Raw Milk!

It's been a while since I talked about dairy.
Since I started GAPS there have been a few hitches. Dairy hasn't been one of them. I started with raw butter a ways back, moved to ghee for the diet (no lactose, thank you!), and then, after a few weeks, started making yogurt from raw milk. It is THE BEST yogurt I have ever tasted. Best of all, I believe that Little Moo is completely able to digest it without a problem. I say that carefully, since she's biased against anything she can scoop with a spoon or sip like soup. If it's something she can chew and that she can hold in her hand, she's happy with it. Otherwise, she might like the taste, but there will be only one or two tastings and we never get to the three that make a complete allergy test.

Raw milk is one of those things that has been taboo for me. I've realized that my mother, who was raised in the 50s, has a much different philosophy about eradicating germs from her life than I do, although she herself had a yogurt and sourdough-making period when I was a kid. I tried to explain what the mainstream dairy industry was trying to do by insisting on eliminating all but a tiny number of "coliforms" in milk, but I think she can't quite get her head around the goodness of certain types of bacteria. (Now, watch as she responds to this post with her poem that she wrote years ago about yeasts...heh.) That kind of bias is, I think, something that most people have, which is a problem. The Standard American Diet (i.e. S.A.D.) has too few good bugs in it and as a result we're quite sick. Milk as all good Americans drink it is pasturized and homogenized, with the fat split away from it, then vitamins re-added to achieve...a food that gives you phlegm, minor amounts of damaged fats that could be carcinogenic due to exposure to high heats, very little of it's original vitamin, enzyme and mineral nutrition and none of its probiotic goodness.

Although I'd love to write more, these guys have done much of the job here:

The Campaign for Raw Milk

So here's my dilemma. I have heard from many a source that milk should be boiled or should be heated to at least 180 degrees and then cooled to body temperature before adding cultures. My question is, then, what does this do to the good rawness of this milk? I realize that I'm not pasturizing it, which is so harmful. I do know, though, that the good stuff in the milk can't necessarily survive such treatment.

Our electric oven doesn't do the job, so I need a yogurtmaker that I suspect is overheating the yogurt. Someone on a list suggested buying a plug-in dimmer, which I may do, and a calibrated thermometer, which I still have to research.

Anyone out there have any ideas?