Popular ways to test milk for naturalness and quality

Every customer hopes to buy quality milk without additives at the store.Then you can count on the fact that this tasty and healthy product will not bring harm. It is no secret that some manufacturers add antibiotics, palm oil, acetylsalicylic acid, which, of course, is undesirable. Starch, soda, chalk are not so dangerous for health, but their presence means that the manufacturer has something to hide. Are there ways to check the naturalness of such unscrupulous companies at home?

First of all, look at the release date. The fresher the milk, the better. Of course, this does not guarantee that it is natural and without any additives, but it is still a little encouraging. If the first box or bottle that you’ve got is a stale date, you can try to find a newer one, looking at the shelf away. After all, most often on the shelves put products that have arrived a long time, so that not particularly picky buyers have time to disassemble them, until the expiration date is out. And of course, do not take the milk in the package, the integrity of which is broken.

If the milk is in a transparent bottle, then you can first assess the quality of the appearance. A good product has a white color with a slightly yellowish tinge, and diluted or with additives - bluish. Quality milk produces cream on top, and with a little shaking, you can determine if it is made from whole or powdered raw materials. In the second case, small grains will remain on the walls.

It is easy to determine if the milk has not sour and if it is not very diluted without the use of chemical methods. You can just smell it. The sour smell will produce a stale product. You can taste it. Sour will taste sour. Dip a toothpick into the milk and drip on the nail. If the drop does not spread, it is fresh and undiluted.

Pour some milk into the pot and put on the fire. Diluted milk will curl. If the product is of high quality, then a thin film forms on cooling. Strongly divorced will remain "bald" without foam. You can also find out if starch has been added. Unscrupulous manufacturers do this to make milk diluted with water thicker in consistency. When cooled, it will become even thicker than it was before heating.

There is a reliable way to determine if the milk was diluted, and even more or less accurately determine how much water was added to it. Dip a thin wand into it and drip onto a paper napkin. The wider the rim around the drop will be, the more water is added. At the same time, the drying time of this rim also depends on the degree of dilution. In a highly diluted product, it dries quickly, in solid - much longer.

• If the milk is undiluted, the drop will not spread, and around it on paper there will be a very thin rim with a width of no more than two millimeters, and it will dry only after 2 hours.
• If the rim is wider and dries in an hour, then the excess water is about 10%.
• This ring around the drop dries out only after half an hour, if the milk was diluted by 30%.
• If it is diluted with water in half, the drying process will not take more than 15-20 minutes.

To distinguish diluted milk from whole milk, you can pour it in a thin stream into warm water. Quality pops up in the form of a white clot, and highly diluted quickly mix with water.

Well, perhaps, all that we can do without asking for help to chemical methods.

Pour 50-100 g of milk into a glass and add a quarter of a teaspoon of soda. If it starts to acidify, then bubbles will appear on the surface.

With the help of vinegar it is easy to recognize the addition of soda or chalk. Unscrupulous manufacturers add soda in order to keep the milk from turning sour. Such an additive can be harmful to the stomach and even spoil the taste of the product. Chalk added to hide the fact that the milk was heavily diluted. This additive is trying to return to him the "natural" color. If chalk or soda is present in the milk, it will “boil” from the addition of vinegar. Bubbles will float to the surface. If there are many bubbles, then added soda or chalk is also a lot.

This reagent is present in almost every home medicine chest. It can be useful if we want to find out if there is starch in the milk. It may appear there if the manufacturer tries to hide the fact that the product was fairly diluted before the sale. Starch informs a strongly diluted milk thick consistency. Expose such a fraudster is just possible with the help of iodine.

Take some milk, pour it into a transparent glass and drip there literally 2-3 drops of iodine. Shake up. If the starch in the product is in large quantities, then the milk will turn blue, and if it is added a little, a bluish tint will appear. If there is no such additive, then the milk will become yellowish.

Of course, not every home can be found medical alcohol, but in extreme cases, you can replace it with high-quality vodka. With the help of them, you can accurately determine whether water was added, and if it was, then approximately estimate the degree of dilution.

Pour 50 g of milk into the container and add 100 g of alcohol to it. Shake for a minute or two, and then pour the contents into a transparent cup.

If the milk was whole, then after 7 seconds it will be possible to detect casein flakes in it. If such flakes start to stand out late, it was diluted. By the time casein appears, it is easy to estimate how much water has been added. If it takes about a minute, then 20% of extraneous water is present in the product, a delay of half an hour indicates the addition of 40% of water, and if milk is diluted with water by half, the process of falling out flakes will be delayed by 40 minutes or more.

It can be found in pet stores. With it, determine the acidity of water in aquariums. But in our case, it can be very useful, for example, in order to detect the presence of acetylsalicylic acid or soda in the product. Both of these extraneous ingredients are added to the milk so that it does not turn sour longer. If it contains soda, the litmus paper turns blue, and if it turns red, then one of two things: either aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) was added, or the product has already begun to turn sour. In normal milk, the color of the paper will not change.

Instead of the litmus test, you can take a universal indicator paper, if you can find one. It can be used to evaluate the acidity or alkalinity of the product more specifically. The more soda is added, the more alkalinity will be and the more blue the paper will become when it is lowered into the milk, and the more acidity the more red the paper becomes. This means that either aspirin, or boric acid, or acid-based bleaching agents were added to it.

Antibiotics can appear in milk for several reasons. They can be added specifically to slow down the activity of lactic acid bacteria and thereby prevent souring. They may also be in the product if the cow has recently been treated with antibiotics. You understand that there is little use for a sick cow’s milk, and sometimes such a product can be completely dangerous.

To determine their presence, complex laboratory studies are required. But, fortunately, there is a very affordable way. You just need to pour a little milk and put it in a warm place with a temperature not lower than 23-25 ​​° C.If after a day it does not have time to turn sour, then you have every reason to suspect the presence of antibiotics in it. Of course, if you find out about it in a day, you can hardly fix it. But at least next time you will think hard whether it is worth taking the products of this manufacturer again.

• A quality product should be white with a slight yellowish tinge. Brownish color indicates that the milk burned during drying.
• There should be no lumps in dry milk, and those that are should easily crumble when pressed with a finger. Otherwise, you can understand that the product is dampened during storage.
• Finally, when diluted, a uniform consistency product should be obtained.

Our recommendations will help to check the product for freshness and sterility. You can find out if the milk is real in the package and whether it has not spoiled.

How easy it is to check the quality of milk at home, see the following video.