Several years ago I stopped drinking milk. I'm not necessarily allergic to it but it makes me cough, upsets my stomach if I drink it straight, and I just don't like it. (Luckily Kevin isn't a big fan of it, either...we're lucky that way - we like most of the same things. Except for chicken. He prefers chicken over steak, crazy man...) So I don't keep it in the house and just keep small, non-perishable quarts of soy milk for cereal or smoothies.
But soy milk does not make good pancakes or mashed potatoes. Or white sauce. Or really any other recipe that calls for milk. (It doesn't give the right consistency and it turns the food an almost bright yellow...bright yellow mashed potatoes are scary...) But I don't use it fast enough to warrant buying real milk and keeping it in the fridge because it goes sour too quickly. (I've been traumatized by having to take tiny sips of questionable milk since I can't use the smell-test method like normal people. And since I don't like the taste anyway, it always tastes bad to me...)
I eventually got the bright idea to buy dry, powdered milk so I could just mix up a cup at a time when needed. In the baking aisle they only sell those unwieldy boxes of non-fat milk and the non-fat variety isn't the greatest for recipes. It works, but usually the flavor isn't very rich and sauces end up being on the thin side.
Somehow I discovered a powdered whole milk called Nido that comes in a canister with a handy plastic lid to seal it. The label is mostly in Spanish but there are instructions in fine print in English (which I thought was pretty funny). AND it gives you the measurements for a single cup of milk. The non-fat dry milk only gave the measurements for a quarter, which is always a pain because then I had to go online to figure out the conversion from quarts to cups, which I never did. (Maybe that was my problem with the thin sauces...I never bothered to get the ratios correct...)
I've been looking everywhere for the past several months since I've been cooking more (but still not enough to buy a container of fresh milk) and could NOT find mi querida Nido. I ran across it recently and giddily purchased a small canister but couldn't find my way back to it until tonight. Funnily enough, it's not with the other dry milk at Walmart but is in the "Hispanic" section with all the rice and beans. I guess powdered milk is more of a Latin thing, culturally, than a "regular" American food? This also probably explains why the label is predominantly Spanish.
Here are some tips to using powdered milk in recipes.
- I used to pre-mix the powder and water, then add it to a recipe. But you can just add the un-mixed water and powder straight to the recipe, then mix the entire recipe together. This saves time and cuts down on extra dirty dishes. (Unless you're making a white sauce, in which case you're supposed to add the milk all at once. Adding powder plus water will probably effect the cooking/thickening of the flour...)
- Warm water mixes better.
- 4 Tablespoons of powder to one cup water makes one cup of milk. 1/4 cup is equivalent to 4 Tablespoons (don't ask me why I can remember THIS conversion...or that a tablespoon is 15 mL...)
- The powder is good for an entire year, so I buy the big 3.52 pound canisters.
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