affect the taste of the final product. Milk is fermented into yoghurt, which is then shaken to extract the ghee. The remaining protein rich liquid is heated until it solidifies. The coagulum is then salted and hand-molded into fist-sized balls. It is sun-dried and then fermented in a clay pot for a month. The resulting product has a moderately pungent and somewhat musty flavor with a perceptible bitter note. It is also naturally very low in fats (around 5%) and constitutes a very healthy source of proteins and calcium. Shankleesh is usually eaten as an appetizer (mezzeh) broken into small pieces, mixed with finely cut onions, tomatoes and green peppers and drenched in olive oil.

A Field Guide to Creams of the World

Milk gets talked about a lot. Cream is mostly orphaned these days, homogenized into milk so that it doesn't float to the top, banished from diners in favor of half-and-half creamers, and discouraged by the anti-fat brigade.

Cooks have always known that some cream products enhance specialty desserts. And, as I show in my Really Big List of Lactose Percentages page on my website, the more fat a dairy product has, the lower its lactose percentage. Let's take a look at an article by Lisa Abraham at Ohio.com on the various species of cream products.

To be called cream, a product must have at least 18 percent milk fat. ...

In recipes, cream adds fat, but it also adds a velvety texture to a wide variety of foods, most notably soups, sauces and desserts.

There are even fattier creams, found more commonly in Europe, but available at specialty food stores and some grocery stores here. Among them are clotted cream, sometimes called Devon or Devonshire cream, and double cream. ...

Double cream is a British term used to describe heavy cream that is 48 percent or more milk fat. It's just heavier heavy cream than what we typically get in the United States.

Clotted cream, also British, is made from unpasteurized milk which has been slowly heated, allowing a layer of cream to rise to the top and ferment, according to the Food Encyclopedia. Once cooled, the thickened, yellowish cream is skimmed off this is clotted cream.

We're most familiar with clotted cream slathered on top of scones and then topped with jam, English-style. It's also called Devon or Devonshire cream when it comes from Devonshire County in England.

However, according to the Food Encyclopedia, there is a difference. Traditional clotted cream is 55 percent milk fat, while Devonshire cream is about 48 percent milk fat, making it spoonable, as opposed to spreadable. ...

Creme fraiche This is a European favorite that is becoming increasingly popular in U.S. cooking. Its name in French means "fresh cream." Similar to sour cream, but a bit thinner and not quite as sour, it's used similarly to sour cream.

Those extra fatty creams probably have no more than half the lactose of regular milk.

Abraham also gives some cooking hints and recipes for the proper use of creams.

Cultured Buttermilk Is Low Lactose

Yesterday I warned you about fermented products that weren't cultured and therefore probiotic. Today I'll tell you about one that is.

Buttermilk.

An unsigned article on the Tuscaloosa News website gives the best summary of today's buttermilk I've seen in a long time.

[W]hat the heck is buttermilk?

It’s not what it used to be, that’s for sure. In bygone days, when dairy products were made on small farms, buttermilk was the byproduct of butter making. Great grandma would leave pans of fresh, raw milk in the cool of the cellar for a day or so, waiting for the cream to rise to the top. Then she’d skim off the cream and churn it until the butter formed. The thin, slightly soured liquid left was the original buttermilk. It was prized for baking because, being acidic, it reacted with baking soda to make biscuits, muffins, pancakes and other quick breads rise. Many people also enjoyed it as a beverage.

With the advent of huge commercial dairies, mechanical cream separators and pasteurization, traditional “churn” buttermilk went the way of — well, of fresh, raw milk....

So what’s in those cartons labeled “buttermilk” in your grocery store? Pasteurized milk that’s been cultured with bacteria, just like yogurt. This process yields a product which, unlike traditional buttermilk, is consistent in flavor, texture, nutritional value and cooking properties. Cultured buttermilk is thicker in texture than the watery traditional buttermilk.

What buttermilk doesn’t have in it is butter. Many people assume from the name “buttermilk” that the stuff is quite rich. Not so. Cultured buttermilk is usually made from fat-free milk. I’m no fan of a fat-restricted diet, but if you’re watching your fat, buttermilk is friend, not foe.

Buttermilk also doesn’t have much lactose. Just as in yogurt, the bacteria have digested the lactose, yielding the lactic acid that gives both products their tangy flavor. This means that buttermilk is far easier than sweet milk on the guts of those who are lactose intolerant. It also means that buttermilk is suitable for those of us who watch our carb intake.

...

Cultured buttermilk is great for baking, adding moisture, tenderness and lightness to everything from pancakes to cornbread. Still, once buttermilk is cooked, the cultures are no longer active. How can you use buttermilk without cooking it?

When I was a kid, it wasn’t uncommon for people to simply drink the stuff. I have a book from the 1960s that recommends drinking buttermilk as a delicious and filling pick-me-up. If you’re fond of plain yogurt, try a glass of buttermilk. Or you can run chilled buttermilk through the blender with a handful of fruit and a little sweetener for a healthy fruit smoothie.

David B. Fankhauser, of the University of Cincinnati Clermont College, has a great Making Buttermilk page.

There's even a specialty buttermilk cookbook, Better With Buttermilk: The Secret Ingredient in Old-Fashioned Cooking, by Lee Edwards Benning.