I work at Cruze Farm! I serve their ice cream all day long, and let me tell you, you never get tired of it! It’s an amazing treat from a genuinely amazing family farm!
"no idea if treating cows nicer actually results in nicer tasting milk, but id like for that to be true. so lets just go ahead and go with it. i mean whats the worst thats gonna happen? were gonna end up being nice to cows for particular benefit unto us? its an end unto itself right?" extremely good point
I'd say it's their diet more than anything else. If cows are stressed they won't let down their milk so it wouldn't make good business sense to make cows stressed. But I do understand that many large farms don't treat them in an ideal way.
@@jg5755 Unfortunately, it does make sense if the drop in quality isn't noticeable to consumers or if the drop in cost makes up for it. Minimum wage workers aren't happy, but they are still very productive. Very few businesses provide the highest quality anything, so they're used to making tradeoffs in quality for profit.
@@pendlera2959n wage workers are not nearly as productive or happy by a country mile as well paid ones can and will be. Yeah “quantity has a quality all of its own” but even Soviet ice cream was known for being VERY high quality. There’s a youtuber who did a giant story on Soviet food modernization that Ill find the name of on here. “my name is andong” “this socialist sausage changed the world”
I can attest to the theory that happier cows make better milk: In my home village, we've got a huge farm of ¬ 1500 Simmental cows, and not only they graze just like the cows and Cruze Farm, we've also added massage station for cows (its like one of those big car wash spinners) that cows can use to their leisure, and the farm lab noticed an increase in quality of milk since it's been introduced.
There is a video on here called "How to make over 100 cows extremely happy very quickly!" by Tom Pemberton Farm Life that installed those giant brushes. It was funny watching the cows play with it.
@@Trahloc Thanks! I watched it. It would be nice to have an A/B test of milk taste before and after the brush is installed. The cows really seemed to enjoy it.
This was #NotARecipe. Let's see how to make this stuff at home, or whatever ice cream Adam can come up with. You can't have too many ice cream recipes.
Having Majit talk about how he takes care of the cows was awesome. He also slipped in little jokes, and he was very knowledge about everything. Ask a CEO of a company about how their API, and see how much they know.
Man you know it's legit local quality over quantity farm when the whole family is working and the bosses are slinging ice-cream and hay during their interview. No UTV's rolling around filled with people holding clipboards while the labor breaks their back. Respect
Okay but that looked so "legit local" as to seem like a bit of a put-on, like is that the main barn? My Dad's farm that he quit milking cows in the 90s looked more modern.
@@HydraulicDesign Plus, if you listen to what Manjit is saying you notice the man knows everything about cows and milk (besides maybe the precise fat content of buffalo milk, but those aren't regular dairy cows, so the argument still stands). The man's legit.
It's legit local. Cruze Farms has been a high point of Knoxville's downtown farmer's market for a couple of decades. Started out with a food truck IIRC, then a short-term pop-up brick-and-mortar, then a permanent store. My understanding is that Cruze Farms was intentionally established to be an artisanal alternate to another popular local dairy business (Mayfield). Knoxville started an intertwined food/entertainment/urban renaissance beginning around 2000 (lots of factors & a few really amusing incidents). It's managed to keep going for over 20 years & has nurtured quite a lot of great local eateries.
I hope your ready for ALOT more as Adams whole plan with RU-vid when he went full time was to travel around and show case either to deep dive into different restaurant or food things outside his house or show case recipes that aren't his own just plans changed with COVID but now traveling is no problem so this will be the norm
There’s an article about him and his wife’s love story/business partnership in the University of Tennessee student newspaper. Apparently she was nervous to introduce him to her parents cause he was “a city boy from Nashville” According to the article he was a history/German literature major who, “took his love of books and knack for tinkering and poured them into learning the ins and outs of being a dairy farmer.” The things we do for love ❤
I think what you said at around 3 minutes about using water buffalo milk for ice cream could be a cool video. They sell it at a lot of indopak grocery stores, at least where I live in Texas. For those asking about how it tastes, it is very creamy, and the milk flavor is stronger, and more pure in a way, in the sense that there isn’t any noticeable external flavor.
