There's a very noticeable difference in taste between pasteurised and UHT milk, and anecdotally, based on discussing with multiple friends over the years, people who are used to pasteurised think UHT tastes worse, people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.
Personally, as a Brit (pasteurised is the norm) who has lived in France and Belgium, I'd always choose pasteurised. To drink on its own, UHT is significantly not nice to my tastebuds. With breakfast cereal its OK but still worse. A small amount in coffee and I don't notice the difference.
In Paris, finding pasteurised was pretty easy to do - although shops gave much more shelf space to UHT, I rarely struggled to find fresh milk. In Belgium on the other hand... near where I was living in a city, only one of 4 chain supermarkets and none of the cornershops sold non-UHT milk.
It's quite possible that if I spent <x amount of time> drinking lots and lots of UHT milk eventually my preference might change. I'm not planning on trying, though.
Can confirm. Always had fresh milk at home, until at some point my mom also started getting UHT. We'd occasionally (say, once every few months) run out of fresh for a day, and more occasionally she'd request me to use UHT because we were almost out and my dad didn't like it.
Little me wanting to show off I wasn't as picky as my picky dad went with it. Tasted less nice, but it was okay. Then at some point as I grew up and realized what a hassle it is to get fresh (and heavy) groceries more than once a week, I just stopped drinking fresh.
It still tastes nicer, fresh, but I can't care enough to have the inconvenience of having to get it so frequently, especially now that I've moved out. Fifty days another comment spoke of, I have never seen.
Same with music: I borrowed expensive headphones once for a while, and any music I discovered with that sounded crap on my own earphones. The other way around was fine. Anecdotically my dad again spends thousands on that stuff and I'm perfectly fine with lesser quality for a much more reasonable price. I don't worry about breaking my €50 three year old wireless headphones that needed disassembling and soldering once already; I do worry about the ones my dad gifted to us (my girlfriend uses them) which are worth considerably more, and I don't like using them because I might (gasp) scratch it.
Your preference might not change but your ability to accept the different taste of UHT may change.
I lived the first 25 years of my life in the UK and drank pasteurised milk almost exclusively and found the taste of UHT to be lesser.
I then lived in Poland for two years and drank UHT only.
At first I disliked the taste of UHT but over time I grew accustomed to it.
I am still able to tell the difference between pasteurised and UHT, I just no longer mind.
I find that for many things in life where there are similar but not exact variants, one tends to prefer the variant one first tried despite both variants being potentially equivalent.
Pasteurised milk vs UHT is one example. Margerine vs butter is another (I was raised on margerine and disliked butter for years). Windows vs Linux desktops (again, I was raised on the former and initially disliked the latter despite both being generally logically equivalent).
I have since learned to be more accepting of the differences in variants of food and tech. This seems to make life easier for me.
> I find that for many things in life where there are similar but not exact variants, one tends to prefer the variant one first tried despite both variants being potentially equivalent.
I grew up with pasteurized milk. As an adult, I tried unpasteurized milk. The taste is different, was a bit weird at first. After a couple of glasses, I much preferred it over the kind I grew up with (it's just so much better), and it's all I drink now. Normal pasteurized milk tastes like low-fat now (i.e., it tastes like drinking water from a glass that had a little milk in it already).
So I don't think it's quite so simple that everyone always prefers what they grew up with. But you're right that we often need to get used to new kinds of food before we accept it.
I was about to give some snarky response, but a quick Google reveals it's actually terrifyingly dangerous and there are good reasons never to drink raw milk. Thanks!
I think the risks are greatly overstated by the dairy lobby. My family drank raw milk from our own cows and goats for the better part of 10 years, and none of us ever got sick as a result.
Of course our animal accommodations and milking practices were much cleaner than what one might find at commercial scale. But that's not a problem inherent in raw milk, but rather the same unsanitary conditions that plague the industry at large.
It's important to look for actual statistics, milk is a leading cause of food born illness even with pasteurization. Abstractly the risk is not that high however food safty is a major issue: the overall annual estimate of the total burden of disease due to contaminated food consumed in the United States is 47.8 million illnesses, 127,839 hospitalizations, and 3,037 deaths.https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/questions-and-answers.ht...
Milk is a funny thing, being a rich medium for bacteria.
Take a pint of fresh-from-the-cow milk and a pint of your typical store-bought pasteurized milk and leave them open on the counter for 2 or 3 days at room temperature. The former will turn into a tart, pleasant smelling mix of curds and whey I'd be willing to taste and possibly consume while the latter will be a smelly, gag-inducing spoiled mess that will almost certainly make you ill.
I've witnessed this first-hand.
Raw milk is loaded with beneficial bacteria that can be naturally culture itself to various ends, more often then not out-competing environmental bad bacterial. Pasteurized milk, devoid of most bacteria to start, will (most often) be overrun by bacteria that will make people ill. I does not surprise me that our "normal" milk is a non-trivial vector of food-borne illness.
While I can understand the assumption Raw milk is far more likely to be associated with food born illness for exactly the reasons you mention. However while overall consumption well below 1% it's still responsible for a and much higher than expected fraction of illnesses and a few deaths.
