I haven’t bought any shelf stable milk/8oz containers, but I am totally in love with Fairlife milk. It’s ultra-filtered and has an expiration date of I think around 2 months. However it’s made gives it more protein and less sugar than regular milk.
I think it tastes great! I drink it straight and put it in cereal.
It is well more expensive than regular milk, but I was in a conundrum where I would run out of milk too often if I bought a half gallon, but end up with a good bit of spoiled milk if I bought a gallon. Now I buy 3 half-gallons of Fairlife at a time and never run out and never have it go bad. So the convenience and the lack of wasted milk justifies and evens out the price for me.
Back in the 80s I had a client who dealt in super-sterilization equipment. It’s a tricky technology - bring up the temperature too slowly and things get scalded before they’re sufficiently sterilized. Bring it up too quickly, and liquids can superheat and explode.
Reminds me of when my mother used to can preserves in an old fashioned pressure cooker. It had a weighted cap for a safety valve, which at least once blew so high it dented the ceiling.
I have a standard size German fridge, and I couldn’t even store one 1 gallon jug anywhere in it. I (and most other Germans) buy milk in one liter packs (a bit less than a quarter gallon). That lasts for about two weeks for me, as a single (nowadays, I only buy oat milk, but in the same dimensions).
I have bought Channel Island milk for that, but I do not remember if the carton was UHT or not. Some of it is; you would have to check the particular brand.
I have no idea about the volume of my fridge, but the way the different shelves and racks are laid out, there is no way to fit for such a big container. But milk isn’t approximately sold in that volume, I think I’ve never seen a bigger pack than one liter at any store.
Total interior fridge capacity is 184 liters, which is about 6½ cubic feet. Way under the “small” category in the list above. But, in theory, if a gallon of milk is a little under 4 liters, the fridge will hold over 45 gallons.
However— if you click through and look at the shelf spacing and stuff, there’s just nowhere to put an American gallon jug, let alone 45.
The 1-liter UHT box, though? Slots nicely into the door rack.
And your fridge is about one third larger than mine, I don’t have two separate compartments. What my fridge does have is a small freezing compartment at the top, though.
This product is hard to find in Ontario in big boxes. You can find smaller bottles and lunch boxes.
It tastes similar to refrigerated milk and would taste the sane in cooking. Cold fresh milk has a slightly better mouthfeel but the difference is smaller than you would suspect.
There’s a relatively new pasteurization technique that gives the safety of conventional milk with the taste of raw milk: High Pressure Pasteurization. It’s been commercially available in Australia for a number of years now but I can’t find any US producers that have started selling it yet.
I’ve found curdled milk in my fridge a few times.