I’ve had the personal boxed milk before,. Not great if you’re drinking it straight, but it works just fine for cereal, convenient to keep in your desk along with cereal.
The milk I get now is lactose free, but done differently. Instead of breaking down the lactose with an enzyme, they filter it out, so the milk isn’t sweet.
Coffeemate and some others are also available in kosher parve versions, which means Jews who keep kosher can use it in their coffee at the end of any sort of meal rather than just a dairy meal. Which is a big reason it was popular among my dad’s relatives.
But most people don’t have that dietary consideration.
oh yeah, something else I just remembered … when I was in high school Kelloggs cereal had a breakfast kit where it was one of their breakfast boxes a rice crispy square and a box of milk and the milk was supposed to be stable for months… (at the time we were told it didn’t spoil at all)
the product flopped so hard because people couldn’t get used to drinking warm /not cold milk they ended up donating it to emergency shelters and schools for the free meals program which is how I discovered it when I saw someone eating fruit loops at school
they ended up losing a lot of money on it and it’s considered to be one of the most expensive flops in food company history
apparently, they’ve revied the idea but without milk apparently probably because you can get milk at school easily
But a ‘real’, Imperial (Long live the Imperor!), gallon is 4.546ℓ
The guy I know, with a big family, who drives out to the dairy to get fresh, unpasteurized milk just brings some sort of bucket.
No. 2ℓ, 1ℓ (closer to your quart) and 0.5ℓ are the standard sizes here, occasionally 3ℓ, 1.5ℓ as well. In fact, you can’t generally buy gallons (or nearest metric equivalent) of milk here, the 3ℓ is closest but it is not a common size.
0.5ℓ is a standard “drinking milk” size, is that the kind of thing you mean by “single serving”?
Roughly - it’s the size that you would put in a lunchbox. Sometimes there’s a smaller one , about 250ml , but it’s rare to see that size in stores. It’s normally seen in cafeterias, breakfast buffets meals-on-wheels , that sort of thing.
I don’t make cheese but I do use Lactaid lactose-free milk to make yogurt; it works just fine. Lactaid is ultra-pasteurized and lasts a long time in the fridge. It tastes the same as regular milk but maybe a tiny bit sweeter (something to do with the lactose already being broken down into other sugars).
You can get the 8 oz boxes of UHT shelf-stable milk here in the US, and have been able to for decades.
What I remember about the taste is that it did taste a bit strange, but on reflection that could have been because I had it at room temp, not cold like milk is typically consumed. I’d have to have it cold to really make a good comparison.
I do know that UHT is used for other sorts of milk- organic milk is often treated that way and keeps for a long time as a result. It generally doesn’t taste much different than the cheap stuff in my opinion.
Not sure if that was a reply to me, but I was talking about fresh milk (not shelf-stable) when I said it was rare to see the smaller size in stores.
Our local (UK) supermarket has a wide variety of milk, both fresh and UHT. That’s aside from milk substitutes like coconut and almond.
Fresh milk is sold in pints (like beer) and comes in half, 1, 2 and 4 pint plastic ‘bottles’. It also comes as full cream, semi-skimmed or skimmed. (Known in this family as full cow, half cow or no cow).
UHT milk comes in 1-litre cartons. also full/semi/skim. There are two or three different brands and it is marginally cheaper than fresh milk, which, I assume, is due to the longer shelf life.
My wife is lactose intolerant and her milk, which is 50% more expensive than fresh, also comes in 1-litre cartons of full semi or skim. Interestingly, due to legislation on labelling, Lactose-free is labelled as “Lactose-free Milk Drink”. Adding “drink” means that it is not pure milk.
In much of Canada, you would have to look pretty carefully to find litre boxes of milk. You could find much smaller portions marketed for lunches, and small ones with added protein marketed for athletes.
Most milk is sold, served and kept cold. Expiry dates vary - lactose lacking and ultrapasteurized types might last a couple months but still require refrigeration. The industry prefers this model, I think, since prices paid to farmers are controlled. It is a better product, and sells for a higher price. But there are situations when boxes are better - emergencies, camping, etc.
I am trying to drink more milk. I see it as a very healthy food. But more options are better.
I think a lot of the differences are due to the length of the supply chain. The UK is fairly small. It’s quite likely that milk can be inside a cow today and on a supermarket shelf tomorrow. This will be much more difficult in countries the size of Canada or the US.
Even that depends, we use to have a more robust dairy farm system in the US. But due to economic issues I’m a little vague on, far too much of it has been moved to California and then milk ships out to other states in tankers.
I’m lucky enough in NJ that our milk comes pretty fresh from NJ and especially Pennsylvania.
The cows who produce my milk are about a 2 hour drive away. I’m not sure whether the milk is processed on-site or needs to go elsewhere for some of that, though. Still, it’s not an impossibly long supply chain.
I’m intrigued by your playing with milk, and using the homemade cottage cheese as your baseline.
Have you ever cultured UHT milk before subjecting it to the cheesemaking process? I’m thinking something along the lines of making your own sourdough starter.
Use a spoonful of plain yogurt, one with active, living cultures. Heat the milk up to “body temperature,” stir in the yogurt, then cover with a cloth and let it set out for a day or two.
Since the UHT is processed at such high heat, all microbes, friendlies and baddies, have been killed off. This milk will need to be inoculated and given time to “spoil.” And since the process is so thorough, it may take a while before you get a response.
Maybe you can mix UHT milk with regular milk, and then progress to cheesemaking. It would be interesting to see the results of different proportions of milk.
Just musings of mine.
~VOW
I culture buttermilk for the lovely mesophilic bacteria which can be used for so many things and have tried it with the ultra pasteurized milk with limited success. As you mentioned, the extreme heat kills everything and the bacteria I have tried to reintroduce just couldn’t take hold. I suspect it has something to do with how the heat also converts the sugars, but I don’t have enough science to know for sure.
Yeah, i wonder if the issue is that the proteins have been denatured, and in the case of lactaid, the sugars have been modified.
Bob wanted to get into cheese-making. After a couple of milk cheeses, he wanted to make a goat’s milk cheese. But his research had told him that the ultra pasteurized process did break down the proteins, which makes it unusable for cheese.
Since all the goat’s milk we could find, he gave up on cheese making.
I made a lovely cream cheese with rennet and buttermilk