Importantly, people are more likely to die from food that looks good but can kill them than they are to eat food that looks and tastes nasty.
I only use raw milk for making yogurt. As part of the process the milk is heated to near boiling point. And I process the raw milk into yogurt quickly, within a few hours of it leaving the cow (to avoid botulism). Living is fun!
While this doesn't necessarily mean it's safe. I've consumed raw milk that we 'grow' on our farm with happy, organically raised cows and haven't had any problems.
I'm sure it does, but every farmer I've ever met drank raw milk, so I'm not convinced it's so terribly unsafe.
For the record, I don't live in the US, and here they don't pump cattle full of antibacterials. I buy my raw milk at the grocery store, it's legal and vetted by the health authorities.
That's why restaurants have to call it "pasta ai quattro formaggi" because if they call it mac-and-cheese it's not going to taste what Mom (or Dad) used to make.
The huge advantage of UHT milk in sealed packages is that it can be distributed effectively in a developing nation environment without a reliable logistics "cold chain" or electrical grid. Example: Boxes of UHT milk sold at nearly every small grocery store in Pakistan where refrigeration is either impossible for the shop owner due to economics, or the electrical grid is not reliable enough to support a refrigerated product section.
I wonder what the history is here. Neither the article nor Wikipedia really get into why the differences by country. Certainly, if one were to go by national prejudices, one would assume the US would be big on UHT (when in fact it's relatively hard to find) and countries that we would assume would be into the less aggressively processed food aren't. Maybe habits developed when refrigeration was less universal?
I agree with your general observations. I tend to keep some UHT packs at home as backup (as well as hotel-type half-and-half portions). But I would never use them on a day-to-day basis especially to drink straight.
Given that UHT has a huge advantage in areas without access to electricity or refrigeration, I wonder if it took a foothold in Europe as it was being rebuilt after the wars in the twentieth century?
That would be my theory as well although I'm not sure it totally squares with the huge variations by country. [1] There is some alignment with Northern Europe (less UHT--less lactose-intolerance) vs. Southern Europe but even then there are outliers like Greece.
UHT wasn't really a thing until the 70s. From the early 60s, Europe was booming and the war no longer had an influence on peoples' living standards (at least in the west).
> It's quite possible that if I spent <x amount of time> drinking lots and lots of UHT milk eventually my preference might change. I'm not planning on trying, though.
here in Switzerland, we have the choice between the two and having drunk both, I can assure you that I'm firmly in the pasteurised-tastes-better camp.
However, the huge convenience of not producing a smelly mess within days after purchase of UHT milk makes me still buy UHT if I don't know that I'm going to be certain to use the milk within one or two days.
I do not understand, under refrigeration it should last quite a bit longer than a few days. I wonder what the differences world wide with regards to pasteurization and additives to such are.
This is easily brand specific too. I know in the US if I buy milk from Whole Foods / Trader Joe's I better drink it in 3 days. Where as the store brand at Safeway is impressing me with its longevity.
> people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.
Being french, I'm used to UHT, but I notice the difference and mind very much. But maybe it's also due to what kind of pasteurisation is used (there are apparently several), and whatever is used here in Japan for the milk sold refrigerated makes it almost tasteless to me. No supermarket around where I am even sells UHT milk (they call it long conservation), but I can fortunately find some online.
Same in South Korea. Almost all milk is treated at 130-135 degrees for 2 seconds.
There's one brand (named after Louis Pasteur) that treats their milk at 63 degrees for half an hour. It's more expensive and not widely available, but it tastes so much better.
The funny thing is that most of the UHT milk here is still only rated for a shelf life of 10 days. You have to pay extra for some sort of super-UHT variant that comes in smaller, thicker cartons if you want to keep it for a few months. Perhaps the rules were set when refrigerated distribution wasn't as widespread as it is now. Or maybe the major brands just prefer to use cheap, non-sterile containers. Either way, we're stuck with disgusting UHT milk that doesn't even last long, negating its only raison d'etre.
I thought the norm was between 低温殺菌 and UHT, but it looks like you're right. The method is however different from the one used for UHT in France, which is why they can't be kept more than 10 days. However, it's possible to find "long life" milk that can be preserved at room temperature for a couple months, that is also UHT, but also tastes much better to me.
I find the Japanese milk to be rather sturdy, I often keep it for a month or so (though I only use it for tea so a little change in flavor probably goes unnoticed).
Wow, to each their own. I prefer Japanese milk to anything I got at whole foods in SF and I prefer it to the UHT milk I had in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Barcelona. It seems richer to me.
On the other hand I think I might have become lactose intolerant recently. Trying to stop drinking milk to see if it helps certain issues
Cold UHT is slightly better, but still, coming from Italy, fresh milk is a whole another level of taste, especially if you plan to dip biscuits. Anyway, if one comes from a country where milk is blander than what we're used, the difference in taste is lesser - i.e. milk in Ireland was murky white water, and don't get me started on their 13% fat extra fat cream. Ugh.