@@NishantSarkar yeah dude, it's definitely the most common milk; it does have a stranger aftertaste and flavor notes that's definitely stronger than cow milk, and cow milk is prized in India over water buffalo milk for stuff like ghee (clarified butter)
A local west african restaurant had the best hot sauce. I asked why and he explained that he was actually growing all of the peppers in his own backyard and making the hot sauce himself. Of course, as the resturaunt grew this became unfeasible, and while the hot sauce made with peppers he bought was still excellent and had a unique flavor to my american pallet, it was really cool to have gotten to try it in the early days when the hand that served it to me was the hand that planted the seed.
Great video Adam, I really like these Niche local deep dives you sometimes do! One thing, I've noticed in alot of your recent videos is the color grade deals with blues really aggressively. The footage of Manjit outside shows this very well in his shirt and the edges of the grain silo. The blues get blocked up and hyper saturated at specific luminance values. Just something you may want to look into if its not intentional.
I hope your ready for ALOT more as Adams whole plan with RU-vid when he went full time was to travel around and show case either to deep dive into different restaurant or food things outside his house or show case recipes that aren't his own just plans changed with COVID but now traveling is no problem so this will be the norm
As a U TENN grad of ALMOST 50(!) years, I love your shout-outs to Knoxville and its people and places. Thank You PS I have NOT had Cruse soft serve, but I have had the ice cream at the Penn State Creamery - Delicious.
I had buffalo milk ice cream a few years ago. Not entirely sure which kind of buffalo, but being in Italy I assume it's the same variety they use for buffalo mozzarella. It was amazing, creamy and very, very filling
Yeah I was going to say Jersey milk is considered a real treat in the UK. Gold top because gold is the best. Get it from your milkman! (I dunno what the pc term is, milk delivery person?)
On a visit to Knoxville to see some friends a couple years ago we stopped at this place and it was so good! My only disappointment was that I was driving too far to feasibly take some home with me without it melting! Great video Adam, love the explorations into how small batch processes can be so good, and how you never talk down about modern processes that do so much to increase food safety, productivity, and stability just because they are 'modern' and not 'old fashioned'.
I absoluetly love Cruze Farms! It's the first time i was ever able to have sweet cream flavor (rather than vanilla which i dont generally like) and weirdly enough, it was the first time i had ever had the flavor combination of lavender and honey, about 7 years back during the summer, and it's now one of my favorite flavors for desserts! Im pretty much equidistance from both their downtown location and their east Knoxville location, so my family tends to go to the house for some ice-cream and relaxing on the giant porch.
I love how knowledgeable Manjit is about the science of what he's doing! You can really tell he cares, and that is reflected in their product. Wonderful
So excited to see Cruze Farm get a well deserved feature! They really are the best. It's so cool to see what really goes into it. I've been buying Jersey cow milk for special occasions for many years.
Love it! I was raised on a small jersey dairy farm in northern Minnesota, and those cows really do love to be outside (except during the very cold winter months, when we'd have to keep them in the barn). I remember the yellow milk fat floating on top of the gallon ice cream containers we'd use for home consumption. Not homogenized, unpasteurized (and I recognize the possible risks of unpasteurized milk), did it taste amazing.
I live on Jersey and our cows get coats to wear in winter so they can stay outside. We’re also testing robot milking machines so the cows can get milked as often as they want.
I'm not a scientist, but I think the concerns of unpasteurized milk aren't much to worry about if you're talking about fresh milk from a local cow. The risks start when you work at an industrial scale: take the possibility of contamination from every single cow in every single herd and mix that into the giant batch, and give any pathogens opportunity to multiply in shipment, processing and storage, and then you're talking a much higher chance of large numbers of people getting sick. Also, your immune system is trained on and hopefully prepped for the pathogens in your local mix of microbes, so even if there is exposure it may have to be much worse to actually get you sick (although I have no data on the latter.)
