Recipes that use a ton of 2 percent milk.

August 18, 2020 6:42 AM

We have two gallons of 2 percent milk. We don’t drink milk (my toddlers drink whole milk; husband and I generally don’t just drink straight milk though it’s ok as an ingredient in something). Help me use it up.

I’m looking for recipes that use a ton of two percent milk. That’s all. Sweet or savory. We have a full kitchen and an instant pot. Easy is best but open to difficult if it s very good and uses a TON of two percent milk.

posted by millipede to Food & Drink (30 answers total)

Do you eat yogurt? The instant pot has a yogurt setting.
posted by amarynth at 6:45 AM on August 18, 2020 [5 favorites]

I have had the same problem and consulted this page:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/08/14-recipe-ideas-for-leftover-milk

From it, I made paneer cheese. I was extremely sceptical that it would work, but it did! I used 'semi-skimmed' milk, as its known in the UK, which is apparently around 1.8% fat, so 2% should work fine. I marinated the paneer in chilli and tumeric and grilled it to have with salad. Highly recommended!
posted by sedimentary_deer at 6:46 AM on August 18, 2020 [11 favorites]

I always make cottage cheese or paneer or yogurt with my excess milk.

You can also make bechamel sauce to go with any pasta - lasagnas are my fave with this sauce, and mac n' cheese is a close second. This has the added bonus of freezing very well. If you have a sweet tooth, puddings and kheers are a great way to use up milk.
posted by MiraK at 6:55 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

I make various flavors of pudding, smoothies, and hot cocoa when I want to use up milk.
posted by rikschell at 6:58 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: (Quick update: I’m looking not for ideas, but actual recipes. Yogurt would work but we already have a lot of yogurt and don’t need more. I’m thinking about paneer but don’t know if we can really eat that much paneer. Puddings sound wonderful, but I need recipes because most puddings call for heavy cream or whole milk. Very interested in recipes and ideas I never would have considered and that don’t seem obvious, too)
posted by millipede at 7:01 AM on August 18, 2020

How about corn chowder? It's great to make this time of year with fresh sweet corn. We always use 2% milk.
posted by briank at 7:03 AM on August 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I sincerely doubt there is a notable taste difference between 2% milk and whole milk in any pudding recipe. If you are worried about the differences, you can google "pudding recipe with 2% milk", for example, and find something with a lot of good reviews.

My favorite pudding is tapioca pearl pudding (well it's actually tapioca pearl kheer, but there isn't a real difference between kheer and pudding when it comes to tapioca). You can use any kind of milk to make it, including skim, but I would not advise using heavy cream.

2 cups of milk
1/3 cup dry tapioca pearls
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp powdered pistachios
1/2 tsp crushed cardamom
1/4 tsp saffron
1/4 tsp salt

Optional:
- 2 tsp raisins
2 tsp chopped cashews
- 1 tsp ghee or butter

---> Throw all ingredients except saffron and pistachio in a pot, and bring to boil. Simmer until pudding is as thick as you like it to be. (With tapioca, your choices can be anything from a runny soup-like pudding with chewy pearls interspersed, all the way to a thick jello-like brick of milky tapioca.)

Stir in saffron and pistachio powder and use a little bit of both as garnish on top. (Optional: Fry cashews and raisins in ghee or butter until raisins are plump and cashews are toasted, and stir that in as well.)

Let it cool until it will no longer scald your mouth, then serve. It can also be served at room temp, and it's delectable when chilled.
posted by MiraK at 7:16 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Add a bit of heavy cream to increase the milkfat and make all the puddings your heart desires.
posted by yeahlikethat at 7:19 AM on August 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

broccoli cheese soup

Ingredients

1 finely chopped medium onion
2 tbs butter
6 cups water
1 t chicken bouillon or one cube
12 oz angel hair pasta (or thin spaghetti works too)
bag of frozen chopped broccoli
1 t garlic powder
1 pound cubed velveeta
6 cups milk

Saute onion in butter. add water and bouillion and bring to a boil. add pasta, cook until al dente. add frozen broccoli, cook until cooked through. add garlic powder and velveeta, cook until velveeta is melted. Add milk and heat until hot without boiling.

not fancy, but good
posted by domino at 7:19 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Chicken Braised in Milk is a recipe that’s received a lot of positive attention: https://www.thekitchn.com/jamie-oliver-chicken-in-milk-best-chicken-recipe-all-time-80388
posted by exutima at 7:22 AM on August 18, 2020

if you want to go full on Oklahoma, chicken fried steak, white gravy and mashed potatoes. i use milk as a tenderizer for the steak, the gravy is milk and mashed potatoes use milk.