That said if I had to transform milk so it lasted months, I'd be doing cheese.
I think the UHT processes must have really improved. I grew up with pasteurized milk in the UK and when I spent a couple of years in France in my early teens I found the taste of UHT seriously gross. However, since moving to Spain a couple of years ago I've found that it pretty much tastes the same as pasteurized milk these days, maybe a tiny bit sweeter.
Interestingly, the pasteurized milk available here in Spain tastes way less like UK pasteurized milk than the UHT stuff. Also curdles after like 3 days of being opened. I guess there are various processes for both pasteurized and UHT.
It seems ironic that France, being a country that places a huge importance on using raw milk for certain cheeses, drinks UHT milk more than pasteurised milk.
And either way, their man Pasteur seems to get no love.
Perhaps we can see it this way: in France, the dairy industry has long worked to produce high-quality milk products such as cheese -- delivering fresh milk to cities was thus less of a big deal.
I don't know why England should be different. Maybe because of country-folk during the industrial revolution coming to the big city at just about the same time as the British Empire fell in love with the kind of tea that goes well will milk.
> people who are used to pasteurised think UHT tastes worse, people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.
Personally, I prefer the taste of UHT. De gustibus non est disputandum.
I remember delivering UHT milk 30 years ago as a kid. It was always in the bottle with the thin neck, and tasted disgusting, we used to call it dead-mans milk.
Interesting... I grew up in South of India and about 30 yrs ago, I used to drink fresh raw milk as soon as my Granddad finished milking the cows.. Back then, not sure if anybody even knew about pasteurization outside of big cities in India.
Things have changed a lot now though.. Everytime I visit India or my village I see Cows being injected with a concoction of drugs and hormones .. :(
Massive difference in taste between UHT and pasteurised but you must understand there's different use for either. I did a course on espresso coffee and clearly remember the teacher telling us that for the best cappuccino you should use full fat UHT as opposed to pasteurised milk. You'll also notice that many coffee chains use UHT. On the other hand eating cereal with UHT has a funny taste. Either way the benefit of UHT is that it can be stored without reliable refrigeration, especially useful in developing countries with a sparse or unreliable power grid.
No cafe worth its salt (in Australia) would be caught dead using UHT milk. Perhaps it is a cultural preference (and what I am used to), but I hate it when I am overseas and see them pull out the UHT milk to make my coffee. It just tastes horrible to me.
As far as I know all the coffeeshops in San Francisco use Strauss milk, which is pasteurized. The cappuccinos at Four Barrel, Ritual, Sightglass, Linea, etc. compare favorably against any I’ve ever had elsewhere in the world. http://strausfamilycreamery.com/products/item/organic-barist...
To counter your anecdote, as a French used to UHT milk, I really hated pasteurized milk at first (and my first experiences with pasteurized milk were in UK)... Since then I've lived in countries without UHT milk and got used to it and actually like it more.
Counteranecdotally, I spent most of my young years in Germany drinking uht, and coming to America for university I found regular milk "sour" in comparison
Maybe you were leaving it for too long before drinking it...
That said, I had a colleague who was mad keen on getting absolutely the perfect traditional milk. This meant the proper kind of high-speed machine had to do the shaking. But it also, apparently, meant using old milk.
He would actually ask servers whether the milk fresh, and walk out if they said "yes".
All of my anecdotes on the matter are EU (possibly all BE/FR, not sure) vs UK, so it's possible UK and US pasteurised milk tastes different (I've had many lattes in America but can't remember ever drinking straight milk or over cereal there..)
Or it's possible my sample size was too small. Would be curious to know how many people feel which way, but somehow doubt there's any good data sets for that!
when i grew up i used to drink fresh (pasteurized) milk, later switched to UHT, nowadays i tried even pure raw non pasteurized milk from farm milk vending machine and honestly i can't say difference between pasteurized, raw and UHT, all of them of course full fat 3.2-3.6%, these days i even tried 5% Jersey cow pasteurized fresh milk but that taste to me like spoiled milk and can't drink it, on the other hand i tried lactose free full fat UHT milk and i was surprised by nice sweet flavor, very suitable for children (it was surprising to me considering i noticed zero difference between 82% butter with it without lactose)
for practical reasons i prefer UHT milk, much easier to store and keep in fridge only 1-2 boxes you are going to drink
I actually grew to like the taste of UHT milk, after living in Panama for many years where the fresh milk just never lasted longer than a week in the fridge. But I prefer pasteurized still.
There are actually three. Vat pasteurization is the oldest, it involves holding milk at 145 deg. F for half an hour. High temperature, short time (HTST) pasteurization involves bringing milk to 161 deg. F for 16 seconds. And Ultra-pasteurization, or the ultra high temperature (UHT) process, involves bringing the milk to 280 deg. F for 2 seconds.
Time is money, so vat pasteurized milk is more expensive than HTST milk which is more expensive than UHT milk. The downside of higher temperatures is that more of the flavor compounds tend to be destroyed in the process. This has a secondary effect of driving the milk producer towards lower milk quality, since it all tastes the same after the UHT process.
