Is is possible to make evaporated milk?

[abefroman]

Is is possible to make evaporated milk?

If I boil skim milk, can I thinken it so I can use the inplace of cream to make a fat free dish?

[phatch]

Not the same, no. Evaporated milk is done with a vacuum meaning it boils away at refrigerated temperatures, not high temperatures. Boiling milk with heat makes the protiens clump and curdle. Yes, it will thicken, but it won't behave the same in cooking or baking.

Many low fat cookbooks use commercially prepared skim milk evaporated milk in place of cream but you still can't cook it with much heat without curdling the protiens unless you also bind it with starches or other binders. And the taste is different as is the texture and mouthfeel. Not bad necessarily, but certainly different.

Phil

[stir it up]

abe, what about mixing skim milk powder into your skim milk if you're after a concentrated skim, if it's appropriate to what you want to make.

make sure your recipe/technique isn't gonna curdle it. good advice from phatch.

[phatch]

The trick with the powder is to get it into suspension in high concentrations. Milk is a colloid like whipped cream, meringue and so on. This is one of the reasons it evaporates well as it is dispersed in a water-based fluid.

Read about Condensed milk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It's one of the earliest commercially canned products, was one of the first safe milks for resale and he had the problem of milk curdling as it was reduced too.

Phil