Adam: This is my favorite plain soft served
ice cream I've ever had. It comes from Cruze Farm Dairy here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Hashtag not
an ad, just a fan. I went out to the actual Cruze Farm farm to find out why this ice cream tastes
so good to me. And in the process of doing so, I ended up learning some pretty interesting things I
want to tell you about how the dairy industry has changed in the last couple generations. Turns out,
the Cruze Farm ice cream tastes different because it is old-fashioned, not just the recipe, but the
milk itself is old-fashioned. So here we are, out on the farm, east of Knoxville. It's 6:00 AM which
is when you milk dairy cows, so that you can do it again exactly 12 hours later in the evening,
before you've lost all your daylight. Productive cows need to be relieved of the enormous pressure
in their memory glands as regularly as possible, or else they hurt and then their production
shuts down. These cows really want to be milked right now, and who could say no to that face?
Manjit: There's a couple of reasons
that we milk jerseys. They're really pretty cows. My name is Manjit Bhatti. I'm the farm and
plant manager at Cruze Farm. This is our nicest, sweetest cow, so if you want to get some cow love,
she's very sweet. She's also our best cow. Adam:
So, Manjit fell into the Cruze Farm business when he married Earl Cruz's daughter Colleen
there. These are their nephews working the farm this morning. In just a few years,
Manjit and Colleen have expanded Cruze into a beloved local institution here in Knoxville,
chiefly by means of adorable staff uniforms and ice cream. Ice cream that tastes different
because it comes from a different kind of cow. The American dairy industry has historically
focused on two breeds of cows. There's the Jersey cows, which are the small blonde gals that you see
on Cruze Farm, and then there's the Holstein cows, which are the big black and white ones
that you think of when you think of dairy cows in a cartoon or something like that. Holstein won out
over the Jersey cow, been historically preferred by dairy farmers in the U.S., because it's bigger
and arguably more profitable than the Jersey. Also, the Holstein creates a lower fat milk,
which is potentially good in a market like the United States where lower fat or reduced fat
dairy products have historically been popular. Anyway, something like 90% of U.S. dairy cows
are Holsteins now, which makes Jersey cows and Jersey milk somewhat rare and old-fashioned.
Manjit: And their milk is
well-suited to dairy products that feature butter fat, which ice cream is one of those products.
Adam: Jersey Milk also has a higher protein content,
which is also good for ice cream. People often add powdered casein to their ice cream mixed to make
it smoother on the tongue. Jersey milk has higher casein to begin with, plus all that glorious fat,
which makes Jersey milk slightly yellow instead of pure white. American consumers generally prefer
pure white milk, which is another reason why Holsteins won out over Jerseys. In recent years,
there has been a resurgence of interest in Jersey cows, as people like Manjit really
appreciate that generous 5% fat content. It's more familiar to the cultural context he got from his
Indian parents. Manjit:
The most common form of milk drunken India's water buffalo milk.
Water buffalo milk is 10% butter fat. Adam:
Ooh, imagine what water buffalo ice cream must be like. Speaking of creamy,
I just love this creamy tortellini dish we ate the other day, courtesy of HelloFresh,
sponsor of this video. This summer, get farm to table quality with every HelloFresh box.
Seasonal ingredients are picked at peak ripeness and travel from the farm to your doorstep in
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because I'm tired, because I got up on the dairy farm so early, and this recipe has
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at checkout, get yourself 16 free meals plus free shipping. 16 free meals with my link and
code in the description. Thank you, HelloFresh. Anyway, there's amazing soft serve ice cream
from Cruze Farm Dairy in Knoxville, Tennessee. One reason it tastes so good is that it's made
with this relatively rare Jersey milk, which has a high fat and high protein content. But,
Manjit at the farm figures there's more reasons why their ice cream tastes so different to me.
Manjit: Of course, what you feed a cow
does affect how her milk will taste. Adam:
Indeed, the particular fatty acid composition I enjoy in this ice cream might result from
the particular forage the cows eat. This is a rye field they're grazing. Dairy cattle
need very energy-dense forage to both feed themselves and to make milk.
Manjit: Forages that
would just cause a beef cow to just get obese and be unproductive, probably infertile.
Adam: And then there's the dry food
that the cows eat in the barn. Manjit:
This here is called baleage. It's hay that has been bailed before it's fully dry, which you can
tell, and then you wrap it in a cover. Adam:
That allows for some anaerobic fermentation inside the bale, which lowers the pH and
preserves the feed. It also makes the feed more nutritious. But crucially,
they don't chop the hay into little bits before fermenting it, as you would with silage.
Manjit: Un-chopped forage
induces a different fermentation in a rumen than chopped forage. So, particle size has a pretty
pronounced effect on milk composition, which is bizarre. Long-stemmed forage particles
generally produce milk with more butter fat. Adam:
So that's good. But at Cruze Farm, they base their cow's diet on fresh green forage from the fields,
and that makes the milk taste different. Manjit:
I mean, your average American dairy cow's not eating any green forage.
