Author Archives: John

Grass-Fed Philly Cheesesteak

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Last weekend I went to Philadelphia, good raw milk was the only food product that I enjoyed.  What was I to do, since all I wanted to eat was a never-before eaten cheesesteak? Well this Sunday I went to Queens Farm (aka Queens County Farm Museum) and purchased a dozen of real cage-free chicken eggs for $6 per dozen and some okra for $4 per pound.  The eggs were from truly cage-free chickens that live on the farm and produce a limited supply.  These eggs are bright orange and have the strongset egg whtie and yolk that you have ever seen in your entire life.  No, these chickens do not take hormones or antibiotics, their bodies are too strong to require such poisonous medicines.  The okra was also grown on the farm and on my way home I decided to stop in at Whole Foods in Manhasset of Nassau County, NY.  I also shy away from the produce section of Whole Foods, which usually carries “fresh” and “organic” produce from South America.  Now I seriously doubt that they flew in those bananas from Ecuador, or the “organic” garlic from China.  And those tomatoes, wow, how can organic tomatoes have such a perfect shape and color?  Anyway, I skipped through that section and went straight to the meat section.  I skipped the “organic” farm-raised seafood, and grabbed some “Local” Sirloin Steak Tips.

 

After, I grabbed some Irish Kerrygold Butter, and some milk from Ronnybrook Farms. Whenever I am low on raw goats milk, the only milk that I trust is from Ronnybrook Farms, which pasteurizes its milk at the lowest possible temperature. Now speaking of pasteurization, do you heat your tangeray and tonic to 270 degrees Fahrenheit and then quickly cool it before drinking it? Do you shake your wine vigorously before pouring it into a glass? No… that’s right, well, guess what ultra-pasteurization is? And guess what homogenization is? Heat the milk to 270 for 30 seconds and then cool it as quickly as possible, and when you are finished, shake the milk vigorously, so that all of the fat globules lose their final natural properties and distribute evenly throughout the rest of the milk.

Now, when I was a student in Philadelphia, I loved eating my cheesesteak with mushrooms and fried onions. Surely they fried those in vegetable oil that was processed heavily before it came to Philadelphia. And I love garlic and onions, so I took 7 shittake mushrooms, 3 red onions, 2 shallots, and 3 garlic heads, peeled, chopped and grinded them in the food processor, otherwise known in Greek as the “diabolaki”

I poured from Greek Olive Oil into the pan, some Celtic Sea Salt and freshly ground pepper along with the mixture from the prior paragraph and turned on the heat. I always turn the heat on to a low temperature, because I do not want to burn the items on the bottom of the pan and because I believe that cooking at lower temperatures is more in line with nature, and subsequently better and healthier for you.

After the onions/shallots/garlic/mushrooms started to caramelize, I threw in the meat, here is what it looks like, nothing close to the grill in the back of a Philadelphia Pizzeria:

Now, what about the cheese? for the cheese I decided to grab some raw milk aged for a minimum of 60-days from Wisconsin.

After I took the meat out of the pot, I put some of this raw milk cheese, thinly sliced on top of the meat and waited for it to melt a little bit.

Now that was a tasty Philly Cheesesteak!

Where is the bread you may ask… Well, I avoid bread and grains unless they are prepared in a special way, to make sure that the phytates have not been destroyed, read more about this here:

http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/living-with-phytic-acid

Philadelphia

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Grass-fed sirloin steak, mushrooms and onions sauteed in extra-virgin olive oil from the Greek island of Crete, a little bit of Celtic sea salt, freshly ground-pepper, some oregano to taste, and perhaps some raw goats-milk kefalotyri cheese.  That is what I call a real cheesesteak.  Where can one find such a cheesesteak?  Not in the city of Philadelphia, unless of course, I am there and equipped with a wood-burning oven.

So, I wake up early in the morning, it is Labor Day 2012, and I decide to take a trip to Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philadelphia before making the drive back to New York.  I order two cheesesteaks from the guy trying to impersonate the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.  There was only one person in front of me, and nobody behind me, and they still tried to pressure them into “ordering fast”, to give you the impression that they are like the Soup Nazi, or perhaps to practice their “Soup Nazi” routine for when tourists were to be around.  Sorry, I didn’t buy it.

As I was eating my cheesesteak I kept staring at the meat and kept thinking that this looks a lot like the pre-cooked meat you get when ordering a steak-like-meat sandwich during one of those special promotions at McDonalds/Burger King.  Actually, I think I can hit the nail on the head perfectly for you… Imagine your son or daughter comes home from school one day and tells you that they had a great Philly Cheesesteak sandwich at school in the cafeteria!  That’s right! The meat looked like public-school cafeteria meat.  Got it?  Anyway, the onions also looked like they were lovingly sauteed by a robot with Artificial Intelligence in some factory in Ohio, freshly canned and shipped over to Philadelphia.  As for the mushrooms? I don’t think they were grown on dirt from the planet earth.  I still don’t know how I used to find these “sandwiches” tasty back in the day when I was a student at Philadelphia’s Drexel University.  Come to think of it, cheesesteaks at Pat’s were or are supposed to be the best in all of Philadelhpia.  In other words, cheesesteaks from everywhere else in the city are horrible when compared to those of Pat’s King of Steaks, or from those of neighboring Geno’s.