I love this kind of content, it's a bit off the beaten path of most food youtubers, and gives some interesting context to things we don't really think too much about. Plus shining a light on local industry is always a plus.
A couple things to add to your video. Given that they produce soft serve they can get away with no homogenization as they don't freeze it as low or keep it frozen. Smaller fat globules are more efficient at encasing air (overrun), which is essential for ice cream. Especially if it's frozen solid and eaten later. These air bubbles help it melt more evenly in your mouth, as does a more even dispersed fat, but at the same time also prolongs meltdown while eating. Homogenization is also why we add emulsifiers to our ice cream, contrary to popular belief not to keep the emulsion from separation (the proteins already to that) but rather to stop the proteins from keeping up an efficient emulsion. Emulsifiers bind to the fat globules and prevent protein from binding to them and thus causing partial coalescence. Which is wanted for a variety of different things. Another thing to add to your final comment on sweetness is that usually not just sucrose is added, but a variety of different sugars. Again, I'm more talking in ice cream not soft serve. Different sugars have different POD (sweetness) and PAC (freezing point depression), and affect melting, storage and crystallization. No ice cream is 100% sucrose because it'd be too gritty. Cruze Farm likely has dextrose (or even lactose) added to it for these reasons. So it likely contains as much sugar as the rest, but the POD is just different hence why it's perceived as less sweet; calories are different too of course. Last but not least, while this applies to most ice confections, I'm specifically talking about ice cream (which here in Australia must have >10% milk fat to be called that).
I went here here because of your video. I was visiting family around Knoxville, and had no real reason to visit downtown, but i did, because of this vid. Damn, that's the best soft serve I've had. I just had the base unflavored version, no toppings. I wanted to taste the milk. Wow. Insanely buttery, absolute perfection, and not overly sweet. thanks Adam!
I noticed Cruze Farm Dairy store uses the same ice cream machines as Chick-Fil-A does. I remember every night the hardest part of the closing process was taking down that ice cream machine. It had to be emptied every night. We usually had one person dedicated solely to that single machine and when they were done they got to go home. I can't imagine how long it must take for them to clean all of those machines every night.
Best I ever cream I’ve ever had- Oberweis. My favorite ice cream flavor, is either sweet cream or vanilla. Truly great ice cream doesn’t need all the bells and whistles. And the toppings are endless. The ultimate “heterogeneity”.
In Nigeria, fresh milk isn’t as common because electricity isn’t as stable especially in remote areas so you get a lot of variation depending on where you are. In most cities or sub urban cities, you get powdered milk that you mix with water (I grew up drinking that and I still do). You also have tinned cream that’s usually advertised as milk but it’s very thick. We also have condensed and evaporated milk that comes tinned. But if you’re in the north and middle belt you get to enjoy no-no which is a fermented yogurt milk drink. Very tasty with Fura (ground millet with spices). Because of the electricity issue, most products that don’t keep in room temperature aren’t as common in Nigeria. You either get it dried, tinned, or fermented.
"Less sweet more fat" describes how I like my food .... and me! When I was growing up we had a Jersey 'house cow' that was hand-milked and the milk (and dairy products) were consumed 'raw'. I miss that so much. Back then about half of the dairy herds were Jerseys and they were the preferred house cow for their gentle nature, better quality milk and slightly lower yield. (Most families didn't need 8 gallons a day, even when they made butter and cheese as we did. Also milking Holsteins takes longer due to quantity.) I can attest to the fact that happy cows not only give more milk but better milk. You could tell when my brother (who didn't have a lot of patience or animal empathy) was rostered on to do the milking by the taste of the milk.
