I was in the middle of making dinner when this happened. I’m grateful I poured it into a measuring cup first. Thankfully I don’t live too far from another source.
I remember milk staying good almost a week past its expiration date when I was a kid. Boy have the times changed.
Don’t you have ultra high heated milk? It keeps fresh for several months at room temperature as long as it’s unopened. It usually tastes a little less great than normal milk but that’s especially not much of an issue if you use it for baking or cereals.
I’m baffled that America insists on selling milk by the gallon. That’s so much milk to finish after opening.
The maximum size we used to get while I was growing up where I live was 1 litre. Then came the big milk, 1.5 L. Now we have this even bigger one that’s 1.75 L, I think. Seems like it’s going to converge on 2 L. 😄
I go through a gallon of milk in 2-3 days and I live by myself. I’m a bodybuilder though so…
When I was a kid my family of four would go through a gallon a week.
You can buy it in half gallons and quarts, too, but a lot of families go through a gallon in a couple days.
Dairy is heavily subsidized in the US. 1 gallon (3.8L) barely costs more than 1/2. Might as well buy the whole gallon and turn what you aren’t going to otherwise use into yogurt or cheese.
I somehow doubt you can do much with pasteurized and homogenized 1% milk.
There’s a reason that most dairy products in Europe are made from raw milk.
Yogurt is super easy to make with any (dairy) milk.
There are some cheeses that are better with unpasteurized milk, but it still works with pasteurized milk. I think most cheeses made with unpasteurized milk are just done that way because the pasteurization is an unnecessary step. Cheeses that are aged long enough have the pathogens die off. In the US, that threshold is 60 days. In the EU, tradition is deemed more important than safety, so there is no waiting period. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12146498/#fsn370409-bib-0006
Homogenization is a challenge for curd formation with some cheeses, but you can counteract it with some extra calcium chloride.
It’s common to add cream to milk to boost the fat content for some cheeses.
You wouldn’t make rennet-based cheeses of the leftovers from a jug of milk, though, cause that’s not enough bang for your buck. I just make what’s essentially like a ricotta. All you have to do is heat it up, and add a little bit of distilled vinegar or lemon juice which cuddles it, and then you strain it through cheesecloth.
Amazing. Thanks for the info.
Any ideas on how I’d make dry cottage cheese out of it at home?
I used to go through 2gallons a week
I can go through a whole gallon by myself before it goes bad. Now, I might just barely be able to do it most times, but still. Between cooking, drinking, and cereal, I can usually find a way to use it all. I mostly drink it though.
In the UK we have (in UK pints, 1 pint = 568ml): 1 pint, 2 pints, 4 pints and 6 pints. We also have slightly smaller metric sizes (1L, 2L) that are typically seen in convenience stores or on branded milk.
I would say that 4 pints (2.273L) is the typical size that most would buy for regular use, with smaller sizes popular for those that don’t have cereal/porridge. I find that milk from the supermarket tends to keep well, so it’s not that difficult to get through a 4 pinter, unless all you use it for is adding some in your tea - in which case you can just get a 1 or 2 pint jug.
Kids drink lots of milk i used to think people who bought multiple gallons was crazy…
Now I’m at the point we use a gallon in about a 2 days…
To be fair, to most of those who are used to fresh milk find the taste of UHT milk off-putting, myself included. North Americans do tend to drink more milk too so they go through a bottle long before it goes bad.
For us the reason for going UHT is that we don’t have the fridge space for all the milk we consume. We would have to buy new milk every few days.
And it actually is possible to make UHT milk taste almost like fresh milk. Those are usually just more expensive.