I'm not sure, I always assumed UHT was a bit cheaper but never paid attention (or if I ever did look at the difference I've forgotten).
I just had a quick look at a UK supermarket's online site and both seemed similarly priced with some comparable options being cheaper on one side or the other. Without bothering to spend more time actually doing the maths, and looking at more than one store, it could be that there is a significant difference on average.
In France/Belgium I equally never bothered to check the price difference (I'd still be choosing pasteurised where available if it cost 5x as much), but anecdotally I saw it more in higher-end (most expensive) supermarket chains.
My mum used to buy pasteurised and when I moved out I mistakenly started buying UHT, not really caring for the difference. It doesn't taste worst at all. It tastes much sweater and actually tastes better in my opinion.
This is interesting to me because one of my favorite weird hobbies is going to my grocery store, taking a photo of the milk with the farthest date, and sending it to my friends as a sort of game.
I shop at Stew Leonard's most of the time (locations in NY and CT). The milk I buy there is organic and lasts a hell of a long time compared to the milk I frequently see in other supermarkets. The current record I've seen is a gallon of milk with an expiration date 63 days from the day I saw it. I'd say the median is maybe...50 ish days (I shop on Sundays, when I think they've likely restocked).
I regularly buy three gallons at a time, and to this day I find it to be the most fun and humorous part of shopping at the grocery store. This milk has literally never gone bad for me and it tastes delicious.
After reading this article, I'm really interested in knowing whether or not it's heat-treated! I have always assumed it lasts so long because Stew Leonard's owns their own farms relatively close to the grocery stores.
I've had a similar experience. I think the organics companies just clean their equipment/tanks better or something. Regular milk with an expiration date 3 weeks in the future often turns sour within 3 days of opening, despite refrigeration. Whereas organic milk with the same expiration date, from the same shelf in the same store, will last a week and a half. And there's really nothing inherent about organic milk that should make it last longer.
I always refrigerate milk, just wanted to be clear about it to explain that it wasn't going sour because I was doing something dumb like leaving it open on the counter.
I find the reverse. Organic smells sour after 2-4 days, but my standard delivered milk lasts at least a week. Both are local and minimally processed, and come in glass bottles.
Man, you're taking me back to a time when I used to work at Stew Leonards. Their milk is probably one of the best I've had right behind Battenkill Milk. Battenkills is more creamy if you can believe it.
As for expiry dates, I don't recall them ever being that long, but I don't think I've ever looked because I just do a smell test and just trust everything on the shelf is fresh.
Target brand organic milk has an insane shelf life compared to the regular stuff. I've seen it two months out. Not only that but it seems to last longer once opened which is great for me since I don't use much milk.
I think it's required to be heat treated to be sold in the US. I like to check the dates too! I always get a little kick from pulling a gallon from the back that has a few extra days left in the expiry label.
After I moved to rural Germany, I was happy to find out that the local farmers will sell you milk.
Since then I only drink that really fresh milk, milked in the same day. The first 4 cm of the bottle are just cream. Is incredibly tasty and you can make any kind of cheese or Yoghurt with it - you need the right bacteria, of course.
Another interesting bit: I used to cook it and then drink it. Not doing this anymore. Some people say is not healthy, but I can really see the cows from where is coming. There is no place where it might be contaminated. And also it resists about a week in the fridge, after that it transforms into a nice refreshing fermented milk drink.
In my mind edible substances that last a long time are free of nutrients and high in calories, most of the time anyway.
I never buy UHT milk and try buying fresh, locally produced milk whenever I can find it. I never buy low fat milk either.
The difference in taste between fresh milk and these replacements is actually huge. I also don't get people buying the low fat variety either. If you're concerned about fat or cholesterol, it's better to drink less, high-quality milk, instead of milk-like liquids enriched with powdered milk, pork fat and dyes (the exact composition of these replacements varies by country, but it's always processed to the point that you can no longer classify it as being milk).
"In my mind edible substances that last a long time are free of nutrients and high in calories"
Salted cod, cured meats, pickels, dried beans, dried oats, pasta, rice, beef jerky, cheese... We have been using preservation methods since ancient times, which do not have any adverse effect in terms of nutrition.
In terms of taste, in many a case, the method used to preserve can enhance the taste and create a different (but not inferior) kind of food than the original.
I don't see why modern methods should have an adverse effect, when done right.
Fermentation as a method of preservation is substantially different than UHT, and you couldn't substitute one for the other without changing the product. Heavy amounts of nitrates are dubious way of preserving food. But your point is generally correct. For example, shelf stable vegetarian dishes should be nutritionally very close to fresh.
Heating (pasteurisation) doesn't make milk free of nutrients[1] -- pasteurised milk should substantially be the same as raw milk in terms of nutrients.
I agree that low-fat (skimmed) milk should be avoided: the fat in whole milk is important as it makes you feel full. Fat free and low fat products encourage over-eating [2][3].