Our local meat shop started carrying what is marketed as “A2” protein milk, which is from local Jersey cows. I’ve made ice cream at home a few times with it and even with my paltry equipment, it’s turned out incredibly tasty. I’d like to make mozzarella cheese or butter with it too. It’s good in mashed potatoes too
as someone in the philippines where water buffalo (kalabaw) are a common sight, can confirm water buffalo milk ice cream is a really tasty and luxurious treat 👌 it used to be a lot more common to consume kalabaw milk too, but cows milk has won over due to westernization (plus it's easier to import)
I love Colleen, I've met her a few times snd shes very sweet. They definitely know what theyre doing on the ice cream side. You can barely get in on a busy night.
The Cruze Farm ice cream shop in downtown Knoxville sometimes has a line out the door. It’s truly beloved. (I live in Knoxville). The selection of restaurants downtown is also very good. 👍🏼 There are more than 50.
our local chain grocery store recently started stocking a local milk that comes in glass bottles (it has a $2 refundable deposit). It's pricey, but I like that I can return the bottles and that it's local! You do have to shake the milk, but that's part of the fun :3
My late father-in-law grew up on a dairy farm that operated in the 1920s-1930s. They didn’t have any modern processing - no automated milking equipment, no pasteurization equipment, and no electric refrigeration equipment. This was in Wisconsin where it was pretty darned cold most of the year, of course. My father-in-law talked about milking the cows, dumping the milk into big vats, skimming the cream off for churning butter or bottling as heavy cream, and then bottling the skimmed milk so it could be distributed to all the households in the nearby towns. This might not seem unusual, but it was QUITE unusual, in fact. The dairy farm was also part of the state lunatic asylum. People with severe mental illness were sent there for long-term housing. They worked on the farm in exchange for a bed and meals. It was almost like a working prison in that the patients were not free to come and go as they pleased; they were essentially incarcerated there. Violent patients were drugged to calm them down, but if they couldn’t keep from being violent they were sent elsewhere. Most of the people who lived there had developmental problems or various mental illnesses that didn’t require much by way of the treatments of the day. Why did my father-in-law live there? His parents were the on-site caretakers of the dairy farm. They lived there, oversaw the operation of the farm, and were generally responsible for the care of the patients. They had patients do everything from janitorial services to cooking to maintenance to all the farm duties. They actually lived in the building where the patient dormitories were, until an incident when a patient tried to kill my father-in-law (who was eight or nine at the time) in the middle of the night. After that, they had the state build them a separate cottage - with adequate locks on the doors and windows - where the family could live. What’s funny is that as an adult, my father-in-law refused to drink milk. Too much emotional baggage and probably trauma from having grown up in an insane asylum where he had to work alongside the patients. He said he felt like he was one of the "inmates," as he called them. I wonder how the milk from those cows tasted. I can’t imagine that cows that are freezing cold all the time are "happy" cows. Nor would being around mentally unstable people probably be the happiest life, but who knows? Those might’ve been delightfully happy cows.
@@Slaeowulf that’s definitely not true lol. Jersey’s aren’t even in the top 10 most common breeds in the UK. They only make up ~1.7% in Ireland as well. For reference, the top two breeds make up 70%, there’s a reason Jersey milk is much more expensive
@@sebastianridley2632 im not being pedantic, there's just nothing right about the original comment. He's trying to say Jersey milk is more popular in the UK than in other countries, which isn't right. In the US, Jersey milk makes up 13% of all milk produced, that's about 8 times more popular than it is in Ireland
Adam I love that you actually add subtitles. It makes it much more rewarding to watch. Also, at the start, there is just a wall of text. Like the whole script of the video in one huge chunk of text
For a request in the Knoxville area to ask about: I can't recommend talking to Yassin Terou of Yassin's Falafel House. They routinely win local and sometimes national awards, including "Nicest Place in America". The food is so good, Adam.
Water buffalo milk has an umami taste to it that translates really well to ice cream. It's also a thing in the Philippines, alongside ice cream made from coconut milk.
