Milk Taste Test

I decided to find out once and for all which powdered milk my family likes best. I didn't realize how important this was until we started living off food storage. I thought (naively) that if there was nothing else to drink, they would drink it. Wrong. Before we started food storage, my family was drinking 5 gallons of milk a week. On powdered milk it dropped down to less than one gallon per week, and most of that was used in cooking rather than for drinking. So I learned 2 important lessons:

1. People will not eat or drink something just because that's all there is.
2. Don't count on powdered milk for giving your family their needed calcium intake.

But I digress. I have stored only real powdered milk. I purposely stayed away from milk substitutes since they don't have the same nutritional value as real milk. I figured my family would need those nutrients if they were actually living off food storage. What I failed to realize was, it doesn't matter how nutritional the milk is if no one will drink it. :)

So I planned a blind taste test to see which milk my family liked best. I even used store bought milk as one of the testers just to see what would happen :) Obviously I couldn't try every brand out there but I tried to pick some of the more popular ones. They included:

1. Morning Moo's
2. Emergency Essentials
3. Church cannery milk
4. Thrive
5. Store bought milk

I also tried 3 brands of chocolate milk which is one way to get your family to actually drink milk:

1. Honeyville Grain
2. Thrive
3. Morning Moo's

The results were interesting. First of all we had 8 taste testers in my family but didn't count the votes of the 3 year old since he denounced all the cups of white milk as "Yucky!!" and declared all of the chocolate milks "Yummy!" :)

Everyone picked their #1 and #2 favorites. Here are the taste test results in order of number of votes received either as #1 or #2:

1. Morning Moo's - 5 votes
2. Emergency Essentials - 3 votes
3. Thrive - 3 votes
4. Store bought milk - 2 votes
5. Church Cannery - 1 vote

So guess which milk I have stored 400 POUNDS of?

Yep.

The cannery. :(

The good news is, it doesn't matter when baking what you use, it's only when drinking it straight that it becomes a problem. So, my plan is to replace the cannery milk with Morning Moo's as we use it up. I will still keep plenty of cannery milk in my storage because it is real powdered milk, rather than a milk substitute, so I still want it for baking. But for drinking, you have to go with the milk your family will actually drink.

Isn't it interesting that the store bought milk only got 2 votes? Guess that's what happens when you are living off food storage. Your idea of what is normal tasting begins to shift.

For the chocolate milk we just voted on our favorite:

1. Honeyville Grain - 3 votes
2. Thrive - 3 votes
3. Morning moos - 1 vote

I got shot down on this one since my favorite was actually the Morning Moos. Oh well, guess we'll have to go with majority rules on this one. I don't drink much chocolate milk anyway.

So you can buy Morning Moo's online but I find that Costco often carries it as well. My Costco was having a blow out sale on it just before we started living on food storage so I bought a whole 5 gallon bucket.

I can't say if that is the milk your family will like best (although I found another blog that did a similar test to mine and came out with almost exactly the same results), but it can at least give you a starting point.

One lesson I have learned from all of this is to NEVER, EVER store food you have not tried. I know it's so tempting. Food storage can be expensive and you don't want to waste a whole can just trying it out, but you could be really sorry if you don't. Some of the food I was storing turned out to be completely inedible (like Honeyville Grain Butter) and I had to throw it all in the trash. Now THAT is expensive.

Also, don't believe the myth that if a person is hungry enough, they will eat it. It's absolutely not true. Just ask my 3 year old. :)

Finally just a heads up that I will be taking a long anticipated trip to Nauvoo and will not be able to blog the next few weeks. I'm thinking if I get really lucky though, I might just come across an old fashioned butter churner, or cheese press while I'm there!