Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There's only two adults in our house. I don't bake and only use milk on those odd occasions when I have cereal or need a small bit for whatever I'm cooking. DH drinks it occasionally and uses it regularly on his cereal. Even if I buy a quart with 2+ weeks before expiration, it nearly always goes bad before we can finish it.
I was kinda curious about everybody reaction to this. Frankly, it's not something I'm gonna do. The gross factor is in my head (and nose), and since I pay about 70-80 cents for a quart of milk at Lidl, I'm cool with throwing it away. (Same as I do with the leftover cilantro and Italian parsley - can't ever use it all up.)
Like you, there are only the 2 of us and we use very little milk: spoiled brat uses it on his cereal and rarely will have a glass if he is having a piece of cake or something. I never drink it. I do make cream sauce once in awhile. We either buy only a quart at once or I freeze 1/2 of what we have. It freezes well. Oh, I might use it for waffles or pancakes, but even then, rarely.
The milk quite often goes bad, not sour due to a pasteurization and an absence of lactobacillus in it. Other opportunistic bacteria takes hold of the milk (disgustingly smelly, bitter) and it is not safe to use!
If you feel that your milk may spoil soon and you know what to do with the sour milk - cheese, whey, baking-
you could mix a dollop of sour cream, yogurt, kefir or a small piece of rye or sourdough bread (you could take it out later- it will be on top) to introduce
"good bacteria" and take it out of the fridge to let it sour properly.
Lactobacilli prefer a warm temperature -as high as 86 to 104 range, but room temperature will do- will take longer.
After milk starts smelling pleasantly sour - store it in the fridge until ready to use
Sour milk could be used in a numerous ways, though some suggestions in the article are odd and made me think that the author is probably a bad cook ("sour" milk in porridge? sweetened sour milk on cereal? - no, just no)
^^^ This as well.
I've had a nose for "bad" milk all my life. Back when kids got the obligatory half-pint carton of warm milk that had been sitting by the cloakroom door radiator for the morning, I could smell the difference when the cows had been fed fermented silage or were out in pasture. I had to forego drinking it many days, even though I was hungry. Don't get me started on the difference between Gurnsey and Jersey milk. Bad milk smells VILE! Yeah, you can make it safe by using it in baking, but you may not burn off all that odor. Buttermilk or cultured milk is different. I still can't stomach buttermilk, but love it (and yogurt) in cooking, where the acid adds to the rise and flavor.
Milk that is "off" has picked up whatever bacteria or spores that might be floating around. Dog vomit, dead mouse, rotting veggies - all are possible sources of bacteria. This thread has me thinking... my past expiration date milk has not smelled as rancid as when I had out-of-date milk in past years. I HAVE been making yogurt and keeping some in the refrigerator. I wonder if one of the bacteria types from it is colonizing and crowding out the putrefying ones?
Freezing milk is iffy. A lot of the time it will clump and not return to a full smooth liquid. As a temporary measure, maybe. Dry milk is not as bad tasting as in years gone by. Some might want to try it again, since the powder is quite stable. Just don't mix it with funky chlorinated tap water and expect it to taste anything but funky.
There is a taste difference between milk that is spoiled and buttermilk. Not a good idea to serve spoiled-milk pancakes to your friends...
Actually you can use soured milk instead of buttermilk. Home cooks of yore used sour milk to make biscuits and cornbread.
I don’t keep buttermilk around. But I do keep yogurt. You can sub yogurt—even expired yogurt—in place of buttermilk. I usually thin the yogurt first with regular milk or half and half.
I either bake with slightly "off" milk or freeze it in recipe-sized portions for use at a later date. Milk that's past its date but passes a routine sniff test is generally turned into some sort of soup or sauce. (Cooking it up to temp extends its shelf life a bit.) It's extremely rare that dairy products reach the point of unusable grossness in my house.
Because an animal either died or was enslaved in order to provide nourishment for me and the other human beings who sit at my table, I strongly feel that animal products are not to be wasted.
So which bacteria is in your “sour milk”? The kind that make it palatable and safe to use for cooking, or perhaps a different bacteria that might not be a happy story in our gut? You don’t know do you? Your kitchen, your food, but I’m not going to do biology experiments to save a dollar’s worth of milk.
Yes, sour milk is due to bacteria not killed off in pasteurization, but using in baking or as a tenderizer before cooking should kill off the bacteria. Drinking a small amount accidentally won't affect you but downing a glass might give you stomach issues. However, if the sour milk has been in the refrigerator several days I would throw it out. Freshly sour is ok.
Milk that is "off" has picked up whatever bacteria or spores that might be floating around. Dog vomit, dead mouse, rotting veggies - all are possible sources of bacteria.
WHY would there be dog vomit or dead mice in your refrigerator?? And clean out the rotting vegetables!
Typically, the bacteria that cause milk to go sour were already in the milk when you got it--pasteurization doesn't kill absolutely everything. That's why milk in an unopened plastic carton in the refrigerator will eventually go sour anyway despite never being exposed to the air in your house. It's not sterile.
WHY would there be dog vomit or dead mice in your refrigerator?? And clean out the rotting vegetables!
Typically, the bacteria that cause milk to go sour were already in the milk when you got it--pasteurization doesn't kill absolutely everything. That's why milk in an unopened plastic carton in the refrigerator will eventually go sour anyway despite never being exposed to the air in your house. It's not sterile.
You don't remember the days before bulk tanks. Cows have manure, manure has flies, flies land wherever in search of food, and so on. My greater point was that you have little idea where wild bacteria came from. Those were examples of possibilities. More likely, given the cross-contamination in the average kitchen, it comes from dead chickens. Happier?
I've been impressed by the improvements in pasteurization over the past few years. I've had milk two weeks or more past expiration date with not a whiff of sour. Back in the last century I was lucky if it made it within a day or two of the expiry date. Sterile, no. More consistently clean, yes.
I'm just beginning to play around with some simple cheese making. One thing the newbies are saying is that they can't get their cheese making attempts to work with pasteurized milk. I don't think they know that professionals in the U.S. use pasteurized milk and then add known cultures to it so that it is safe.
We don't use much milk at all, maybe a gallon or two per year. I always try to use all of it before it goes sour, but if there is any left and it is just a slight bit off I bake with it, like many others in this thread. I don't use it for cooking because it curdles and separates when it heats. If it is really "off" it goes down the drain because septic systems benefit from the bacteria in sour milk.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
