How to check milk for naturalness - this question is of interest to everyone, because there is an opinion that this product often contains chalk or starch, and even more often - water. Indeed, laboratory staff now and then reveal counterfeit - sometimes both in taste and in appearance it is indistinguishable from natural milk. At home, you can also conduct several tests to help determine the quality of products purchased in the market or in the farm store.
How to determine if there is chalk in milk?
Chalk is added to milk not in order to increase the calcium content, but with a more pragmatic goal - to hide the fact that the fat content of the product is much lower than stated. At large enterprises that pack milk into bags and bottles, they don’t do this, since expensive equipment can fail. But small distributors - farmers and villagers who sell milk from their cows for bottling - often use this method.
However, it is very easy to find out if there is chalk in milk. This can be done even at home:
- Pour some milk into a transparent dish.
- Pour some citric acid in it or pour in vinegar.
- Watch the reaction. If small bubbles appeared, as in a bottle with soda, then the product was falsified.
Whole or diluted - we check milk for quality
Often, the milk yield is increased in the most prosaic and cheap way - they dilute the natural product with whey remaining from the production of cottage cheese, or with ordinary tap water. Large producers do not resort to this method, but owners of private households do not disdain the opportunity to make a profit and instead of the whole they bring diluted milk to the market.
There are two ways to recognize a similar product:
- Taste it, which, however, is risky: milk purchased for bottling should be boiled before use.
- Pour some milk into a pipette and drip onto a fingernail. A natural product cannot be excessively flowing, a high content of fat and protein makes the drop quite stable. If a drop quickly drains from the nail, this is an occasion to suspect that the milk was diluted and “whitened” with chalk.
A simple way to find out if starch is added to milk.
Dishonest merchants use starch to make the product appear thicker and, accordingly, greasy. As in the case of the chalk method of falsification, this is not found in industrial enterprises: impurities lead to the breakdown of production lines, the cost of which is much higher than the profit from the sale of fakes.
To detect the presence of starch, use iodine:
- Pour a little milk into a glass or spoon.
- Put iodine there.
- Normally, the contents should turn a tan. Blue-violet color indicates falsification.
Due to the fact that starch gives a viscous structure to liquids during heating, it can be detected in another way - put milk in a spoon and bring the lighter on from below. Such an experiment is easy to carry out even on the market.
Goat milk check: is it possible to recognize a fake?
Goat milk is falsified even more often than cow milk. Firstly, this is due to great demand, and secondly, to low competition in the market: goats are farmed far less than cattle.
All of the verification options mentioned above are also suitable for goat milk, but the problem is that it is almost never diluted with water and is not whitened with chalk or starch. Instead, dishonest sellers mix milk from goats with cow milk, and such a fake can only be detected in the laboratory.
How to find out if there is palm fat in milk?
Most likely, he is not there. In markets, a product with a lower fat content is more common (1.5–3% instead of the standard 5–6%). Sellers collect cream, and what is left is sold under the guise of whole milk. A similar situation occurs in factories - milk is normalized there, bringing to fat content of 2.5 or 3.2%, which is always indicated on the label. Artificially adding fat simply does not make sense.
Do I need to check the quality of store milk?
This is not to say that large manufacturers do not produce counterfeit products. However, they “chemical” with other methods - for example, they replace normalized milk (that is, whole milk with reduced fat content) restored from dried milk, which cannot be done according to technical regulations adopted in the Russian Federation. Revealing such fakes at home is unrealistic.
Even if the above tests, done at home, showed the absence of external impurities in the milk, this does not mean that the product is of high quality. There are many more fake methods than verification methods. Therefore, give preference to products from trusted manufacturers.