I generally don't like milk. The taste makes me gag a little bit and it nearly always smells like it is going sour, even when it clearly isn't.
It isn't for lack of trying, and there are differences. Lactose-free milk is better than normal. Low-fat milk tastes better than whole milk, yet skim milk tastes like I put water in a glass that had milk in it without rinsing. For me, there is no real concern about the calories - I use cream occasionally in cooking, after all, and use butter.
I didn't discover UHT milk until I moved to Germany, and went to the supermarket. It seems that every culture has its own grocery taxonomy, so I had to ask an employee where I could find the milk.
She pointed me towards the milk aisle, and I was amazed that none of it was refrigerated. Sure, you can buy fresh milk in Germany, but it seems that UHT is considered more the "standard".
I have to say, I preferred the taste to either American or Japanese milk, and fell in love with the convenience of being able to keep a case of the stuff in my pantry.
This must have been a long time ago. In my local super market it is harder to find UHT milk than fresh milk in the fridge. Which by the way has a two week shelve life because it is highly filtered.
Agreed. I usually groceries shop in one of three stores, and in only one I'd even know where the UHT milk aisle even is, and that's just because it happens to be next to the eggs. The refrigerated milk aisles (pasteurized and ESL) are very prominently featured in all those stores.
I am also surprised that the wiki article linked elsewhere gives 66+% UHT consumption in Germany. They might be lumping together refrigerated Extended Shelf Life milk with 2-4 weeks shelve life (heated more than pasteurized milk and also usually filtered, but less so than UHT) and UHT milk in that statistic, but those are not really comparable in taste (and storage, obviously) at all.
A few years ago, super markets in Germany (and I guess also in other European countries) switched from selling pasteurized milk to ESL milk (Extended Shelf Life). It has actually became quite hard to find any non-ESL milk in grocery stores.
ESL milk last for 2-3 weeks in the fridge, but it has not been heated to the same degree as UHT milk. Therefore it still tastes better, but not the same as pasteurized milk.
I was actually very surprised when I first moved to UK to find that milk here spoils within a few days of purchase, I was so used to UHT milk that we would normally buy several cartons of, and then it would last months(obviously only few days after opening, but we could conceivably buy a 6-month supply and just keep it in the basement for later consumption). Nowadays I found where to buy UHT milk in the UK, it gets me some weird looks from my friends but the convenience of not having to go to a store to buy fresh milk every few days is absolutely worth it.
UHT milk is not popular at all in Australia, except in motel room mini-fridges.
I find the taste to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike milk. Particularly when used to make a flat white coffee.
I would put up with a long walk to a shop everyday to not have to taste UHT milk :)
Also, regular pasteurized milk is very cheap in Australia already. As low as $1/Lt in a supermarket as the result of some dubious market practices [0].
Milk actually has a few places in UK's cultural history, one bit of which is very relevant to the inconvenience of buying milk regularly.
Traditionally, "milk floats" (a vehicle) would be driven by "milkmen", doing early -morning deliveries of milk in glass bottles, and they would collect the previous day's empty bottles at the same time. Wiki page has photo examples of what milk floats look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
This service is actually still available in some places. For example, I just checked my postcode with https://www.milkandmore.co.uk and they told me my milkman's name and that he delivers on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. But when I was a kid, say 20 years ago, we'd get it delivered Monday to Saturday, and seeing milkmen doing their rounds was incredibly common, with many customers everywhere. Now it's a bit of a quirky thing you don't see or hear much of, mainly because most people decided that the inconvenience of picking up from a shop was outweighed by the flexibility it offered.
It's interesting that you described the concept of milkmen as specifically relevant to the U.K. In the United States, milkmen are well-established in pop culture, particularly as a quaint symbol of pre-WW2 domestic life. I would have assumed that milkmen were standard in most every developed country before refrigeration became widespread. I also would have assumed it's still common in developing countries.
I was replying to somebody who was talking about the situation in the UK, and the knowledge I have of milkmen is from the UK - I didn't mean to imply it was necessarily unique to us.
We had a milkman when I was growing up in the US in the 1960s although it was already something of an anachronism at that time as we went to the grocery story for other dairy perishables. (I drank a lot of milk growing up so having the scheduled delivery was probably still somewhat convenient.)
The adjacent town to where I live did have a dairy farm that delivered until fairly recently but I'm not sure they do any longer. I imagine there are still milkmen in some places but I'm not aware of any.
Besides "milk men", there were "ice men" who would deliver ice to homes. [0] Demand for ice delivery turned into a major exterior feature of early 20th century homes, and you can still find small ice doors mysteriously adorning the Victorians of SF.
The first time I ever heard about the ice trade [0] and the iceman occupation was from the movie "Frozen". One of the main characters in the movie is an ice harvester by trade.
> Traditionally, "milk floats" (a vehicle) would be driven by "milkmen", doing early -morning deliveries of milk in glass bottles, and they would collect the previous day's empty bottles at the same time.
It used to be dominant in the US, too, and is still available in some places, so I don't think this is in any way indicative of a unique position in British culture.
