Defrosting milk the easy way

I posted about freezing milk, but how do you go about defrosting it quickly? Leaving it out on the kitchen counter will take a couple of hours. However, there is a shortcut…

1. Put your plastic milk container into your kitchen sink (or even better a half-sized side sink if you have one)

2. Run your water until it gets as hot as it will go

3. Put the plug in and fill the sink up so that the milk container is floating (the more water the better, so fill it up as far as you can without risk of overflwoing)

4. Go and do something for (less than) 30 minutes or so and retun to some defrosted milk

This works well because not only does the hot water quickly convect heat from the frozen milk, but it also normalises the temperature between the two fluids and hence keeps the milk cold. Hence, if you forget about it for a while, you can trust that it will have at least kept cold for longer than if you have left it out on the counter.

Freeze fresh milk to always have it at hand

Did you know that you can freeze fresh milk?

I learnt this whilst living in West Africa where the only way of getting fresh milk was having it shipped in from South Africa. It came frozen and we would put it straight in our freezer. We'd buy enough for two weeks to last until the next shipment came in.

Now I am back in the UK, we still freeze milk as it is so convenient. Once it is defrosted, it looks and tastes exactly the same way as it did when it was bought. We have kept frozen milk in the freezer for a few months sometimes.

In the picture above, the frozen milk is on the right. Notice that the container has expanded a bit and it goes a creamy yellow colour compared to the liquid-state milk on the left.

I would suggest freezing milk in plastic containers - this way the container can take the small bit of expansion that occurs during the cooling of the milk. I would also suggest freezing a few different sizes. You at least then have the choice (e.g. if you know you are only around for a couple of days, there's no point breaking out more than a pint or so).