How to stop milk from spoiling

Milk is such a basic ingredient, that is on most people’s daily shopping list. Since, it’s a fairly cheap product, we often buy more than what we need or buy large packaging, because it’s cheaper than the smaller bottles. The problem is that the longer it takes you to drink your milk, the easier it is for it to go off.

So, today, I wanted to explore some tips on how to stop milk from spoiling and help you to keep your milk drink for longer.

How to tell that your milk is off

That’s easy! Sniff it!

If it smells funny (sour – off), then it’s off. The bad smell develops first before the whole milk taste really horrible. This way, you can be guided by your smell before you drink the milk.

If you are still not sure whether the milk is off or not, pour small amount of milk on a spoon and then taste it. You will know straightaway if it’s off.

Spoiler allert!

If you store your milk correctly, it actually lasts a lot longer than what the sell by and use by date is. I regularly buy price reduced milk on the day when it ment to be used by and it regularly last another 3-4 days.

Freeze milk

This is the obvious choice and the most practical one too. The only way how to prevent your milk from going bad is to freeze it. You can then keep it for 3-6 months and take it out when you need to.

• Don’t freeze glass bottles, as these can crack. Instead decant the milk into a plastic beakers or containers.
• Decant the milk into smaller portions, so that you only defrost what you need for 1 day. This way, your milk will always stays fresh. You can use smaller plastic beakers, strong plastic freezer bags or even use a ice cubes tray to freeze your milk. This very much depends on how much milk you use per day and how many people are in your household.

Refrigerate milk

This sounds obvious, but the amount of time I’ve seen people just keeping their milk in the side of their kitchen counter, instead of in the fridge, is quite alarming. Milk will be fine for a short period of time outside the fridge, but if you 

Boil milk

To prevent fresh milk from going bad, it’s a good idea to boil it straight after you brought it home from the shops.

You only need to bring the milk to boil and then boil for 1-2 minutes. Leave to cool down a bit , spoon out or take the milk skin from the top and then pour into an airtight container – such as large bottle with a lid. Store in fridge and use within 3-5 days. 

Boiling milk helps to kill of any harmful bacteria that might be still in the milk and could cause potentially for the milk to go bad. 

This method is perfect when you have a fresh milk from the farm or unpasteuriased milk. This is a traditional method used from the olden ages, when when people didn’t even had a fridges or cold stores and had no other way of keeping milk fresh. 

Nowadays, most milk from the shops is pasteurised, which means that it went though a similar process of hot treatment in the factory setting. 

I’d suggest, it’s still worth doing this at home, especially if you can’t use your fridge.

Store milk correctly

Milk is particularly susceptible to a temperature changes, so taking it out, leaving it on the counter and then placing it back into the fridge, all builds up and eventually can cause your milk to spoil even if you do keep your milk in the fridge (for most of the time).

Ideally, you want your milk to be stored in the main area of your fridge, where the temperature is constant. The best place is at the bottom of the fridge towards the back of the fridge.

Make sure that the milk bottle or cartoon is not completely touching the fridge walls, as this would prevent air circulations. Most fridges use cold air to distribute the temperature around the fridge, so it’s a good tip for any product you want to store in your fridge.

Most people keep their milk in the fridge door, because the manufactures have designed the fridges that way, but that’s actually the worse place to store your milk.

As you are constantly opening and closing the fridge doors, the temperature changes too. It might be only few degrees, but over a period of time it does make a big difference.

Your fridge should be set around 40F 5C. With constant fridge door opening and closing the temperature can easily get to 45F or 7-8C.

When the temperature increases over longer period of time, the bacteria will start to grow and multiply inside the milk and that’s what causes the bad smell and sour taste.  

Only buy what you can use

If you are able to buy your milk regularly, I’d suggest that you only buy what you need for 1-2 days and then buy more when you need to. This is particularly useful in summer when milk can go off even when it’s stored in the fridge.

What to do if the milk goes bad

Sometimes no matter what you do, your milk will still go bad. The good news, is that you can still do something with that milk instead of just pouring it down the drain. 

Make a homemade cheese

This is the easiest thing you can do with your spoiled milk. Warm up your milk again, stir in some lemon juice and you can make a simple cottage cheese! You can follow my easy recipe for homemade cheese step by step.

When you finish making your cheese, you will end up wth a milk water. Use the separated water from the cheese making to add to your bread recipes instead of water.

It has a hight fat content and other nutritions, which will add a slight tang to your bread. Perfect if you are baking a rye bread or sourdough bread, but you can easily add it any type of bread or bread rolls.

BREAD RECIPES