The availability of shelf life milk can be erratic. It was easy to find in any
grocery store in Utah, but in my hometown in Mississippi, it's only at the
Walmart. Many stores put it in the "baking goods" aisle but some put it with
charcoal briquettes and picnic supplies. I like it quite a bit for the same
reasons. In some places you can even get tetra packs of goats milk.
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-------- Original Message --------
On 4/24/24 3:11 PM, Mr. Ransom wrote:
So, I was looking at the LivingAlone reddit group, and someone posted a
complaint about milk usage, which resonated with me. My milk usage is not
consistent. Sometimes I go through a lot of milk, sometimes I go weeks or
months without needing it at all. It depends on what I'm cooking and whether
I want cereal and stuff like that.
What happens, then, is that I either buy too little, which is annoying, or I
buy too much and end up throwing half of it out, which is also annoying. It
would be nice if I could stock up on milk the way I do sugar and just pull it
out of the cabinet as needed. You can kind of do that with powdered milk, but
it's not really the same: powdered milk is fake milk, and I want real milk.
Someone else in that group posted about a product I had never heard of:
"shelf stable milk". This is milk that they don't just pasteurize, they
basically sterilize it, then vacuum seal it. It can be stored without
refrigeration for up to a year.
I've never seen it sold anywhere, but the poster said they actually sell it
at Dollar Tree, in 1%, 2%, and whole milk containers. I never buy food at
Dollar Tree, but I checked, and, yes, there it was. So I bought some, just to
see.
Took it home, opened it up, and... it was milk. Not weird tasting fake milk.
Just milk. It was warm, of course, and you have to refrigerate it after
opening, but it was fine. After I refrigerated it, it was, in all ways, equal
to the regular milk I've been buying. Also, because there's NOTHING alive in
that milk, once you've opened it it lasts much longer than regular milk,
because it spoils much slower; there's nothing growing in there.
I went back and stocked up. The use-by date on these containers is January of
2025. I have a gallon in my pantry, in quart containers. I open them as I
need them. If I empty a container and still need more, I just pull a new
container out of the cupboard. Super convenient.
This is the only milk I'm going to be buying, going forward. It's
indistinguishable from "real milk" because it IS real milk, it's just
super-pasteurized.
It is slightly more expensive than the grocery store milk ($5 a gallon, in
quart containers, at Dollar Tree), but not if you count how much I tended to
throw out.
I've looked for it at other stores and can't find it anywhere. But the Dollar
Tree stuff is fine. Like I said, this is the ONLY way to buy milk. I don't
know why all milk isn't sold this way, it is so much better. I'm not kidding,
this IS the way milk should be sold.
Scott
