One of life’s annoyances is to discover milk you have in the Fridge smells a little off. Especially when it’s a day or two before or after the expiration date.
Happened to me this morning. One day before the expiration date. I had just used it two days ago and it was fine. This time I just said F it and used it on my cereal anyhow.** I was hungry.** Didn’t even taste sour yet. I’m sure it will by tomorrow. I plan on a McDonalds breakfast run in the morning and I’ll pick up fresh milk later tomorrow.
Any reason slightly sour milk would hurt a person? Assuming of course it’s grocery store, pasteurized milk. Not raw milk from a dairy.
Oops. Voted wrong. Just smelling wrong is fine–if it doesn’t taste bad, it’s probably just a little bit of spoiled crud near the mouth. Anything further I would avoid.
And, no, it’s not buttermilk with pasteurized milk. Pasteurized milk must have bacteria added to it to get proper buttermilk. It may also have to do with the homogenization–I don’t remember.
Yep. That’s what we call “spoiled milk.” Pasteurized milk is not “soured milk” when it goes off. It is spoiled (unless you’ve innoculated it with buttermilk with live cultures or some other source of lactic acid bacteria and such.)
Sour milk makes the best pancakes and baked goods, so I’m going to say it’s going to have to be pretty far gone before it will actually cause sickness in humans.
I answered with “tastes a little sour” but I actually do toss milk as soon as it starts smelling sour. I’d rather be safe than sorry and milk is too cheap to chances with. (Plus, that sour smell really turns my stomach.)
My answer would also depend on the application of the milk. Used raw over cereal, I’d be more worried than if it’s cooked into something like pancakes.
I’d toss it if it smelled bad. If it tasted just a little sour, I’d still use it in a bowl of cereal. If it was lumpy, no way. Milk is supposed to stay good a week after its sell-by date, so I don’t worry if it’s one or two days past it.
There’s a significant difference between properly soured milk—e.g. buttermilk, yogurt, clabber, sour cream, crème fraîche, kefir—and spoiled milk. The former is good. The latter is not. When it goes off after its expiration date in your fridge, there’s nothing you can do but throw it away. It tastes like ass and would probably make you sick. Sorry. I guess it depends on the exact type of culture you have going there. They’re not all the same. Some are desirable and some completely ruin the milk.
I voted for the third option, on the basis that I have in fact done this in the past with no ill-effects (though of course I may have just been lucky), and I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that spoiled (pasteurised) milk just smells bad and isn’t likely to have harmful bacteria in it. A quick Google search doesn’t reveal any science to back this up, though, so not a GQ-quality answer by any means. I’m hoping someone with more knowledge will stop by shortly.
I’d be interested in an authoritative answer about when “sour” milk is actually unsafe to consume. Especially when we’re talking about pasteurized milk, not raw or natural - in which case I’d be worried about a lot of potential pathogens, same as with raw meat.
But after pasteurization, it seems like the souring bacteria would be relatively common household ones and it’s more a matter of taste and suitability than health. From fresh to old to sour to, well, clotting up - when is milk actually unsafe to consume without any kind of treatment, including cooking?
I have often drunk milk that is a bit sour, and even, on occasion, milk that has begun to curdle a bit. The curds will usually sink, so sometimes I don’t even know it curdling until I have drunk a bit (and it sometimes does not seem more than slightly sour, even when there are curd down there). It doesn’t taste very good, bit I have never never noticed any sort of digestive problems caused by any of this. Sometimes, if the end of a bottle is souring, I will mix small amounts of it into my fresh milk, just to use it up.
That’s my answer too. Smell test first. If its a little off than a dab on tongue. If it tastes ok or just faintly sour then it goes on my cereal. A strong sour taste and it goes down the drain.
I very rarely get milk to last more than a couple days past the expiration date. It depends on how it was handled in the store. Milk in display coolers with doors stays cooler and is fresher when bought. I’ve found that milk bought from open shelving coolers goes bad quicker. I may even have to pour it out a day or two before the expiration date. Open shelf milk is fine for families with kids that use up a carton every few days. It never has time to go bad.
I don’t think there is an authoritative answer, even from a scientist.
Food poisoning is all a matter of how much is in there and of what type. At best, you’ll get an answer like “x% of people got sick under the described handling methods.” We don’t actually know the details of how the OP’s milk was handled, though.
Many of the things considered unsafe in modern food handling are mitigating very small risks. After all, if even 1% of people got food poisoning, we’d consider that unacceptable. From a manufacturer’s standpoint, that’s hundreds of people a day getting sick. On the other hand, if you’re an individual weighing the odds of surviving that last bit of sour milk, 99% chance of no problem seems like a pretty safe bet.
A trick I learned as a poor college student - if the milk has a slightly off aroma, add a little bit of baking soda (~1/4 tsp for a half gallon). It will taste and smell completely normal for a couple more days.
There is NO relationship between smell and pathogenic microorganisms. Spoilage microorganisms and pathogenic microorganisms are two separate and distinct set of species. You can have milk that smells perfectly fine that cause harm and milk that is inedibly rotten that you could drink with abandon.
With proper pasteurization and avoidance of cross contamination, milk is acceptably safe for it’s entire usable lifespan. Throw milk out when it’s unpalatable but not because it will make you sick.
There’s sick, and then there’s sick. You are right that it won’t make you sick in terms of catching some disease or being poisoned. But sour milk can certainly make you “sick” in that you puke out your guts. (Spoken from experience.)
This, not because I’m afraid it will make me sick, but because it tastes nasty. But if it hasn’t actually curdled and I want to cook with milk (pancakes, pudding whatever) I will still use it.