Cow

The default, the baseline, and the milk almost every recipe assumes. Which makes this the page to put the comparison table on, because every other milk in this wing is best understood as a deviation from it.

The comparison, with real numbers

From a meta-analysis of around thirty studies per species — so these are averages of averages rather than one herd’s figures, which is what you want for a table like this:

Milk	Protein	Fat	Fresh-cheese yield
Cow	3.42%	4.09%	15.4%
Goat	3.26%	4.07%	11.9%
Sheep	5.73%	6.99%	22.9%
Buffalo	4.38%	7.73%	25.5%
Dromedary camel	—	—	13.8%

Two things in that table are worth stopping on, because they contradict what most people assume.

🔴 Goat milk is not richer than cow milk

Look again: goat is 3.26% protein and 4.07% fat; cow is 3.42% and 4.09%. They are, for practical purposes, the same.

The widespread belief that goat milk is richer, heavier or more concentrated is simply not true on composition. What makes goat cheese taste distinctively of goat is the fatty-acid profile and the casein structure, not the amount of fat and protein.

🔴 And goat milk yields less cheese than cow milk

This is the one that genuinely surprised me. Near-identical fat and protein, and yet:

Cow: 15.4% fresh-cheese yield. Goat: 11.9%.

So you get noticeably less cheese from a gallon of goat milk than from a gallon of cow’s, despite the same solids. The reason isn’t the fat or the total protein — it’s which caseins are present and how well they build a network. Goat milk is lower in αs1-casein, and that affects how firm a curd it makes and how much it retains when you cut and drain it.

Practical consequence: if you switch a recipe from cow to goat, expect a smaller wheel and a more fragile curd, and don’t conclude you did something wrong.

Why cow milk became the default

Not because it’s the best cheesemaking milk — sheep and buffalo beat it on both solids and yield. Cow won on everything else:

Volume per animal, by a wide margin.

A long lactation, so you can make cheese most of the year rather than in a short seasonal window — which matters enormously, because a sheep dairy’s calendar is dictated by the ewes.

Temperament and scale. Cows tolerate large-scale management in a way that has no equivalent among the alternatives.

And it homogenises the market. Once cow milk dominates the supply, recipes get written for cow milk, equipment gets sized for cow milk, and the whole system reinforces itself. Every recipe in my thirty-odd books assumes cow unless it says otherwise.

What cow milk is good at

Almost everything, which is the actual answer and the reason it’s the default.

The families that are specifically cow: cheddar and the English cheeses, gouda and the washed-curd family, the alpine cheeses, Parmigiano and Grana, most blues except Roquefort, and the bloomy rinds.

Its flavour is comparatively mild and sweet, which is a feature: it takes on what you do to it, so it’s the milk that most rewards technique. A cheddar tastes of cheddaring and two years of ripening. A sheep’s-milk cheese tastes substantially of sheep no matter what you do.

What to buy

Covered properly in getting started, but in short:

Not ultra-pasteurised. UHT cannot form a proper rennet gel and it is the commonest cause of a failed first attempt.

Ordinary pasteurised is fine, with calcium chloride to replace what pasteurisation shifted out of solution.

Raw is better for rennet cheese if you can get it — and in Michigan that means a herdshare, not a purchase. My own first cheese was raw cow’s milk from the farm down the road.

Non-homogenised if you have the choice. Homogenisation shatters the fat globules and disperses them permanently, which changes how fat is trapped in the curd. It isn’t fatal — plenty of good cheese is made from homogenised milk — but it’s a difference.

And breed and season change the numbers in that table more than people expect, which is its own page.

Next: goat — where the “naturally homogenised” story turns out to be wrong for an interesting reason.

Sources

Composition by species from a meta-analysis of ~30 studies each (cattle 3.42% protein / 4.09% fat; buffalo 4.38% / 7.73%; sheep 5.73% / 6.99%; goat 3.26% / 4.07%) and fresh-cheese yields (buffalo 25.5%, sheep 22.9%, cow 15.4%, dromedary 13.8%, goat 11.9%): “Composition and aptitude for cheese-making of milk from cows, buffaloes, goats, sheep, dromedary camels, and donkeys,” Journal of Dairy Science — https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(21)01073-0/fulltext