Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

THE SKIM SCAM

I always used skim milk until recently, when fat-free milk became more available. I didn’t like the fat-free milk as much, however, and my visiting grandson wouldn’t touch it. So I bought some low-fat milk. That made me wonder: What’s the difference between these products? True skim milk was blue-white, and the edge around the glass was translucent. Why can’t I have my good old skim milk back again?

When a billboard asks, “Got milk?,” we may be tempted to reply, “Can you be more specific, please? Are you asking about raw milk, pasteurized milk, homogenized milk, aseptically packaged milk, whole milk, skim milk, 2 percent milk, 1 percent milk, fat-free milk, evaporated milk, condensed milk, or buttermilk?”

If cows ever knew how we humans monkey around with their God-given, natural product, they’d jump over the moon.

But first, do you think you know what milk is ? According to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, Volume 8, Chapter I, Part 1240, Subpart A, Section 1240.3(j), Release 13, milk is “the lacteal secretion obtained from one or more healthy milk-producing animals, e.g., cows, goats, sheep, and water buffalo, including, but not limited to, the following: lowfat milk, skim milk, cream, half and half, dry milk, nonfat dry milk, dry cream, condensed or concentrated milk products, cultured or acidified milk or milk products…” and on and on for eighty-eight more words.

(Bureaucracy? What bureaucracy?)

Now that we know what we’re talking about—always a good idea—let’s first tackle the fat problem. I’ll stick to the “lacteal secretion” of cows (genus Bos ) only, assuming that you know what they are without the help of a zoologist or the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations.

Our contemporary American society appears to have concluded that the 8 grams of fat in an 8-ounce glass of typical whole milk constitutes a serious threat to our survival as a civilization. Hence, our markets offer us a dizzying variety of milks with ever-diminishing fat contents.

In simpler times, one could obtain “skimmed milk” or “skim milk” by allowing most of the fat globules to rise to the top of a bottle of whole, un-homogenized milk and skimming off what we called “the cream,” as if milk and cream were two distinct products with nothing in between. But today, both milk and cream come in a variety of fat contents.

Our supermarkets’ dairy sections offer us a confusin’ profusion of choices—a broad spectrum of fat contents in milk products produced, according to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, Volume 8, etc., etc., “by modifying the chemical or physical characteristics of milk, cream, or whey by using enzymes, solvents, heat, pressure, cooling, vacuum, genetic engineering, fractionation, or other similar processes, [or] by the addition or subtraction of milk fat or the addition of safe and suitable optional ingredients for the protein, vitamin, or mineral fortification of the product.” But you knew all that, right?

So what’s a consumer to do?

Fortunately, what the dairy industry hath given, the government hath taken away. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has lumped the fat contents of milk and cream into only four categories of milk and six of cream, including two sour creams. Table 1 lists these products by the label names the FDA permits the manufacturers to use, as of a January 1998 regulation. The corresponding traditional names are shown in parentheses.

The numbers of fat grams and calories shown in the table are taken from the USDA’s Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, a compilation of the average compositions of virtually all foods. Individual brands, however, will vary somewhat.

Note that even though there are 9 calories in a gram of fat, the number of calories in a given milk product is not necessarily nine times its number of grams of fat; there are calories also in its proteins and carbohydrates. Also, because the various kinds of milk differ in more ways than fat content, the number of calories per cup won’t necessarily be additive or subtractive in line with the amount of fat.

From the table we see that eliminating virtually all the fat from whole milk reduces the number of calories per cup only from 149 to 86, saving you a mere 63 calories. On the other hand, substituting a cup of one kind of cream for another can make as much as a 500-calorie difference.

One cup of heavy whipping cream, incidentally, makes two cups of whipped cream, halving one’s guilt-by-volume. The second cup is pure, no-calorie air.

We perpetrate even greater crimes on milk than relieving it of its fat-induced richness. For example, we remove about 60 percent of the water from whole milk, put it in cans, and call it evaporated milk (19.1 grams of fat and 338 calories per cup). All of the milk’s fat is retained, except in the inevitable low-fat and no-fat versions of evaporated milk. For example, evaporated skimmed milk (or is it skimmed evaporated milk?) contains 0.5 gram of fat and 200 calories per cup. Sweetened condensed milk (26.6 grams of fat and 982 calories per cup) is evaporated milk mixed with about 45 percent sugar.

And so it goes. Your precious skim milk still exists, albeit hidden behind any one of several modern aliases.

LA CRÈME DE LA CRÈME

What’s the difference between all the kinds of cream I see in my grocer’s dairy case: heavy cream, whipping cream, light cream, half-and-half, etc.?

Cream is made from milk by boosting the percentage of milk fat (also called butterfat, because it is made into butter) beyond the percentage the cow put into it. That is, some of the watery, non-fatty part of the original milk (the “skim milk”) is removed to increase its “richness”: its smooth, unctuous mouth feel.

How? Well, gravity will do the job automatically if one lets whole, un-homogenized milk stand for a while. Since fat is lighter (less dense) than water, it will float to the top, and the fat-rich portion—the cream—can be poured off.

But dairies separate the globules of fat much more quickly and efficiently from the rest of the milk by using centrifuges or so-called cream separators—machines that spin the whole milk around at thousands of revolutions per minute as if it were laundry in the spin cycle of a washing machine gone berserk. The heavier (more dense), watery skim is forced outward more strongly than the fat and migrates toward the outer portions of the bowl-shaped container, while the less dense fat globules linger nearer the center. A stack of conical vanes collects products of various densities, that is, products with various percentages of fat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulates the labeling of creams of various fat contents. Heavy cream, sometimes called heavy whipping cream, is literally the crème de la crème , because it contains the highest percentage of butterfat: from 36 to 40 percent. Lighter whipping creams may contain from 30 to 36 percent butterfat, but anything less than 30 percent won’t whip. Light cream, sometimes called coffee cream, contains 18 to 30 percent butterfat.

A small, hand-cranked cream separator. The cream comes out of one spout (at left) and the milk comes out of the other. (Courtesy Hoegger Goat Supply.)

Half-and-half is supposedly half milk and half cream, but that’s not to be taken literally; its butterfat content depends on how heavy or light the “cream” half is. Half-and-half can run from 10.5 to 18 percent butterfat.