Our ice cream and how we make it?
I was brought up hand milking cows with horns so it comes naturally. My family ran an outdoor holiday business on our croft in Lochaber and we kept a herd of Welsh Black cattle. All of the milk and cream and often crowdie and butter for ourselves and our guests came from our Welsh Black house cows, and I was milking by the age of ten. I can still remember the day I was allowed to go with a hurricane lantern to do the evening milking by myself, the peacefulness, quiet munching, and the sound of the milk in the bucket lives on with me. To this day hand milking my cows in the early morning is my favourite job.
So many people are surprised that we milk our Highland cows, commenting that they thought Highland cattle were a beef breed. I suppose the reason for this is that the majority of people breeding Highland cattle today do so for the beef market, but… every cow is beef, and every cow has milk.
Although they produce much less milk than cows bred for commercial milk production, in the old days Highlanders had three jobs – they were work animals, used for ploughing and pulling, they were milked to feed families and neighbours, and they produced beef. The very interesting fact about this versatile breed is the unusually high butterfat content in their milk, so although they have a very low yield the milk of the Highlander is very rich and creamy.
Only in the 18th century did subsistence farmers in the Highlands stop taking their Highland Cattle to graze in the high hills. The festivals of ‘Beltane’ at the beginning of May and ‘Samhain’ at the end of October marked the leaving and returning of the cattle from the high shielings . Women and children spent their summers with their cattle, tending them but also taking care of the important job of milking the cows both to nourish their families, and to make much sought after cheese and butter to sell at the trysts (markets) in the south of Scotland in the autumn. This fascinating history is what inspired us to try milking our Highlanders to make ice cream.
We don’t always have our signature Highlander ice cream in our display cabinet – you have to be patient if you want to try this delicacy. Production is usually from mid-May onwards working around calving in March/April. We have found that starting milking when the calves are 5 – 6 weeks old minimises stress for both cow and calf – by this time the calf has had a great start and both are relaxed being nose-to-nose through the fence during the night. In the morning the cow has stored up plenty of milk, so we milk two quarters giving us enough milk for that day’s ice cream, and the calf gets a good breakfast from the other two quarters. Cow and calf go out to pasture together during the day so that the calf can have all the natural mothering and nourishment it needs.
We pasteurise the milk before making it into ice cream, but it isn’t homogenised meaning that the cream is retained in its natural form along with the high level of raw protein and vitamins in the milk.
We only use what we call ‘light flavours’ grown and foraged on the farm for our Highlander ice cream recipes so that the deliciously fresh sweet taste of the milk isn’t lost. Minty Highlander is made with home-grown garden mint, Highland Meadow with foraged meadowsweet, Zesty Highlander with lemon balm and the big favourite of course is our signature Pure Highland – perfectly plain, light and delicious.
We can’t make enough Highlander ice cream to meet the demand of our customers, so we make our Natural Flavours range with bought in Scottish organic milk, as well as fresh fruit sorbets and dairy free Oat milk ice cream so that we can have ice cream available throughout the year.
For our Natural Flavours, Sorbets and Oaties, we use lots of different sustainably sourced ingredients; fruit and herbs that we grow and forage on the farm, fruit from local growers, sustainably sourced chocolate, coffee, spices, salts and sugars and we make our own oat milk with organic Scottish oats to create the dairy free Oaties.
