I think it is for my use case. I live alone and tend to only use a little milk on the days I eat oatmeal or cereal. I wouldn’t get through a half gallon before it spoiled.
I buy the shelf stable cartons by the box at Costco. They are 8 oz single serve and work great for me. I can always have milk on hand.
I’ve also used the quart boxes of shelf stable that I can find at WalMart, Target and even Dollar Tree. Once opened I put it in the fridge and use it up in a week. Enough for 3 or 4 bowls of cereal or oatmeal.
I only buy the shelf stable milk in the little kiddie boxes. I never drink milk straight, only use it for cooking and every cooking application is going to heat it more than the UHT process.
This. I’ve been using it for years, for cooking, and the occasional bowl of cereal. I can detect the slightly cooked taste notes, but I just asked my husband and he says that to him it tastes no different from regular milk.
No, utlra high temp pasteurized, and packaged in aseptic packaging, so a process with results rather akin to being canned, without actually being canned.
When I’ve had it, it has a bit of a cooked taste, but it worked well for cooking, as did the shelf-stable cream we bought at Trader Joe’s once.
No. It’s heavily processed with heat. It’s just ultra pasteurized and stored in a well-sealed container.
Oh, i see all that’s been said.
Anyway, it tastes slightly “cooked” to me, moreso than the ultra pasteurized milk that’s sold in the refrigerator section. But it’s obviously fine for cooking, and really, it’s fine for most of the stuff people use milk for.
I don’t know why, either. The technology has been around since the 1960s, I believe.
I first encountered it in Europe in the early 2000s. My brother was living in Germany and during a visit, he served it with breakfast cereal in the mornings. When I got back to the States, I started looking for it and couldn’t find it anywhere. Seems like it took till around 2015 before I found it sold at Walmart.
I’m in Europe. Nearly everyone buys their milk in shelf-stable non-refrigerated form. Once or twice a week, I get a six-pack of one-liter containers (I have two kids; we go through a lot of milk). It looks like this.
Houses, kitchens, and by extension refrigerators are much smaller here than in the US. There, it’s very common to have a gigantic fridge, and you have room for a gallon-sized container of milk.
Here, that’s simply not practical. Instead, the six-pack of milk lives in the utility room. We retrieve a new container only as needed. When we empty it, we open a new liter, which goes from the room-temperature shelf straight into the fridge.
If American kitchens and refrigerators were the size of our European facilities, I suspect the smaller container and the more rapid turnover would have taken off sooner. But since there’s very little need for this, and therefore little demand, there’s no reason Americans can’t just buy enormous containers of fresh milk out of the chill chest.
While fresh milk is the default in the UK for most people, shelf-stable has certainly been around since the 80s in my memory and probably before that. We mostly just had it for emergencies and camping trips. If you don’t drink milk much, you can keep some around for visitors.
It always tastes a bit nasty to me though, at least neat. I think it’s one of those things that if you’re used to it it’s fine, but if you’re used to fresh, the shelf stable stuff tastes weird. It’s a common complaint from British tourists to areas in Europe that use the shelf-stable stuff; they often assume it’s gone a bit off.
I don’t drink much milk, but those little “kids lunch” boxes are great when I do multi-day hikes.
I eat cereal (muesli) in the mornings for a decent carboload, and although I drink coffee black usually, if any is left in the box it goes into my cup.
I don’t mind the flavor, it’s not like real fresh milk recently extracted from a cow and full of cream… But it is better, albeit heavier, than powdered milk, which I don’t really like.
I buy and use it. I’m not one to get through even a half gallon of traditionally pasteurized milk before it goes off, so I keep a stash of the small 8oz on hand. That way when I need milk for something, I have it available.
I don’t notice any difference in taste - but it’s also been years since I bought “regular” milk.
I know only one guy who drives out to the dairy and buys literal buckets of fresh, raw milk, which, naturally, tastes better than pasteurized supermarket milk, but he has a family with a wife and three kids. For people who do not drink milk like it were water and maybe add some to their coffee now and then, those UHT Tetra Paks are a great invention.
My uncle kept 10 to 12 cows. He started by buying unwanted calves from a local dairy. Later he paid a neighbor to use his bull and we had calves. He sold the one year-old steers at the local livestock auction.
He never milked any of the cows. I think he was very concerned about getting sick from raw milk.
I kept asking what fresh milk tasted liked. He picked one off the gentler girls, washed the udder, squeezed some milk onto the barn floor, and then into a coffee cup.
I can say that I’ve had it straight from the tap. Just that one time.
It’s UHT; I can taste the difference - it just tastes like milk that has been heated (because that’s what it is). It used to have a much more ‘cooked’ flavour to it a couple of decades ago but these days it’s way more subtle - I assume there must have been refinements to the heat treatment process.
I still get fresh (pasteurised but not UHT) milk delivered in pint glass bottles with foil tops, by a milkman, but I usually keep a couple of litres of UHT in the cupboard for emergencies and such.
I can taste it, too— I am just arguing that if you are going to steam some up for your cappuccino, it is not that terrible a sacrifice (especially compared to, every single time I have bought a non UHT pint of milk at the convenience store, it was spoiled.)
