OK, so I ask this, because I just ruined what could have been a delicious pot of potato bacon soup. The recipe called for all chicken broth, but I thought it wouldn’t br “thick and creamy” enough with just the broth, so I replaced about 1/3 of it with cream. However, I added the cream too early, I added it before the potatoes were done, so while it was brought to a boil and then simmered for fifteen minutes, the cream curdled.
I tasted it…and it still tasted fine, and the texture wasn’t even that bad, considering. So what would happen if I actually ate it? What is so bad about curdled milk and cream? I mean…my stomach is acidic, right? So it would curdle down there no matter what, so does it really make a difference if it is curdled before it gets there?
AFAIK, there’s nothing wrong with milk curdled by heat other than the appearance and texture. And I’ve used naturally curdled milk to make cheese and biscuits.
You would be guilty of eating a less than perfect soup.
Curdling while cooking just alters the texture of food. It doesn’t make it toxic or anything. On the other hand, if your milk or cream curdles during storage, it may have picked up a bad variant of coli or listeria bacteria. That’d make it unhealthy to eat.
Dairy that’s been curdled in the way you describe (proteins coagulated by heat) isn’t going to have the familiar “rotten milk” taste. In fact, it will taste more or less like regular cream, differing only in texture. No biggie.