Adam: Yeah, I've read estimates as high as 95%
of U.S. dairy cattle do not have access to fresh pasture. They are raised in much more confined,
controlled environments. They usually don't get to live the life you see them living on Cruze Farm
with fresh pasture. Most cattle you pass by on the road are being raised for beef. The dairy gals are
usually indoors. But at Cruze Farm, they get lots of outside time, and green forage results in milk
with proportionally higher omega-3 fat content, which is probably good for us and it's probably
better for the cows. Manjit:
Everybody in the dairy industry knows that happy cows give more milk. I think that probably happy
cows give taste to your milk too. You stress cows out by doing things that would stress anybody out,
like yelling at them, or pushing them. One thing, for example, cows generally walk a lot,
lot slower than humans walk, and you could be the person that's really type A, and wants to
get started milking, and you can get cows to walk at human speed. You can make them afraid
of you if you want to, but cows will be happier if they live in a lower stress environment.
Adam: No idea if treating cows nicer actually results
in nicer tasting milk, but I'd like for that to be true. So let's just go ahead and go with it.
I mean, what's the worst that's going to happen? We're going to end up being nice to cows for no
particular benefit to us. It's an end unto itself, right? Another big thing that makes this Cruze
Farm ice cream taste so different and better to me is that Cruze farm milk is not homogenized. Back
in my parents' day, you used to have to take all milk and shake it really hard before you drank it.
Otherwise, the really giant fat globules and milk will float to the top and they'll just be there in
a little oil slick. You have to shake it to get it emulsified again. Homogenization is this step
that almost all the producers take nowadays, where you bash up those big fat globules down into tiny,
small ones that stay emulsified in the milk. Manjit:
You're shooting the milk under a very high pressure pump in very small droplets across
an airspace onto a plate where it then drips down. And, if you are trying to oxidize milk,
that's probably how you would do it, right? Adam:
Yeah. Oxidation is a problem with homogenization, because it happens when you increase the surface
area of the fat, which you do when you are bashing the fat up into a million tiny little particles,
tons of surface area to oxidize now. And oxidization of the fat results in flavors that
are just off or not fresh. And, the industry has lots of ways of minimizing oxidization,
but at Cruze Farm, they just don't even homogenize it to begin with.
Manjit: If you're a producer and you have a soft
serve machine or your an ice cream shop owner, or whatever, or a Chinese buffet, and you'll
go to Cisco and you'll say, "Hey, I need a jug of soft serve mix." The soft serve mix that they
bring you is designed to be able to stay in that ice cream machine for up to a week. So, you can
serve ice cream, and then you can put it in what's called standby mode, which is
refrigerated but not frozen. And then you come in the next morning and then you push a button
and it goes back into freezer mode or ice cream mode. And, since our ice cream is so delicate-
Adam: He means their fat globules in their
milk are so huge that they tend to clump together and separate out to form butter if you agitate the
milk too much, so you can't churn it too much. Manjit:
... It cannot sit in an ice cream machine every night, overnight. So, at all of our stores,
we have to empty each machine every night, clean it thoroughly, and then refill it the
next morning with fresh mix, actually. So that's a challenge that we have. But then,
it also makes really yummy ice cream. Adam:
Yeah. It may be that your average restaurant soft serve is just old, right? It's been sitting in the
machine for a week. Whereas, when you're making soft serve with this fresh, un-homogenized milk,
you have no choice but to make a fresh batch every day. And speaking of old school processing,
here's where they bottle the soft serve ice cream mix. This is the same very old pasteurization
equipment from Earl Cruze's day. Manjit makes the ice cream in here now, and it's batch processing,
which is old school. You have to heat the milk to a certain temperature for a certain time in
order to kill most of the bad bacteria that you worry about in milk. And most milk today goes
through a continuous process pasteurizer, where milk is constantly squirted across a sequence
of heat exchange plates, heats it up to a very precise target temperature, incredibly precise,
and it allows you to use the absolute minimum amount of heat required to kill germs.
Today's typical fresh supermarket milk tastes pretty fresh because of that gentle
pasteurization. Compare that to the taste of UHT milk, Ultra-High Temperature pasteurization,
that stuff is shelf stable, but it tastes cooked. Most of today's milk is really minimally heat
processed, and that's good. But there is a cooked or caramelized note in the Cruze Farm ice cream
that tastes different and really good to me. And I think I understand why now. It's because they
heat the mix in these batch pasteurizers old school, basically just big pots with
stirring spoons in the bottom. This is much less precise than a modern continuous pasteurizer.
Manjit: There's no way
to actually just get this mix to be 165 for 15 seconds when you're slowly heating it up,
slowly cooling it down. So it's a lot more similar to if you were to make a ice cream
mix at your house. Adam:
Some of the milk inevitably heats up beyond 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and maybe that's where you get
those caramelized notes that I'm tasting. Or, it's also the case that Manjit has to pasteurize the
milk for a much longer time to compensate for that lack of precision. So maybe that's where you're
getting those cooked notes. But they're there, and I really, really like them. It tastes delicious,
and different, and old-fashioned because it is. Plus, their added sugar content is around 12%,
which is on the low side, and I really appreciate that. Less sweet, more fat. Yum. Cruze Farm Dairy,
Knoxville, Tennessee. Hashtag not an ad. So, that's why my favorite local soft serve
tastes the way it does. I went and I asked them, "Why do some of your local favorite
treats taste so good?" Why don't you go and ask them? Let us know about it down there. Yeah.