Yes, out of sheer habit…
No, because we have bagged milk here and it’s very difficult to smell anything out of the tiny corner hole.
And also because we go through eight litres of milk a week in our house. The odds that it had gone bad are so vanishingly rare that it never enters my mind.
I smell it, doesn’t matter where I am. It’s not like being at a friend’s/relative’s/whatever’s house means that milk doesn’t go sour. There’s not really anything wrong or rude with smelling it, as far as I can tell (if that’s the reason that people wouldn’t smell it at someone else’s house).
How do you know it smells off if you aren’t smelling it every time? That’s why I went with yes on saying I always smell milk, even if I don’t always explicitly stop and take a huge whiff.
For UHT, sure. Elsewhere, not so much. If that were true, milk wouldn’t go bad unopened in my own fridge, which it definitely does.
- it’s the sell by date option and 2) I make my husband do it.
Too many kids here to need to smell milk anymore, we go through 4-7 gallons a week…
However, if you aren’t in that situation, I recommend that you pour a little into a cup and smell THAT. Because there’s always a little rim around the edge of the carton that can smell off as it dries, but the liquid milk in the carton can be just fine. I do this for cream or half and half, because I don’t use it in such great quantities, and it seems really variable how fresh it stays in my fridge, opened or unopened. I’m not sure why.
I almost hurl every time I scroll past this thread. Smelling “fresh today” milk would make me hurl. Can we throw this one in the quarry?
Me too!
Yep, rather hard to sniff through a half inch slit in the milk bag. Also, I don’t think my sense of smell is refined enough to know when milk is bad.
I mean, sure if it had curdled and been stinking to high heaven I could tell, but just turning sour? I wouldn’t be able to tell from smell alone.