The easy solution would have been to work from milk powders, concentrated milks, butter and water, or less bad, to find a dairy plant that would deliver a ready-to-use, standardised, homogeneous, invariable milk straight to the workshop.
At Sikou, we have always chosen natural, unprocessed dairy products: raw milk and raw cream, purchased directly from farms in Wallonia, a region renowned for the quality of its milk.
The milk and cream in Sikou products are therefore not simply fresh, but also raw. The only treatment they undergo is pasteurisation in our workshop. This is a significant distinction. Our dairy products have not been subjected to any treatment when they enter our workshops, neither mechanical nor thermal (no UHT treatment, no standardisation, no homogenisation by micronisation).
Indeed, dairy products, which are of considerable complexity in their original state, are damaged and have their molecular structure altered by these various treatments — treatments that are superfluous in the manufacture of a product destined to be frozen.
Milk is often subjected to brief, undiscriminating criticism, without distinguishing between whether it is raw or whether it has been treated for long shelf life, lumped together under the same word: milk.
While long-life milk has only limited and/or artificially reconstituted nutritional value and is regularly pointed to as a cause of intestinal cramps and poor digestion, it is remarkable to note that the lactic ferments in raw milk actually aid digestion. There is no shortage of irony in this, and the debate borders on the absurd as long as no distinction is made between UHT milk and raw milk.
Finally, buying raw milk and raw cream directly from the farm allows us to select our producers based on their products and the quality of their work. We know our farmers personally, we share a beer together, and as a result, their work holds few secrets for us.
We believe that quality control is better served by dialogue between people who love their craft than by formal checks on documents and thermometers. While such formal controls are of course necessary, we consider them insufficient. Buying directly from the farm removes any doubt about the provenance of our ingredients.
On their side, our farmers earn a better living through this short supply chain than when they sell their production to dairy plants, and they are assured that their work is valued. Indeed, a portion of organic dairy production does not always find the expected outlets. The milk is then downgraded and returns to the conventional milk supply chain, which is quite demoralising for farmers and devalues their work.