I live in the rural USA. We get local milk in glass bottles once a week. I can not imagine why they dont have it everywhere. Its nice to get to know your farmers and growers. I get to specify my favorite cuts and gice direct feedback. If i had to eat walmart food I might understand going veg/vegan.
If I walk into tesco right now I can guarantee that their freshest milk will have a use by date of about 5-6 days from now. It should also be used within a couple days from opening - I would definitely buy a new bottle every 4-5 days. And nope, my fridge sits at a solid 2C, thank you.
Wow, we regularly buy milk with best before dates 3-4 wks from the date of purchase. The milk doesn't travel far as there many dairy cows in Northern California.
I wonder if different definitions are at work: i.e. 5-6 days assumes you open it the moment you get it home, while 3-4 weeks assumes you drink it within a few days of opening.
That sounds unusually short. I bought 1pt milk from tesco on 2nd April and its use by date is 11th April; the 4pt cantainer i bought last week sometime (so 27th March or so?) is use by 6th April.
Perhaps 3 weeks would indeed be stretching it, but (with the proviso that I'm going entirely by my gut here, nothing scientific) 10 days feels pretty usual.
Plain fresh milk will start to taste a bit sour after a few days and will turn after no more than a week or so; or it could turn in a day if it's left out at room temperature.
What you want to get is micro-filtered milk. Cravendale is the main supplier I know of, but some of the supermarkets' own brand have micro-filtered versions, with markup.
Micro-filtered milk will last a few weeks, up to a month, without curdling.
Thinking I might be lactose intolerant I tried some lactose free milk some time ago. It was the best tasting and the longest lasting Milk I ever bought. Ever since, I tend to buy exclusively lactose free because of that.
I have considered the same thing. I've never really liked milk. Chocolate milk was always worse - it tasted like someone mixed something rotten with a chocolate flavor. I always think milk smells like it has gone off. I've never had an upset stomach or other gastric symptoms from dairy like my sister, who is lactose intolerant. I always kinda figured I wasn't.
Then I tried some lactose free chocolate milk, with no sugar added. I think this was the first time I've actually enjoyed milk. I still do not drink milk often, but now I will actually drink it.
I don't drink much milk so I mostly keep the little packages around for occasional baking and other recipes. Something missed in the article is package inflation has not caught up to UHT like it has for most every other product in the supermarket, a cup sized package continues to hold exactly 1 cup or 8 oz like it has for a couple decades. Most processed foods in the supermarket have dramatically shrunk over time making UHT something of a novelty.
Interesting, I'd never heard of that process before, sounds very clever, does it taste just like ordinary pasteurised milk? (as it sounds like they use a filter, then pasteurise)
Yup, just like pasteurised. After a few weeks, it starts tasting a bit different - not like fresh milk going sour, just different, don't really have a word for it.
Really? Normal, non-uht milk bought here in the UK will start smelling off and go lumpy after about a week or so in the fridge. Month after opening? I imagine it would be fully soured at that point?
For the US, I agree as well. Maybe about 2 weeks on the outside for regular pasteurized milk and it will generally start to taste somewhat off within a week. A month? No way.
ADDED: Sounds as if there's something called micro-filtered milk that I've never heard of in the US. It's certainly not a standard item.
I don't find pasteurization to make as much of a difference as other things like fat content. Whole milk is sooo much better than skim milk, for example.
I love milk and since moving to California I haven't been able to find anything nearly as good as what we had in Boston. There was this brand High Lawn Farms that had tangibly better milk. You could even notice the difference when used in small amounts in tea/coffee, which is probably why every single local coffee shop used it. Someone should figure out what they are doing differently.
One of the nice things being back in New Zealand is the quality of the milk here - maybe it's just because I grew up drinking it, but it tastes vastly better to me. It has a much fuller flavour than anything I found in California - could be because all the cows here are grass-fed?
UHT is available here but for most people it's emergency use only.
Looks like they have only Jersey cows that make milk with higher fat content and also primarily with A2 beta casein.
There is a brand here in California called Saint Benoit creamery which you can find at Whole Foods.
As a person sensitive to the taste of milk (am I the only adult who just drinks it in a glass as opposed to putting it in other stuff?), I can also vouch for High Lawn - it's delicious. I don't really milk often, but when I do, I have no problem splurging for the good stuff.
A commercial producer like the one listed is still selling pasteurized product. I do like to buy from a couple of small local producers when it's convenient but I'm not sure I could identify in a blind test.
The availability of raw milk varies by state and is often only available for purchase on the farm that produces it or otherwise outside of normal retail channels.
I'm just speaking to my experience with all different kinds of milk. I don't think I've ever had completely unpasteurized milk (is that legal in the US?), so every other kind.
You can certainly use UHT milk to make cheeses that don't contain rennet such as paneer, ricotta, and quark. Some argue that you can't make good quality versions of these cheeses with UHT milk. From personal experience, I've made quark with UHT milk and it seemed pretty good quality to me.
I do get excellent results making yoghurt with UHT milk. It's also a simpler process as there is no need to heat the milk first before adding the starter.