After I finished my Pat’s cheese steak, I decided to go the bomb-Iran/we need TSA checkpoints on highways, union supporting Geno’s Steaks.  Geno’s was different than Pat’s in that it was littered with “Support Our Troops” and other “patriotic” stickers, along with one that particularly caught my eye that said  “Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Deportation”.  Nevertheless, there were no stickers saying “Bring our Troops home”, or “End the wars”, or “End the Wars and Fix Veterans Healthcare First” stickers.  Incidentally, this is the same place that once gave a free tee-shirt to myself and a good friend of mine named Russel from Oklahoma, all because the lady behind the glass thought we both had amazing blue eyes.

The cheesesteak from Geno’s tasted almost exactly the same as the one from Pat’s.  So much for surprises, Pat’s = McDonalds, Geno’s = Burger King.  Here is a picture of the Geno’s cheesesteak in all of its glory:

So I decide to buy an extra cheesesteak from both establishments to bring home to my brother in New York so that he could try them and see what he was “missing”.  Back home in New York, I couldn’t finish my portion of these cheesesteaks without drowning them in ketchup.  How do people eat this stuff almost daily in the city of Philadelphia?  Well, at least we now have Obama care, because every single “civilized” western nation has free health insurance to cover people who eat crap food like this, get fat and subsequently get heart attacks and cancer by eating this chemical-laced, hormone/antibiotic pumped, factory produced “meat-like” products.

So the Philly Cheesesteaks were not a hit, but the Reading Terminal Market was.  I arrived in Philadelphia on the Sunday morning the day before Labor day and was not expecting to see raw milk for sale in the Reading Terminal Market.  For if I were expecting it I would have brought the largest cooler I have and would have packed it with ice and as much raw goat’s and cow’s milk as I could put in it!  So I was unfortunate and had to buy a smaller portion of milk.  My hotel room wasn’t even ready by the time I got there, so I decided to sit in the lobby and enjoy some of my recently purchased raw goat’s milk:

The cow’s milk was second on my list of drinks to enjoy, and I ended up finishing it while driving back home to New York:

Philadelphia, when I return to you I will get more raw milk from you, but a cheesesteak? Never again!

That’s all for today, and this is John signing off and telling you remember, eat whole foods. Why? Because there is a reason they are called “whole” in the first place.  The word whole means complete, entire, not missing anything.  They call that big supermarket chain which has its headquarters in Austin, Texas Whole Foods for a reason.  They didn’t call it “Skim Foods”, or “Mechanically Separated Milk Foods”, they called it whole foods.  Think about it, would you rather enjoy the company of a wholesome person or of a non-wholesome person?  Words don’t lie…  and words don’t get their definitions by edict, neither from  Congress nor from Obama or the Supreme Court.  So from now on, drink only raw whole milk.  And if you are lucky enough to live in Philadelphia, you know where to get it from!

Scaling up Operations

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Monday, August 6th, 2012

So, this past weekend was an eventful one for me. For one, I decided to make yet another beautiful/pleasant drive up to Edgwick Farms in Cornwall, NY. It is so nice up there that I wouldn’t mind moving there someday…

Last time I visited Edgwick Farm I purchased 2 gallons of raw Goat’s milk, which went rather quickly, so this time I decided to scale up a bit so I ordered 3 gallons. I left my house at 8:22. Farmer Dan was going to leave the farm at 10 am in order to go to a farmers market. My GPS said it would take 1 hour and 30 minutes to get there… luckily traffic was on my side that morning, and I made it there by 9:30. Farmer Dan had the 6 jars of milk ready for me with a label “John” on each of them. I loaded up my cooler and headed to a nearby store for some ice.

Back home, I left 3 of the jars outside of the refrigerator in order to get them to room temperature for the creation of yogurt. In the meantime, my younger brother had arrived with one of his friends. Only my brother had the guts to try the raw milk… Then they both noticed how I left the jars outside of the refrigerator and I told them that I was going to turn them into yogurt.

I waited for about 2 hours and then placed the 3 jars (half a gallon each) into a large pot. I turned on the burner and took a large 17oz container of Fage Total Classic (read: with all the fat) and set it outside to let it warm up slowly to room temperature.

So while I was waiting for the milk to heat, I said to myself, let’s try this original brand of Greek-Yogurt. I must say… Fage does make some pretty good yogurt! I also want to say that that paper net/remnant from their straining process is pretty cool as well. I love peeling it off with my fingers and licking the yogurt remaining yogurt from it.

Anyway, so 110 degrees Fahrenheit is reached, and I place 17ounces of Fage Total minus a few tablespoons which I ate into the mixture and stir thoroughly. I place it into a warm oven, which has the heat turned off but was just preheated to 200 degrees.

