Raw Milk Recipes: How Our Family Uses 40 Gallons per Week
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Owning a family milk cow or dairy goats can be a great way to rely on the grocery store less. In this post you will learn our favorite raw milk recipes that help us manage the excess of milk that comes in daily!

From store-bought creamers to cheddar cheese, there are numerous ways you can use fresh milk to make homemade alternatives to items typically on the weekly grocery list. If you made a list of foods you consumed with dairy, the list would be long– and there are probably things you don’t even consider to have dairy in them that actually do! We have had a dairy cow for over seven years now, and we’ve outlined some of our favorite ways to get all the benefits of raw milk from our gals.

If you are a first time milk cow owner, the best way to make use of all of the fresh dairy is to pick something from your grocery store list you buy the most of– focus on just one item at a time! Homemade ice cream, homemade butter, and fresh drinking milk are often the best place to start! The good news is it won’t take long to replace grocery store counterparts with raw milk products on your shopping list! And while you are in the process of making your own dairy products, you can get the rest of your dairy staples from Azure Standard. This is where we buy all of our organic bulk staples for our homestead, everything from fresh dairy products like cheese to pantry staples like all-purpose flour. Use this link to sign up now! We earn a small commission credit on our orders at no extra cost to you. We appreciate you shopping with our affiliate links!
How much milk does a milk cow produce?
On average, our two beautiful Jersey cows give us around 40 gallons of milk each week after their calves have had their fill. While the number fluctuates based on the time of year, we are constantly needing to make use of delicious fresh raw milk in our daily diet. You can learn more about how much milk to expect your milk cow to produce in this blog post here. Below are all of the different ways we use our fresh milk in our family.

Raw Milk Yogurt- 2 gallons per week
Raw milk yogurt is most of my children’s favorite way to consume dairy! Each week we make two large batches of homemade yogurt using different frozen or fresh fruit and homemade granola. You can top it with raw honey or maple syrup. The beneficial bacteria in yogurt partnered with the minerals in honey or syrup, make yogurt full of health benefits! All of our kids typically eat a half pint of yogurt with homemade granola while we cook breakfast. When we are on the go, we like to use these pouches.
We use the stovetop and follow the instructions on the Yogourmet Yogurt Starter. From the first batch, we save 1/4 cup of the yogurt to make a new batch and only use a packet when the yogurt gets too runny or if we forget to save back a portion. We’ve had this same 16 count pack for over two years so yogurt is a great way to get all the good bacteria in your body for a very low cost. While many will suggest a yogurt maker, and the ice cream machine we linked below has a yogurt feature, we prefer to use our instant pot because we make one gallon at a time. This recipe is how we make ours, leaving it in the instant pot to incubate.

Milk and chocolate milk for drinking- 2 gallons per day
As a family of six with a milk cow, we drink an unlimited amount of fresh milk. Fresh cow’s milk is actually something we crave, which was not true for us when we had store milk.
Chocolate milk recipe for half gallon:
combine:
- 1/4 cup cocoa powder
- 1/4 cup organic sugar
- 1 t salt, use real salt– salt enhances the sweetness of foods and provides minerals, don’t skimp on salt!
- splash of vanilla
Mix these ingredients into 1/2 cup boiling water, then dump into a half gallon of milk.
We keep this in our fridge all the time to enjoy cold chocolate milk!

Adding milk to baked goods or soups- ~1 gallon a week
We’ve adjusted a lot of our baking and cooking recipes over the years to replace water for milk. Milk provides a soft crumb feel for buns and pizza crusts!
Cheese- 14 gallons
We’ve not entirely crossed cheese off our shopping list yet as this has been a large learning curve. In 2025 I have a personal goal to cross cheese off my grocery store and Azure standard list. We enrolled in an online cheesemaking course and I am working on making at least 2 5 gallon wheels per week! We do make mozzarella and ricotta almost twice a week for lasagna and pizza.

