It’s always a battle to keep fresh milk in the fridge. A lot of times it starts going bad even before the expiration date. It all depends on where you buy it and how its been handled. Milk in open shelving is more likely to go bad early. I prefer buying at places where it behind glass doors. Even then I suspect sometimes the milk has been left out unrefrigerated in the stockroom. Especially when it goes bad several days early.
The best place I’ve found to buy milk is my local Exxon. They don’t have a stockroom. Milk comes right off the truck and into the display case. It actually lasts a day or two beyond the expiration date. But it costs 60 cents more at the Exxon.
I usually will use milk if there’s only a faint sour smell. I’ll sample a test spoonful and if its not real sour then I’ll use it on cereal. If its a workday and I’m rushed I’ll use it even if it tastes a little sour tasting. The alternative is to go to work hungry and that puts me in a cranky mood all day.
Milk forces us to make trips to the grocery more than anything else.
Once our milk gets past the “Sell by” date, I’ll give it the sniff test before using. If it fails, it gets dumped. However, we drink skim, and it seems to last a pretty long time. In fact, we had a gallon recently that was fine 2 weeks past its “Sell by” date.
My idiot nephew refused to ever consider milk that hits that date. Of course, his mother, my sister, refuses to drink tap water, so the nuttiness is inherited.
I switched to lactose-free milk for a while because I thought I was lactose intolerant. Even when it turned out I wasn’t lactose intolerant, I kept buying that milk because it had a crazy expiration date, like a month and a half or something.
I think my husband will drink it anyhow, but even a hint of an off-smell, even way before the expiration date, and I won’t touch it. I don’t like milk anyway, so it has to be very cold and very fresh.
I don’t keep track of the date, but if it tastes bad I’ll throw it out. However, I only use it when I eat cereal, so it’s entirely possible that the taste of the cereal is overpowering a little bit of sourness.
It’s rare that milk has a chance to go bad in our house. If I can smell that it’s sour, I throw it out. If I’m making chocolate milk or something, I may not notice if it’s just a little sour.
I guess I need to make more late night grocery store runs for milk.
I don’t make a habit of using slightly sour milk. I only do it once and then buy fresh after work.
Expired milk never used to be a problem. But the food Nazis have convinced us all not to drink milk as a beverage. I always have to poor out bad milk. You don’t use that much just on cereal.
I’ve completely switched over to almond milk, but when I did buy dairy milk, I would keep it around after it started going sour to use in baking. But this was rarely an issue because the milk from my local grocery store would keep for an amazingly long time–a good two weeks past the expiration date without a hint of an off smell. (Now that I’m used to non-dairy milk, though, even fresh dairy milk tastes slightly sour to me.)
I buy ultra-pasteurized organic milk and the expiration dates are always at least a month out from the purchase date. I never have milk go bad anymore.
I drink 2-3 cups of milk a day, and almost never have to deal with close-to-expired milk. If I have milk that’s nearly expired, I do a sniff test, as I have a rather strong sense of smell. If it smells off in any way, it goes down the drain. I used to do the sniff test for my housemates; they would tell me the milk smelled fine, but one whiff would make me gag, so my nose became the meter for testing milk freshness.