We’ve talked so much about powdered milk here—hundreds of uses for it, how to make it taste really good for fresh drinking, the importance of comparing nutrition and cost among the numerous brands, etc.
I’ve presented recipes and tips for using dry milk to make cottage cheese, cream cheese, yogurt, smoothies, etc. Sometimes it’s a bit of a trick to get nonfat powdered milk to make a good soft cheese. Sometimes you just have to have the fat you get from using whole milk.
I’ve spent months trying to find a truly affordable whole milk powder without soy added to it. Honestly, it shouldn’t cost that much more than nonfat milk powder, but it does. A whole lot more. It’s not something sold in stores around here or any place I have ever lived; the only option is Nestle’s Nido, which of course contains the added soy. While it is available in most grocery stores either in the powdered and canned milk area or in the Mexican shelves, it’s a bit less expensive on Amazon. Of course, Amazon has lots of other choices for powdered milk. I can’t try them all. I can’t even try more than one.
The 56.4-ounce can of Nestle’s Nido Fortificad makes 53 servings, 3 1/3 gallons, and so it works out to about $4.80 per gallon, a little over one dollar more than I pay for a gallon of fresh whole milk right now. Be careful if buying powdered milk on Amazon—the prices for other whole milk choices range up to nearly $40 per gallon. I kid you not.
The best-by date on the can I just recently bought is April 2023, so it doesn’t have a great shelf life. But it should last a little while longer than that, especially if it’s kept cool and dry. In addition to the soy lecithin, other ingredients are vitamin C, iron, zinc, vitamin A and vitamin D3. It’s also got calcium, potassium, vitamin B12, phosphorus, and riboflavin. Essential vitamins and minerals-wise, Nido Fortificada is more nutritious than any other milk product on Amazon at the moment.
Even at these prices, Nido is still too expensive for me to buy a lot of it. Especially when the nonfat milk powder works so well in baking and cooking, and even drinking milk much of the time. However, as I noted above, sometimes you just need the fat of whole milk for best results in making soft cheeses. I wanted to be sure Nido would work in making these cheeses before I stock up on it.
So I did some taste-testing and experimenting with the reconstituted Nido Fortificada whole milk this week.
Here are the results:
- Whole milk drinking.
I knew it was powdered, so of course I was looking for anything
off. And there is a bit of an off taste
to me. I think I prefer nonfat powdered
milk doctored up with vanilla extract and sugar. Becky had a sip with her cookie and gave me a
suspicious glance. She knew something was
off and asked what I did to the milk.
She said it looked right, there was no weird texture or consistency, but
the flavor was a little off, though still acceptable. She prefers this over the doctored nonfat
powdered milk. Buttercup said it tasted
just fine and kept eating her cookie and drinking her milk. King of the Picky Eaters didn't like it.
- Cottage cheese. Little bit of off taste when eating it plain, but not a big deal.
- Cream cheese. Nice and rich. We could not tell it came from powdered milk.
- Yogurt. Nice and rich. We could not tell it came from powdered milk.
If you can freeze the powedered milk. It will last much longer that way.
ReplyDeleteSame with the bags of flour from the store. Freezing them for several days kills off any microscopic life in the powder preventing their metabolic processes from occurring. Once you have frozen it you store it in an airtight container such as a food grade plastic bucket sealed tightly. I have had flour more than 5 years past it's best buy date and it tastes just as good as new flour. Much of the spoilage that occurs is caused by microscopic beasties in the food living their life cycles. Interrupt that activity and food will last a lot longer.
Hoosier hill whole milk is AMAZING for coffee/tea, etc. used it for years when I wouldn’t go through milk fast enough to stay good in the fridge. Pricey, at $9 a gallon, but lives next to my instant coffee and comes out each time I skip buying fresh for a day too long. Yes, if planning to routinely drink, not that cost efficient, but good for supplementing other foods.
ReplyDeleteThat's good to hear. I have gotten their cream cheese and sour cream powders and been sorely disappointed.
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