Looking for noninstant nonfat dry milk

I actually researched this once.

nonfat dry milk is a product of the butter industry, and it's manufacture gives it properties that make it valuable for baking (and possibly chocolate making) but also make it unsuitable for drinking, as I'm sure you've noticed.

Here's the deal: Butter factories don't make butter out of cream. They never bother to separate it. They make butter out of whole milk, as fat as they can get it.

The process they use to make butter extracts pretty much all the fat from the milk.

If you've ever made butter from cream, you're aware that there's a liquid left over that has a malty, not entirely unpleasant flavor, which some people sometimes refer to as buttermilk. I've not researched the etymological history of that term yet, but that liquid has very little in common with the buttermilk you buy in the store.

So, anyway, this has a lot of whey in it. which aint bad at all, for baking.

But it turns out that if you take whole milk, and crystallize all the fat out of it, you end up with funny tasting milk, because there's too much whey in it, and all the richness went out with the butter fat. Nobody wants to drink this stuff.

So what do the butter factories do? They boil off the water content and scrape together the solids and call it "non-fat dry milk".

It's salient here that they boil it, because the heat converts most of the sugars in milk to other sugars that are not as sweet tasting. Also, volatiles are lost in the steam that would not be lost in a cool process.

So, this is why non-fat dry milk is wretched to drink. It's not sweet enough and it's got too much whey in it. aside from having no body because there's no fat in it.

They sell most of it to companies that mix it with livestock feed - plenty of protein and calcium and other nutrients.

I have heard that when milk chocolate was first developed in europe, they used powdered milk, but i don't know what kind. I do know that hershey uses fresh milk, and that the process causes it to sour, giving hershey milk chocolate that distinctive acidic, curdled milk flavor.

Anyway - since there's clearly a market for powdered milk in some sense as a drinkable milk, dairy companies make non-fat instant dry milk using skim milk, and using a process that doesn't apply enough heat to convert the sugars. This way it doesn't taste all weird, though it's still no substitute.

So, yes, you can try substituting it. You will probably have to measure by volume somewhat more, because there's more air in the instant product, so that it dissolves faster in water.

It will probably not taste the same - you won't get the malty flavor you'd get from the other stuff.

bulkfoods.com has "instant non fat milk powder" and "low heat non fat milk powder" and "malted milk powder" (probably what goes in a malted milkshake?) and "buttermilk powder" but doesn't seem to have the yellowish stuff with the corn starch consistency that we know as non-fat dry milk.

As for the whole buttermilk thing, especially with regard to chocolate, "buttermilk" in the states is a cultured milk product, like yogurt or kefir. I'm told that this derives from the european method of culturing whole milk before making butter out of it, to give the butter more flavor. You can sometimes buy this type of butter as "cultured" or "lactic" butter.

If indeed the french invented milk chocolate using dry milk, I have no idea what kind of dry milk. Some say that it was more expensive than fresh milk at the time. If that were the case in france, i can't imagine they would use leftovers from making butter. Maybe it wasn't the case in france but was the case in pennsylvania. If they were using leftovers from butter, it seems there are two kinds they could have used.

powder.

Why worry about looking for dry milk if its non existent in your area. It will not be wise either to get in onlline, that adds to the hassle. You can just replace your dry milk with liquid milk and that will solve your problem. Just use the bottled fresh milk you can see in refrigerated shelves .Just take note 10 grams of powder milk can be roughly replaced with 100 ml of liquid milk. Consider the fact that normal liquid milk is 1 part dry matter and 9 parts water. If you are using a maximum amount of dry milk in breadmaking you can replace all the water with liquid milk.

Roy

I was curious, so i dug a little deeper.

It turns out that the process of boiling the water off of the leftovers from butter and cheese manufacture are being replaced by filtration processes that are in fact cheaper and produce a more valuable end product.

Read an FDA report from 2001 here:

Seems that liquified whey, whey powder, and purified lactose areincreasingly becoming market commodities that are more valuable thannon-fat dry milk. And in addition, the factory actually saves money byswitching from the boiling process to the filtering process. Says here, also, that non-fat dry milk is 36% whey, which is clearly far more than you get in the more drinkable instant powdered milk.

You could use regular milk as Roy suggested or use other powdered milk, and spike it with a small amount of whey powder to get the flavor you were going for.

I can think of a few things off the top of my head that wouldn't taste right without the right amount of whey.

King Arthur Flour lists it in their catalog as Item No. 1188 at $4.25 for a one-pound bag or $3.75 each for two bags. The catalog description is as follows:

"Our nonfat 'Baker's Special Dry Milk' is specially prepared for use in yeast doughs; the high-heat processing disables protease, an enzyme that normally slows down yeast growth. Substitute our special dry milk in any yeasted recipe, and see how much taller your bread rises.

"The addition of 1/4 cup dry milk will result in better nutrition (extra calcium) and a more tender crumb. (Dry milk won't reconstitue, so combine it with your other dry ingredients)."

They also carry dried buttermilk powder and dried whole milk for baking. See:

The Old Bear

I use a combination of dry buttermilk powder and nonfat instant dry milk powder in place of nonfat noninstant dry milk powder. If the recipe calls for 20 grams use 10 grams of each instead and see if you like the result. dry buttermilk is basically nonfat, since the process of making butter removes virtually all of the fat. Try a local bulk food store instead of a natural food store, and you should be able to find both of these products in 'loose' form for self packaging. In Toronto the Bulk Food Barn chain has dry buttermilk powder and the supermarkets all have the instant dry milk powder, so both are relatively easy to get.

FWIW

RsH

-----------------------------

======================================================= Copyright retained. My opinions - no one else's... If this is illegal where you are, do not read it!