I love this type of content. I will always support a family owned, local, or small business over a large corporation. You tend to get a much better product that has been made with quality in mind, and you’re supporting a local family. As soon as Australia lifted their lockdown, me and my girlfriend drove to Hunter Valley and did a tour of the local wineries, and stayed at a family owned bed and breakfast. We wanted a great time, and to help the local economy, and it was absolutely perfect. One of the best getaways we’ve ever had. We had locally made wines, cheeses, fruits, and even some beautiful homemade maple bacon. It was amazing.
I always love these videos Adam - a true testament to "Just ask! Never know what you'll find out." So many people that are so skilled at what they do, and a ton of really cool things, that lots of folks just... don't know.
Wow, I was just listening to the video, suddenly thought did I just hear my name? 🤯 As a guy who loves science and is from rural india. Loved how much Manjeet knows about science of feed and dairy farming, proud of you Sir. (I am a phd student in Australia working on nanomaterials)
This is similar to going to an apple cider mill in the fall, getting the fresh stuff as it is being pressed, along with the cinnamon cake doughnuts. Always remember to grab a jug to ferment a little too lol
There's a guy selling ice cream in a little old citroen truck in the park hrere in my tiny moutain area town in France - once I told him that his ice cream tasted incredible - he said his grand-mother was selling ice cream in the exact same spot 80 years ago with the exact same recipe. Gotta love grannies
Long time watcher, first time commenter, 5yesr Knoxville local. I've been waiting for this video for a very long time. I was starting to think Cruze Farms wasn't your favorite soft serve ice cream. Knoxville has an outstanding ice cream selection for some reason. Places like Sugar Queen are definitely on par, but Cruze Farms is the reigning monarch.
There's a fast-food dairy producer in the state I live in, Oklahoma, and they don't ship at all outside the state. They serve hamburgers and ice cream. While they do have soft serve it's frozen yoghurt. Their ice cream is the kind you dip with an ice cream scoop. They have some great flavors, my favorite being their peppermint. It has tiny round red and green peppermint candies in it. If you're ever in Oklahoma, the place is called Braum's. On a cone or in a sundae, it's really good ice cream.
Nothing beats the taste and creaminess of high fat milk. Absolutely love the yellowish fat layer on top of fresh milk coming from cows that produce milk of a higher fat content.
Just saw a post online from someone who found a pearl in their white clam pizza from Pepe's in New Haven, so I guess the reason my local food tastes so good is that they are definitely using real clams!
7:20 it's been shown that unhappy cows produce less milk. People setting fireworks off at weddings they had out in the plains would cause a notable drop in production the next morning.
I've drunk raw milk for 12 years, the last two using milk from my own cows. I've looked at my cow's raw milk under the microscope and it looks like Yakult. It's jam packed with beneficial bacteria and looks like static unless you water your sample down - very cool to see. Pasteurised milk in contrast looks like an empty wasteland. Raw milk has never made me sick and our daughter won't drink pasteurised milk now (I simply cannot as it upsets my stomach). But you must know your source and their hygiene practices. Would definitely be awesome to hear an unbiased view on raw milk.
I live in the Tararua district in New Zealand. Lots and I mean lots of dairy cows around me, a few farmers even have Jersey cows. They are all grass fed, but they are given palm kernel husks, maze (the whole plant cut up tiny) and bailage to supplement their feed. I've wrapped bailage as a job before too, but the small sized ones that a person can pick up. Once it has fermented it smells really good.
ahhh I miss this place so much 😭Used to go while at UT, back when the shop was summer-only it's nice to see it get a shoutout and learn about the process
You know, I'm not sure where I got this idea in retrospect, but I always figured that Holstein cows aren't actually all that common and that the idea that they're the main type of dairy cow was just a cartoon trope.
This now explains why I like milk in my hometown over milk in the city I moved to. The state my hometown is in has a milk brand called Leche Jersey, and they use jersey cows! I grew up drinking that milk and now holstein milk tastes dilluted to me.