Raw Milk Cottage Cheese
Each time I make a batch of hard cheese, we will save off whatever curds did not fit into the cheese press. We add a bit of cream and salt and it’s delicious! While these will be smaller curds than store-bought cottage cheese, it’s a family favorite. Since there are no binders like carrageen in my list of simple ingredients in the kitchen, the cottage cheese does not stay as creamy as store bought.
Pudding or Popsicles, ~1 gallon
Each week, we make pudding so the kids can choose that as an alternative to the yogurt. At the end of the week whatever yogurt or pudding has not been eaten, we put into these popsicle molds.
Using Cream:
Heavy raw cream is cream that is skimmed from the top of each gallon of milk prior to drinking. Jersey cows produce a lot of heavy cream, so even when skimming the milk, we are left with whole plus and lots of cream! (see photo below for the cream line in our raw milk) Here are some ways we use the cream:

Butter- 2 gallons of cream per week
We make at least four pounds of raw butter each week. This allows us to use butter in all our baked goods and hopefully put enough away for when the cow is not in milk.
Did you know different seasons of butter are good for different things? The main difference between winter and summer butter is its texture, with winter butter being significantly harder and firmer due to a higher content of saturated fats in the cow’s milk during colder months, while summer butter is softer because of a higher proportion of unsaturated fats from the cows’ grass-based diet in warmer seasons. Winter butter is hard and firm, summer butter is easier to spread. Pro tip, use your blender and let the cream come to room temperature before making butter! This will allow the milk solids to separate from the butter fat quicker!
Homemade sour cream- 1 pint per week
To make sour cream, we add 1/8 t mesophilic culture to a pint of cream and leave it on the counter for 8-24 hours. The longer it sits the tangier it gets.
Ice cream- 1 half gallon most days!
When we first brought our first cow home, we got this ice cream machine. It requires no ice and no pre-freezing so you can make ice cream in less than one hour. In the summer, we make raw milk ice cream every single day because it’s so easy. This machine is a beast and the customer service is top-notch. Get it here!
Combine together:
- 4 cups raw milk cream
- 2 cups milk
- 4 egg yolks
- 1 cup sugar
- splash of vanilla
Run this in your ice cream maker and toss in any toppings you wish at the end. For chocolate ice cream, we use the same base for our chocolate milk above. Let it cool before adding to the ice cream maker.
Homemade coffee creamer- 1 quart per week
Most commonly we just add a little bit of cream and sugar to our coffee, but some days I make a homemade latte with raw maple syrup. We’ve had this frother since 2022 and make regular use out of it!
Whipped Cream- 1 pint per week
We use this whipped cream dispenser to make whipped cream for waffles.
Other items:
- Buttermilk is a byproduct of making butter. We often make biscuits or pancakes with buttermilk.
- Homemade cream cheese is something we’ve replaced by using strained yogurt or sour cream.
- Seasonal drinks like egg nog, and hot chocolate.

What do we do with extra whey?
Whey is the liquid that is left after making cheese. During the process of making cheese, the curd and the whey are separated, and then the curds make the cheese, and the whey is left. On our homestead, all of the whey is fed to the pigs or used as a starter culture for the next pot of cheese. Any true excess of milk we don’t have time to turn into something else is happily fed to the pigs after the cream is skimmed.
How to make it last all year
While it can be easy to get used to the abundance of milk from your cow, keep in mind there are always about one or two months of the year when the cow will not produce milk. We try to freeze or stockpile enough dairy products and extra milk to get through the month that our cows are not producing milk. Many dairy products can be frozen and thawed without any problem at all! You can make extra and set aside, or just be diligent about not letting any dairy products go bad before adding them in the freezer to enjoy at a later time.
Having a dairy cow can be a lot of work, but truly, nothing compares to fresh milk and homemade cheese! If having a dairy cow is something you want to learn more about, you can find all of our dairy resources with the link below!