This time I decided to place a thermometer into the pot while it was incubating. Now my thermometer was not big enough to touch the bottom of the pot, and neither did it have a latch to hook on to the side of the pot to prevent it from falling in. So I decided to take a thin towel and to cover the pot with it and to leave a little opening to the side for the thermometer to latch on to. This way I kept checking the temperature of the incubating cultured milk every 2 hours and I would turn the oven on for a few minutes each time to let the mixture slowly increase its temperature back up to 110.

So 7 hours passed, and I looked at the mixture and did not see any whey separate onto the top, remember, this is raw goats’ milk yogurt, which means that the yogurt cultures are competing with other present cultures (i.e. beneficial stuff not present in pasteurized milk) so I decided to press on and let the milk culture overnight. So I set the alarm for 3am and when it went off I took a look at the temperature and heated the oven for a little bit.

Then I wake up in the morning and decide it is time to strain the yogurt! Here is a screenshot of how large of a pot I used to culture the yogurt with:

The yogurt produced a little more than half a gallon of whey after straining it, and a really large bowl and just a large bowl of strained greek-yogurt.

 

Warning: Do not eat raw goat’s milk yogurt, it will ruin your taste buds and you will be forever unable to eat yogurt from any retail location and/or restaurant ever again in your life.

Also, I want to say that according to mainstream medicine, I am “lactose intolerant”, which means if I drink milk from a regular dairy – such as Tuscan Farms or any other conventional brand of milk, my stomach will immediately become upset and I will have lots of flatulence and will make many trips to the bathroom. When drinking this milk, I do not have even the slightest sympton of “lactose intolerance”. Are any professors listening?

-John

P.S. You can also find Edgwick Farms on facebook at the following url: http://www.facebook.com/edgwickfarm

Real Greek Yogurt

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There are two and only two ingredients in real, authentic Greek Yogurt:

  1. Raw Goats’ Milk
  2. Yogurt Culture

I made some of my own real, authentic Greek Yogurt this past weekend by using none other than the fine Raw Goats’ Milk that I obtained from Edgwick Farms in Cornwall New York.  What I did follows and you can use this information as instructions for how you can make real, authentic Greek Yogurt from the privacy of your home without having to deal with all the additives, preservatives and other nasty tricks that “Greek Yogurt” manufacturers engage in in order to make a bigger profit, at your expense.

You can visit Edgwick Farms yourself, they are located at 348 Angola Road, Cornwall, NY. By the way, their Feta is awesome…


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I took about 3 liters of raw goats’ milk and placed it into a pot and turned on the heat. Once the thermometer read 115 degrees Fahrenheit I introduced a small amount of yogurt culture into the bottom of the pot and stirred it slowly to avoid leaving any thick yogurt clumps.  The yogurt which I used said “contains live cultures” on the package.  After allowing it to incubate for approximately 7 hours, I noticed that very little yogurt culture thrived and I was left with a pot full of milk and very little “new” yogurt.  After doing some research, I determined that this occurred because raw goats’ milk contains many naturally occurring cultures that also compete with the cultures that I introduced via an amount of already existing yogurt.  So I decided to heat the milk up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit to kill some, if not most of the already existing cultures. (Most yogurt manufacturers heat their yogurt to temperatures above and beyond 185 degrees Fahrenheit, which not only kills any live cultures, it also destroys the molecular structure of any, if not most beneficial compounds present in your milk.) After heating the milk to 150 degrees, I waited for it to cool to 110 degrees and then I tried again with some more starter yogurt.

After 7 hours of sitting in the oven – my incubator, I opened the pot and to my delight saw my brand new yogurt made from fresh raw goats’ milk!  I then wrapped up the yogurt in a cheese cloth and placed a bowl beneath where I hung it up to collect the whey.

After 2 hours, I opened the cheese cloth and scooped out some real Greek Yogurt.  I then placed it into the refrigerator and here is what it looked like after about 1 hour:

Now, that is *REAL* Greek Yogurt!  Not yogurt made from reconstituted milk or non-fat milk mixed with milk solids and powdered milk and some more “forms” of milk.

And you want frozen Greek Yogurt? How about you stick it in the freezer overnight.  Don’t believe the Ben & Jerry’s hype, their yogurt is full of sugar and other things that they think the average person cannot understand like “liquid sugar”, “sugar”, “water”, and “corn syrup solids.”  I’m serious, see the picture of the label below, the ingredients literally read:

  • Liquid Sugar (Sugar, Water)
  • Sugar
  • Water
  • Corn Syrup Solids

Did the chef have a hard time with that one? Mix Sugar and Water, add to yogurt.  Take sugar, add to yogurt, take water, add to yogurt.  Take corn syrup solid, add to yogurt. Wow, I must say, this is an amazing recipe, I only dream of being like the folks over at Ben & Jerry’s one day.  Why don’t the founders go occupy some real food ingredients for a change?

Fake frozen Greek yogurt:

*Raw Goats’ milk was legally purchased from Edgwick Farms in Cornwall, New York. (see http://edgwickfarm.wordpress.com/, or find them on facebook)

Note: In the State of New York, you can only buy raw milk on the farm from a licensed raw milk farm.  So that means I have to drive 2 hours each way from home in order to buy raw milk.  But the milk and yogurt tastes so much better that I am more than willing to make the trip there from time to time.