Polish Mare Milk Ice Cream Still Needs Cow Cream

Horse milk ice cream from a Szczecin lab still needed cow cream, because the mare milk itself held only 0.50% fat. Katarzyna Szkolnicka and colleagues at the West Pomeranian University of Technology froze four yogurt and synbiotic mixes in a 1.5-litre machine, then reported the result in PLOS ONE on August 7, 2024.

The finished tubs were white, soft, and creamy. They were also a craft product meant to be eaten in a day or two, built on milk that European mare dairies still sell by the litre.

Four Batches From a 1.5-Litre Freezer

The milk came from a milking farm in Wielkopolskie voivodeship in summer. The team pasteurised it at 65°C for 30 minutes, a mild heat they chose to spare bioactive proteins, then split it. One portion stayed cold. The rest was fermented with three starter cultures from Biochem in Rome, dosed at 0.1 g per litre.

Yogurt culture YO-122, Streptococcus thermophilus plus Lactobacillus delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus, sat at 42°C for 4 hours and finished at pH 4.39. A Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus monoculture fermented at 37°C for 10 hours to pH 4.35. Lactiplantibacillus plantarum ran at 34°C for 10 hours to pH 4.19. They blended fermented milk with plain pasteurised mare milk so the frozen dessert would not taste too sharp, then added sugar and, in three batches, inulin.

THE FOUR MIXES

The design target was 7% fat, 7% milk solids non-fat, and 26% total solids. Mixes matured at 4°C for 2 hours, then froze for about an hour in a Springlane compressor machine that can reach about -30°C. Ice cream left the bowl at -10°C and went into store at -18°C. They packed 60 samples of about 50 g each and ran the tests after one day, the window they assigned to small-batch craft ice cream.

Mare Milk Was Too Lean to Freeze Alone

That Wielkopolskie lot tested at 0.50% fat, 2.37% protein, and 8.24% total solids, with a pH of 6.70. Ice cream needs far more fat than that if it is going to hold air and melt slowly. Preliminary runs showed the frozen yogurt would not keep its body without an added fat source.

Mare milk is not churned into cream, so the lab bought pasteurised cream from cow milk at 30% fat from a Szczecin shop. Measured fat in the finished ice creams landed at 7.33-7.58%, with protein at 1.85-1.91% and total solids at 24.66-26.96%. The paper notes that full-fat ice cream often sits near 10% fat, and that the slightly coarse texture they recorded is what you get when fat is cut.

Due to the fact, that mare’s milk is not used for cream production, we used cow’s cream. However mare’s milk remain the main ingredient, thus obtained product may be referred as mare’s milk ice cream.

Katarzyna Szkolnicka and colleagues, PLOS ONE

Both claims can be true at once. Milk can be the largest ingredient by weight, and almost all the fat in the scoop can still be cow fat. Anyone who cannot drink cow milk cannot treat this recipe as a substitute, even though raw mare milk itself is often discussed for that use.

How Did the Polish Horse Milk Ice Cream Taste?

Sensory work was done by six trained staff of the Faculty of Food Sciences and Fisheries, four women and two men, not by a crowd of shoppers. They scored consistency, taste, flavour, appearance, and colour from 1 to 5, for a maximum overall mark of 20, and they also ran a 9-point descriptive profile.

Colour came back as white-creamy and uniform. Texture was soft, quite creamy, and slightly coarse. Taste was pleasant and creamy on every mix. The only attribute that split the panel at a statistically clear level was acidity: the plantarum mix with inulin had a distinctly more acid flavour. Titratable acidity told a related but different story. YO, the only batch without inulin, was the most acidic on the lab bench, which the authors read as inulin lowering that measure.

Overrun sat in one band for all four mixes, 35.20-44.03%, and so did melting rate, 73.49-79.87% of a 25 g scoop after 60 minutes at 20°C. Hardness was low, 0.34-1.14 N. High melt and low hardness are what a lean frozen dessert does. The panel still called the overall quality high.

Inulin Kept More Bacteria Alive After Freezing

Inulin in this study is a prebiotic fibre, Orafti from Beneo in Mannheim, swapped in at 2% in place of some of the sugar. It is not a probiotic. The live cultures are the yogurt pair, L. rhamnosus, and L. plantarum.

Freezing and whipping both cut bacterial counts. Fat, casein, sucrose, and lactose give the cells some cover, which is why ice cream can carry probiotics at all. After production, mixes with inulin still held more than 7 log CFU/g of lactic acid bacteria. The yogurt mix without inulin stayed above 6 log CFU/g. That is the gap the paper hangs on: inulin helped the cultures through the freezer.

WHAT THE FREEZER LEFT ALIVE

• With inulin: Live lactic acid bacteria stayed above 7 log CFU/g in YO+I, LCR+I, and LP+I.
• Without inulin: The YO mix stayed above 6 log CFU/g, the lowest of the four.
• Overrun band: All four mixes whipped to 35.20-44.03%, a high-air, soft scoop.
• Melt band: 73.49-79.87% of each test scoop was liquid after an hour at 20°C.

The authors closed on a narrow claim. Mare milk, they wrote, may be considered a feasible raw material for yogurt ice cream and synbiotic ice cream. They did not claim a supermarket swap for cow gelato.