Slightly off-topic, but how far are we from producing artificial milk? It would seem like a relatively easy thing to do (at least compared to meat), and with high payoff (vegetarian diet without the ethical and ecological problems of animal dairy).
There are a couple companies tackling this problem. Ripple uses peas and is on shelves now - I tried it and it was pretty good, better than soymilk but not as good as real milk.
What I'm really excited for is when milk is being produced in vats with a combination of cow gut bacteria and grass - in theory a mechanical cow's stomach could produce milk that was indistinguishable in taste from real milk but cheaper, cruelty free, cleaner, etc.
Are any of these nutritionally equivalent to cow's milk?
Or human milk?
Or some kind of adult-biased version of human milk?
Oh wait, yeah. Soylent, Huel, Mana, 100%Food etc. etc. etc. are effectively "artificial milk for adult humans", at least in their liquid forms rather than the ones who sell packaged meal bars as well.
Why does it matter? Milk nutritionally is simple to replace. It's sugar water with fat and some assorted vitamins. It doesn't have anything that isn't easily replaceable.
About fifteen years ago, I had a housemate who was from Italy, and she thought the milk I bought (standard US whole milk) was gross and, she said, "tastes like cheese". I had already been exposed to shelf-stable milk on a previous trip to Europe, so we soon figured out that was the source of the issue, but reading this article suggests she may have been exceptionally perceptive with the cheese comment.
This would be great for the Canadian north where food is incredibly expensive due to the cost of shipping and storage. For example a 2 liter bottle of orange juice is $30, 4 liters of milk $10. the UHT milk could bring that cost down if it can be stored in bulk for long periods of time.
In Nunavut, it's closer to $38 (but sometimes as low as $26). Food prices in Northern Canada are basically more ridiculous than Norway.
However, Walmart Canada has 1L "value brand" orange juice for as low as $1. So don't assume the price is the same everywhere. And also consider that OJ prices fluctuate daily on the commodities exchange (as much as 19% just in the past 3 months) and there are many tiers of OJ, from concentrate at as low as $1 per liter, to as much as $10 for super-premium brands.
Sounds about right. I paid $4.50 for a warm (12 oz) can of Shasta root beer in Koliganek, AK.
Keep in mind that these prices are for very small, very remote towns where everything is flown in (or driven over the ice in winter), not downtown Montreal or Anchorage.
Certain foodstuffs are also more expensive on Caribbean Islands (not as high as remote Alaskan towns, but more expensive than the continental US). Brand names are also way more expensive there (for the most part) than off brands. Lots of Ultra Pasteurized products for sale as well.
Root beer (well, Shasta at least) is a sugary soft-drink (non-alcoholic). I think I paid about S$12 for a pint of actual beer at some pizza place in Clarke Quay. Don't think they tax the sugary stuff as much (if at all?), but they'll certainly shame you out of them (hello TAF).
Yep, I've only had pasteurised in the UK and Ireland and those two taste the same. If I'm every in the US I'll have to try the milk and see if it tastes different.
You can't make mozzarella with UHT milk. One nice thing about regular pasteurized milk is that it forms curds easier and has higher yield. I love going to the store and buying a gallon to turn to fresh mozz.
I remember reading that some years ago and wondering if it was like condensed milk (which would probably be pretty awful on Captain Crunch cereal). Now, I think the cereal might be the key thing to hide the flavor of UHT milk.
I don't like milk, but will eat in cereal - though I won't drink any leftover milk in the bowl. It isn't just that cereal changes the taste of the milk, but the way you smell it is different. In a glass, you have a concentrated smelling tube you put to your mouth, and cereal you have a dribble on the spoon. You simply can't smell or taste as much of it.
British / Irish pasteurised milk tastes so much fresher than pasteurised milk in other countries, must be our abundant green grass, British Beef is also the best in the world.
UHT milk is horrible. Filtered fresh milk is the answer, needs refrigeration but lasts for 5 times longer than non-filtered.
My local store just started carrying small (1 pint) UHT milk. We don't use milk in our house, except as an ingredient in other things, so a pint at a time is perfect, and now it has a 6+ month shelf life, so there's less planning and feel-bads when it goes sour.
Pasteurized and UHT have about the same shelf space in Italy with the former tasting much better than the latter to me. I buy UHT only for the first breakfast when I come back from a vacation. Full fat milk tastes better than reduced fat, which is watery in comparison.
However micro filtered milk become common in the last years. It lasts one or two weeks and tastes as pasteurized. It's the one I buy.
The advantage of UHT is that it doesn't need a refrigerator so it's what I buy on vacation, when I don't have a fridge or where I don't trust the fridges of the sellers.
Anecdotally, I almost exclusively buy Fair Life milk nowadays which usually has a very comfortable shelf life of 2-3 months. No discernible taste differences.
