For many people, condensed milk is a taste of childhood. But some might not even know what this is. If you’re from the latter batch, let us give you some insight into this dairy product. Condensed milk is creamy sweet goodness with a bit of a caramel taste that you just want to have a spoonful after a spoonful of until you’re finished with all the condensed milk you have. Seriously, it’s so good you just will fail to stop yourself from eating it. 

This dairy product was invented at the beginning of the XIX century by Nicolas Appert in France. However, Marco Polo was saying in his writings that Tatars could condense milk as early as the thirteenth century. But their product was quite different from what we call condensed milk today. In the USA, this creamy goodness appeared in 1853.

There is a reason some people want to make condensed milk at home. Essentially, this product is just milk and sugar — nothing else at all besides that. In some countries, it’s even considered to be baby food, that’s why you would not want to add anything else to it. But industrial brands usually have a ridiculously long list of ingredients for their condensed milk. Additional ingredients are usually used for thickening, flavor improvement, and longer shelf life.

So if you’re not a fan of eating something with ingredients you don’t understand, we offer you to make condensed milk at home. It’s not a cumbersome thing to do, so why not try making this dairy product at home?

How to make condensed milk at home

For your homemade condensed milk, all the ingredients you need, as we have mentioned above, are milk and sugar. You can use any kind of sugar or replace it at all with another sweetener such as maple syrup, agave, or honey.

So, for the quantities of ingredients, you will need:

• 2 cups (or 450 ml) of milk. You can use any milk, even plant-based ones. The percentage of fat doesn’t matter as well.
• ⅔ cups (or 142 grams) of sugar. As we said, you can use any sugar.

And that’s it! Now let’s get to the cooking part.

Step 1

Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan to prevent milk from burning. Heat milk and sugar on low heat and stir until all sugar is completely dissolved. Make sure you stir well because otherwise, you will end up with clumps.

Step 2

Keep the mixture on low heat making sure its temperature doesn’t go above 122°F (50°C) until it has reduced approximately by half and got a slightly darker color. The consistency should be thick and creamy.

Step 3

When you have reached the desired consistency, take the mixture away from the heat and pour it into a jar. Let your condensed milk cool down completely before putting it into the fridge.

And that’s it! Now you have your very own homemade condensed milk. You can store it in an airtight jar in the fridge for about a week. And you can freeze it if you want to keep it fresh for about 3 months.

While the process is simple, temperature control is quite important when you’re making condensed milk. That’s why we prefer to make this dairy product using a milk pasteurizer. It’s a machine usually used to pasteurize milk. But you can choose a specific setting to make a pasteurizer to keep your future condensed milk at the required temperature.

In our shop, you can find different pasteurizers designed for home and farm use. You can pick the one that suits your needs. And if you have any difficulties with choosing the option that’s right for you, you can simply drop us a line and we will help you out!

https://milkyday.com/products/milk-pasteurizers

Is condensed milk healthy?

Well, we can say for sure that condensed milk is the healthiest sweet food you can treat yourself to. The only thing that is “unhealthy” about it is sugar. However, we should say that if you have skin issues such as acne and eczema, you should be very careful with sweetened dairy products because the mix of sugar and dairy can cause the worsening of your skin condition.

From the amount of milk and sugar you’re using, if you decide to follow our recipe, you will get under 400 grams of condensed milk which is around 1200 calories. So that’s another thing to keep in mind if you’re trying to stay fit. But even if you aren’t, we don’t recommend indulging in a lot of condensed milk at once in general. Eating too much of this dairy product might result in an upset stomach. And a low glycemic index and a high sugar content will make your blood sugar spike resulting in a crash afterward.

But besides that, condensed milk can be considered healthy. It doesn’t lose all the health benefits of milk just because we evaporated it and added sugar to it. Condensed milk contains a lot of calcium that keeps your bones and muscles strong and healthy. In addition to that, it contains a wide range of other minerals and vitamins that are essential for keeping our bodies in a good shape and staying healthy, energized, and happy. 

How-dairy-products-impact-your-health-and-beauty

You can explore all the benefits milk brings to our health and beauty in the article where we’ve explored this topic extensively. All these benefits can be applied to condensed milk as well.

But as we have said earlier, don’t overindulge in this sweet dairy goodness. It’s best to consume condensed milk not as an independent product but as a delicious addition to some other food such as fruits or pancakes. Condensed milk is also widely used in baking, and you can cook many other finger-licking desserts using this dairy product.

Why would you want to make condensed milk at home?

We’ve mentioned at the beginning of this article that industrial condensed milk is usually full of extra ingredients that are put into it for various reasons. But the more ingredients there are in condensed milk, the less of condensed milk it becomes. You’ve seen how straightforward the cooking process is. Why would a manufacturer want to go further with ingredients and use more of those?

The answer is very simple — to lower the cost of condensed milk. Cow’s milk itself is not the cheapest product out there, especially if we’re talking about full-fat milk which will result in the most delicious condensed milk. That’s why industrial brands come up with these various additives that will add volume, texture, fattiness, and thickness while allowing them to reduce the production and raw materials costs to the bare minimum.

That’s why it’s safe to say that as much as two-thirds of condensed milk you can see on the shelves of your local supermarkets are fake. You can even see that by the naming. A simple and understandable name “condensed milk” turns into “condensed milk with sugars” or something like that. And when you take a look at the ingredients list, you will see vegetable fats such as palm oil, for example, which are harmful to our health — let alone the harm the harvesting of palm oil causes to our planet. You will also see different additives for improved thickness, color, taste, and so on.

Another thing that should get you alerted is packaging that’s made of plastic — for example, tubes. They’re quite widely spread when it comes to industrial condensed milk. And that’s a red flag because condensed milk made industrially is supposed to be stored for a long time — up to one year. Will that plastic stay away from exuding its bits into condensed milk?

That’s why we prefer to make condensed milk at home and we advise you to do so as well! There is no better feeling than eating something unusual you made yourself — something you could just go and buy in a shop but you preferred to cook this product at home. When you eat condensed milk you have cooked yourself, you know how exactly it was made and what ingredients are inside.

So treat yourself to this sweet dairy product — we’re sure that condensed milk will quickly become your new favorite thing to surprise your family and friends with!