European Mare Dairies Sell Litres, Not Tankers

A cow is bred to fill a tank. A mare is bred to feed a foal, and her udder does not store a large reserve. A review of equine dairying in the journal Animals put milk harvested per milking at 500-2000 mL. European farms often milk three times a day and, in intensive units, as many as eight, usually after the foal has been taken off for a couple of hours.

The foal still drinks most of the day’s milk. Commercial litres are the surplus, which is why a mare dairy is a small, labour-heavy shop even when the animals are milked on a schedule.

WHY THE SUPPLY STAYS TINY

• Small takes: Each milking yields 500-2000 mL, and the foal still needs the rest of the udder.
• Many visits: Farms milk three times a day in ordinary work, and up to eight times in intensive European units.
• Short season: Mares are seasonal breeders, so milk arrives in a wave after foaling rather than in a flat year-round flow.
• No cream line: The milk is too lean to separate into a mare cream, which is why the Szczecin mixes borrowed cow cream.

Germany already has a specialist trade. Zollmann, at Kurgestüt Hoher Odenwald, sells organic mare milk at 14.53 euros a litre. The family dates the farm to 1959, runs it as a Demeter holding since 1989, and keeps about 400 horses on about 320 hectares. Foals stay close for 6-8 weeks, then spend part of the day in a “foal kindergarten” while the mares are milked, and they are weaned at about 9-10 months.

That price, and that choreography, is the real limit on horse milk ice cream. A 1.5-litre lab freezer can prove a recipe. It cannot fill a cabinet that sells scoops for a couple of euros.

Closer to Human Milk Than to Cow Milk

The health pitch around mare milk is older than this paper. Hippocrates and Herodotus already described equine milk, and koumiss, the fermented drink of the steppes, is still made from it. A 2020 review in Animals said equine milk has been reported to be consumed by 30 million people, and that dairy horse and donkey farms have spread in France, Italy, Germany, Greece, and parts of Asia.

On paper, the average horse milk composition sits nearer human milk than cow milk: more lactose, less fat, less protein, and a lower casein-to-whey ratio. A 2024 paper in Foods, looking at grazing mares, likewise stressed lower casein and higher whey protein than ruminant milk, plus more forage-derived polyunsaturated fat.

MILK SIDE BY SIDE

Those averages are not the Szczecin tank. The ice-cream milk was leaner still, at 0.50% fat, which is 5.0 g/kg. The same table also undercuts a common guess about digestion: mare milk is higher in lactose than cow milk, 63 g/kg against 48 g/kg, so it is a poor bet for lactose intolerance even when the protein profile looks gentler.

Low fat is not automatically better food, either. The Szczecin scoops were lighter than a typical 10% fat ice cream because the team was working with a lean milk and a 7% fat target, not because a dietitian had redesigned dessert. The cultures and the inulin are the functional extras. The cow cream is what made the mix freeze like ice cream.

The Scoop Already Exists in Almaty and the Odenwald

Western shops still treat mare milk as a curiosity, which is the gap the Szczecin authors wanted to close. They wrote that the frozen desserts looked like good candidates for introducing mare milk to consumers who do not know it. The product they actually made is a short-life yogurt ice cream with live bacteria, cow cream, and a milk that costs more than 14 euros a litre when it is bottled on a German farm.

The dessert is not new on every map. Fermented mare-milk ice cream is already sold in Almaty, where koumiss is an ordinary drink. In the Odenwald, the same milk is frozen, dried, fermented into kumys, and put into skin creams. The Polish paper adds a tested yogurt-ice-cream formula, a six-person sensory score, and a clear record that inulin helped the cultures survive the freezer.

It also adds the sentence the healthier-gelato headlines skipped. Without cow cream, the mare milk they bought would not make ice cream that held together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can people with a cow’s milk allergy eat this ice cream?

Not this recipe. The Szczecin mixes used cow cream at 30% fat, so they carry bovine casein and β-lactoglobulin, the proteins that trigger most cow’s milk protein allergy. Mare milk on its own has been tried in Italy as a drink for some allergic children, but that is a different food, and even equine milk can cross-react in a minority of patients.

Why did the Polish recipes add cow cream?

The mare milk contained only 0.50% fat, and early trials would not set a body or resist melt without extra fat. Mares are not used for cream production, so the team bought cow cream and aimed at a 7% fat mix, which is leaner than the 10% fat the paper cites for ordinary full-fat ice cream.

How much milk can a mare give in a day?

Harvested volume is 500-2000 mL per milking, and commercial farms often milk three times a day after separating the foal for a few hours. Daily totals in the research literature, counting milk the foal drinks as well, average about 11.7 kg, with a published range from 3.9 to 17.2 kg, so the bottles that reach a shop are only a slice of that figure.

Is mare’s milk lower in lactose than cow’s milk?

No. Average horse milk holds about 63 g of lactose per kg, against about 48 g/kg in cow milk and 64 g/kg in human milk. People who avoid cow milk because of lactose, rather than protein allergy, do not gain a lactose cut by switching to mare milk, and fermented drinks such as koumiss are the form that lowers lactose through bacterial use.

Did the Polish ice cream use only horse milk?

No. Each mix combined pasteurised mare milk, fermented mare milk, cow cream, sugar, and in three batches 2% inulin, then a freeze-dried lactic culture. The authors still called it mare’s milk ice cream because the mare milk was the main ingredient by weight, not because the fat phase was equine.