They claim that they've got a cold-filtration process which is what allows for their milk to last so long. Doesn't sound the same as the UHT discussed in the article, I'd be curious to know what they exactly do. (https://fairlife.com/our-process/)
Heh, I keep a box of single serve UHT milk cartons in my fridge just for making coffee on the weekends, and the occasional recepie. It's a little pricey at about $1.10/8oz carton, but at my consumption rate I'd be throwing away most of the 1/2 gallon jug anyway, which typically costs more per oz than a full gallon.
I don't find it as good as non-UHT milk, but it's definitely worth the convenience of always having milk when I need it.
I do the same thing, but still end up with extra at the end of the weekend. When traveling in Europe I noticed a lot of places have small tablespoon servings of UHT milk in little cartons. I wish we had something like that here, but all I can I find are stuff like "mini moos" which are too heavy.
Non-homogenized milk will also not spoil like regular milk does [though it still needs refrigeration, but it will last for 2-3 month pass its expiration date].
This is probably what we call tetrapak milk in Mexico. You buy them in the supermarket and they last for months. I was surprised not find it in the US. It is very convenient. I don't think it tastes different than regular refrigerated milk.
So I go out and order a nice coffee from expensive beans, grinded & brewed with love -- only to see that they put UHT milk in it instead of fresh milk ... that spoils it for me!
Does anyone irradiate milk? I don't think the Mallard reaction would be present -- although, the milk proteinase would remain, but traditional pasteurization would be effective as an interim solution to deal with the unwanted enzymes.
It seems like this is a low-hanging startup that might actually benefit from Trump's America.
I'm embarrassed that I never looked into the difference between the two.
I've always bought fresh milk on the assumption that it was healthier and purer than the long life stuff, especially because the long life milk tastes a tad sweeter and creamier to me (so it must be bad for me, right?)
Weird that they don't talk about micro-filtered milk. It removes bacteria through filtration, tastes like regular milk, has a long shelf life and stays good for a good week in your fridge...
In fact most of the fresh milk sold in Germany is microflitrated. It is really hard to find old school pasteurized fresh milk nowadays in a normal supermarked. The microflitrated milk is named "Frischmilch - länger haltbar" (fresh milk - long life). Milk that is only pasteurized is named "Frischmilch - traditionell hergestellt" (fresh milk - traditionally crafted).
If it tastes like regular milk (assuming you mean the pasteurized milk we drink in the US/Australia/NZ) what are the advantages over it? I regularly keep milk in my fridge much longer than a week.
I've started buying microfiltered milk (am in the UK) because I've always had trouble with milk going off before I can use it all when buying ordinary pasteurised milk, but the microfiltered milk stays fresh plenty long enough to use it all up.
On the bottle the stuff I buy say it's good for 7 days in the fridge after opening. Experience so far bears this out, whereas normal milk manages about 4 for me.
It's entirely possible my fridge sucks, but I have checked the temperature and the milk comes out of the fridge at about 2C, so...
Sure, if you don't think mass deforestation is cruel... Brazil is one of the biggest soy exporters in the world, and large swathes of rain forest and cerrado (savanna) have given way to soy farms.
More than 85% of soy grown is for non-human animal consumption. Animal agriculture in Brazil is the leading cause of Amazon deforestation, likewise, animal agriculture in Argentina.
I'm not even sure if you've read the source you've given as it states the same.
Not to mention that most soy humans consume is non-GMO (which excludes practically everything from Argentina and Brazil), and that soy is grown in China, and for example in suprisingly large quantities in Serbia. So it's not even necessary to cut rainforests.
This is unbelievably silly and entirely disingenuous because the deforestation is happening in order to feed cattle, not humans. Deforestation is a reason to switch to soymilk not avoid it.
I mean, you literally linked to an article that says
>Therefore, most of the world’s soybeans are consumed indirectly by humans through products like meat (chicken, pork and beef), dairy, eggs and farmed fish. People also directly consume soybeans in tofu, soy sauce, meat substitutes and other soy products... Limiting consumption of animal-based food products, particularly meat, is one thing people can do to help end this devastating trend.
to advocate for not switching to a plant based alternative.
I'll just piggy back this comment to add that there's a whole world of milk alternatives too if you're worried about the ethics and don't like soy.
I'm not keen on soy but use coconut milk. Others I know prefer almond milk or oat milk. Probably took about 3 weeks to get used to but now I definitely prefer it.
I didn't know this existed. I have a weird fascination with replacement foods - not so much of the nutrition shake variety, but things just like this. I don't mind drinking cows milk, but if I saw this in the store I'd have to try it. Thanks muchly.
Personally, as a Brit (pasteurised is the norm) who has lived in France and Belgium, I'd always choose pasteurised. To drink on its own, UHT is significantly not nice to my tastebuds. With breakfast cereal its OK but still worse. A small amount in coffee and I don't notice the difference.
In Paris, finding pasteurised was pretty easy to do - although shops gave much more shelf space to UHT, I rarely struggled to find fresh milk. In Belgium on the other hand... near where I was living in a city, only one of 4 chain supermarkets and none of the cornershops sold non-UHT milk.
It's quite possible that if I spent <x amount of time> drinking lots and lots of UHT milk eventually my preference might change. I'm not planning on trying, though.