Bachelor living leaves me no milk, and almost a full quart of Half & Half. Can I use this to make whole milk somehow if I blend it with water? I’ve got a blender.
According to a USDA website, half & half contains a minium of 10.5% milk fat, max of 18%. Whole milk contains a minimum of 3.25%. So you could cut the half & half with water to get in the ballpark of the milk fat content of whole milk. I don’t think you’d need to use a blender.
I have no idea if it’s going to taste like whole milk. And I wouldn’t try doing the whole quart – just enough for whatever you have an immediate use for.
Milk fat is not the same as milk solids. If you mixed the two together, you really, really wouldn’t have milk. You’d have… I don’t know. Water and milkfat. If you gave it a whirl in the blender, it might turn the milkfat into butter. And a lot of water. Wouldn’t that be yummy?
No. The milk solids ratio will be wrong. You’ll have fatty water. But try it, you might like it anyway.
Definitely not.
When I was a kid, a friend’s mom (who didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, for the record) once tried to make skim milk for me by watering down the whole milk. It tasted like whole milk, only more watery. This would basically be the same thing.
If you’ve ever cooked ground beef and skimmed some of the fat off, or used a napkin to blot some of the grease off of a particularly greasy burger or piece of pizza, it’s basically the same concept. Think about mixing water in with those things and you’ll understand why it won’t work for milk.
That being said, what do you need the milk for? If you want to cook something, you can probably get by with using half and half. If you’re going to drink it, though, it’s probably not going to taste too good.
Ditto elfbabe’s answer - use the half & half if you’re cooking and need milk. Whatever it is won’t suffer, it will only be richer.
I’m going to slightly disagree. For cooking purposes, a blend of half and half and milk works fine. Depending on the recipe, it works in baking as well.
I always felt sorry for the kid that had parents making milk from evapotated milk or powdered. Nothing mixes up to taste like a pasturized gallon of milk. Powdered milk is ok for cooking when you don’t have milk. It works good in a hot cocoa mix also. I keep a small amount for bread making and cooking emergencies.
True, but I’d put raw milk far ahead IMHO.
As to the OP. I beleive you could mix 1/2 and 1/2 with the proper percentage of skim milk to make whole milk. But if it’s for cooking water and 1/2 and 1/2 should work great, probabally better then whole milk (heavy cream even better).
But considering you have it why not try it already (and let us know).
No, this won’t work for the same reasons that mixing half-and-half with water won’t work.
OK there goes my gas pump style milk dispenser idea, where it would only contain skim and heavy cream and blend it to order. But the question is why it wouldn’t work. Half and half is already a blend of (heavy or light) cream and whole milk. Raw milk can be (is usually sepperated by itself) sepperated into cream and skim (or other percentages by removing part of the cream), mix them together and you get whole again.
Not unless you can do home Homogenization. Your blender won’t handle that.
I don’t understand. I’m assuming that whole milk generally has n% of non-fat “milk solids”. For the sake of the argument let’s assume that skim milk and half-and-half have the same n% of “milk solids”(a reasonable assumption). Now, if you mix a part of half-and-half with two parts water, your result will have (n/3)% milk solids and about 3.3% milkfat - watery milk. If you mix a part of half-and-half with two parts skim milk you’ll have n% milk solids and about 3.3% milkfat - which seems to be the exact same thing as whole milk. I mean it might not mix well, but I think it should work.
How about agitating the half and half until you’ve churned butter (butter-ish), then removing that?
A lot depends on your purpose for needing whole milk.
If you want to drink it, it probably won’t taste anything like whole milk. When I was growing up in the 60’s, my father (a doctor) insisted that we drink skim milk, and to save money, he made my mother mix skim milk with reconstituted dried milk. While the mixture was probably still “milk,” it so completely turned me off of milk that I cannot drink any kind of milk to this day. (No problems with other dairy products, though, regardless of fat content or not.) I also remember that during one of my first trans-continental flights as a child, the stewardess added ice cubes to the milk I requested. Even though it was whole milk, and I was used to drinking skim, it was a completely different texture and taste than what I was used to.
Even though I can’t tolerate drinking reconstituted dry milk, I do keep dry milk powder on hand on a regular basis to use for cooking, and I’ve even used it successfully in making hot chocolate when I didn’t have fresh milk available. I routinely add dry milk to some foods my son eats to increase the protein and caloric content (he’s VERY underweight!), and he normally doesn’t notice it if it’s a food that already contains milk in some form. Adding dry milk powder to 2% milk also makes something relatively close to “cream,” when I don’t need whipped cream.
That said, I normally buy fat-free half-and-half, when I buy cream at all. I don’t drink it straight, but it tastes the same as other cream-type products when I use in recipes that call for cream, or even when I add it to coffee or tea.
Milk is a colloid. Homogenization reduces the size of the fat globules and puts them into a suspension. Merely mixing substances with different fat contents doesn’t do anything toward making a consistent product. Check also this article on emulsion.
But isn’t half-and-half already homogenized? If you add skim milk to it, the fat globules should stay in suspension.
Mixing half&half with water makes watery milk, as previously stated. Mixing with skim should work fine. Previous posters who denied that should provide a cite. It may not taste perfectly fine since half&half is probably ultra-pasteurized.
Sorry I’m late, but I’m here with all your answers! (insert theme music here)
Half and Half plus water = nasty watery milkish substance
Half and Half plus skim = Whole milk (you can do the math for all the percentages)
Half and Half plus water plus nonfat dry skim = Whole milk, too (again I leave the math for you).
FTR, Whole milk is usually about 12% total solids, Skim is usually about 9% solids by weight. Half and Half can vary widely.
Half and Half is already homogenized, so whoever upthread said it wouldn’t seperate is right. Once homogenized, the fat will stay in suspension. You can, indeed homogenize in a blender, but there may be some whipping of the fat involved, too.
Another FTR, fluid milk processors almost always seperate to skim and cream and then recombine a certain weight of skim and a certain weight of cream to get the desired fat level.
(theme music fades)
So can my gas pump style milk dispenser work then? Where we have 2 tanks, one heavy cream, the other skim, and the consumer would press the button (skim, 1%, 2%, whole, 1/2 and 1/2, light cream, heavy cream) and the pump would blend the 2 and dispense it? What about buttermilk?