Jersey milk! Or as us brits would say, Gold Top! Here, we often describe the fat content of our milk by the colour of the cap on bottle. Skimmed is red top, semi skimmed is green top, and whole is blue. But everyone in a while, often accompanied by some kind if luxury branding, you get jersey milk which comes in a gold topped bottle. The elegance! It's amazing. I wonder if other cultures do this colour coding?
I live in Texas. Here every brand does different color coding. So you can get used to always grabbing a certain brand's blue top, and then one day they are out of stock, and you have to read the labels on your next favorite brand lest you get home with the wrong one.
My wife and I take long weekends to cities we don't know. This past one was to Knoxville. This was the best ice cream we've ever had. Worth the trip We also hit Pretentious and made some glasses and had some beers, ate at Seoul brothers and then Status donuts as well as a few other places. The knoxville tourist center owes you a few bucks. :)
This! A new favorite video and subject matter amongst many other favs on this channel. Adam, please do an exploration of mass market popular dairy that claims organic and/or grass fed and any that claim “happy cows”. Grass-fed has popped up more and more on labels (I’m looking at my Organic Valley 100% Grass-Fed milk right now). Is it quality grass? Are the cows meandering in fields at their own pace, or is it cut grass, et. This video gives me more questions about the “quality” dairy we have access to at our big grocery stores. If I’m buying big National brand milk and dairy products, who is doing it best? Thanks for listening!
I totally agree wih you Adam. Treating cows nice should be a high priority for cows and you would guess that happier cows give more/better tasting milk but that is actually not the case. Atleast not at my uncle's farm. He roughly has a hundred holstein cows that produce the highest quality milk available here in the Netherlands. My uncle (and me when i'm working at the farm) has a big screw with him the entire time to move cows a certain direction. If cows aren't afraid of you, it would be practically impossible to move them anywhere. I have experienced a resistant cow at times in the morning when they do need to be milked and if the cows generally wouldn't be scared of humans, they would never get out of their sleeping boxes and move to the milking robot. This is a crucial thing (that you also mentioned in your vid) because their utters could stumble upon infections and then their production shouts down. My point: it is okay to have the cows be scared of humans, because it would be impossible to move a 700kg (1550 pounds) animal if their are resistant. They have a lot of space to walk around and get a lot of fresh pasture and sunlight in the summer (which also hurts the production) so they are living very comfortable lives but stubborn cows is one of the biggest problems my uncle stumbles upon at his farm so he needs to carry that screw to poke them at times.
I live close to Knoxville and LOVE Cruze you can tell Adam has good tastes on all the local favorites not to mention the Highland Brewing beer in a previous video!
Cruze Farm ice cream is great! The place downtown is always packed but the line moves along pretty well. I love when you highlight good Knoxville restaurants/food businesses, would love to see more!
Blows my mind that most American cattle are reared indoors on feed. Cattle in Northern Ireland only come inside and have silage for feed during winter, grass fed the rest of the year. None of this grain fed, grass finished nonsense! We have amazing dairy and beef produce as a result.
This video is about how the Cruze farm does it different, classic. You touched on pasturisation. My favourite brand of milk is Natrel. It uses ultrafiltration instead of heating to remove the bacteria and viruses. The resulting milk has a six to seven week shelf life (refrigerated, of course). Maybe you can touch on that subject sometime. Great video, as ususal BTW.
My grandfather had a dairy farm with 60 head of guernseys, so I'm rather partial to those myself. However, jerseys are a very close second, followed by brown swiss, milking shorthorn, and finally holsteins. And yes, everyone wants pure white milk, but there's something magical about the flavor of milk that's practically yellow. Taste it once and you'll be hooked forever.
I started work at an ice creamery this year and one of the flavors we make is "Tasmanian Honey and Blueberry". The costumers love it and its my current favorite as well. Apparently according to my boss, the honey used comes from bees on the island of Tasmania and he says they only collect nectar from leatherwood trees, which is what gives the ice-cream these super floral but not overly sweet notes. Its really good.