If you are so inclined and this isn't something you have done, i will hook you up!
posted by domino at 7:26 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Mac n cheese recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/238691/simple-macaroni-and-cheese/

White lasagna recipe: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/white-lasagne-100760

Both of the above freeze well and tend to be popular with toddlers!
posted by MiraK at 7:27 AM on August 18, 2020

Boxed pudding, regular old Jello brand. Growing up and even today the vast majority of the milk available to me has been 2%, or 1% if we're feeling healthy. It's all we've ever used for, well, anything. 2 cups milk, pudding mix, stir, set. Use in all sorts of desserts.
posted by cgg at 7:29 AM on August 18, 2020

My previously. :) I made the Tres leches milk cake recipe which was awesome and would be fine with 2%.
posted by Melismata at 7:36 AM on August 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is not quite the answer but we routinely freeze milk and thaw it as-needed for cooking. If you're not sure you can use it all up before it spoils, I recommend it.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:38 AM on August 18, 2020 [8 favorites]

I recently learned that you can "turn milk back into cream" by simply adding melted butter. 1/4 cup melted butter plus 3/4 cup milk = 1 cup of heavy cream. Note that this will only make a cream substitute that you can use for baking or in soups that need cream - it won't make anything that you can whip into whipped cream unfortunately; but it might get you going on using things that call for cream.

Or here is a chocolate pudding recipe that involves a quart of milk, and no cream.

Jamie Oliver has a recipe for chicken cooked in milk that I see invoked a lot.

The consensus here is that you can indeed use 2 percent milk to make homemade dulce de leche, and that would take care of a lot of it in one fell swoop - a quart of milk, plus some sugar and vanilla if you want, makes one cup of dulce de leche. All you do is mix things up and then boil the milk for a few hours. (Alton Brown's recipe says to use whole milk, but you can use 2%, it just may take slightly longer for the mixture to concentrate down and you may end up with slightly less than a cup.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:38 AM on August 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'd also suggest rice puddings. Basically rice, lots of milk & sugar cooked either on the stove top or my favorite way, baked slow in the oven until a nice skin forms on top. Serve with a dollop of jam. 2% milk works great with this as the rice makes it creamy. We don't use the dried fruit, but you can add any dried fruit you feel like or play with the spices.

Also bread puddings are amazing & super simple & can be sweet or savory.

You don't need full milk in any of the above or cream, the bread/rice bring the creaminess & the things you add bring the flavor so you wouldn't really taste any difference.

If you need to store it until you can make all the recipe ideas you get & have the space, milk freezes well.
posted by wwax at 7:45 AM on August 18, 2020 [8 favorites]

Bechamel is the answer, because it's so simple that you don't need a recipe, and it's so versatile that you can use it as an ingredient in innumerable other dishes.

To make the sauce, you just make a roux and add the milk. A roux is just flour and fat in the same proportion. The actual fat you use might change depending on the recipe (more on that in a second), but butter is the standard and pretty versatile. Start small, maybe 1/4 cup of each. Melt the butter first, and then add the flour, stirring until it's mixed. At that point, you can either leave it to cook/brown a little longer, or start adding your milk. Add your milk slowly and whisk it into the butter/flour mixture, until you've reached a consistency you like.

Once you've got it, it forms the basis for so much else. Add cheese to make a cheese sauce, which you can then pour over macaroni, or tortilla chips for nachos, or on a Philly cheesesteak, or anything else that would use liquid cheese. I just made a beer cheese recipe someone linked on here the other night, where you just pour some beer and a little mustard into your bechamel. Add chicken and veggies to make pot pie filling. Add cooked spinach (just spinach in a pan full of melted butter) to make creamed spinach. Add some broken-up breakfast sausage and black pepper and pour it over some biscuits for biscuits and gravy. For the latter, you can cook your sausage first and then use the grease in the pan as the fat for your roux. Pretty much anything that has a white and/or cheesy sauce.

I've never frozen it, but the internet consensus is that bechamel is freezable.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:49 AM on August 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

We love a Hungarian cauliflower soup that uses 2 quarts of milk as the broth base. It has softened cauliflower and carrots which are tasty and manageable for small fingers when served with a slotted spoon. My base recipe is from the William Sonoma cookbook and I’ve made it several times a year and it works well with 2 percent milk. It calls for stirring in sour cream before serving which bumps up the creaminess.
posted by childofTethys at 9:03 AM on August 18, 2020

I’m thinking about paneer but don’t know if we can really eat that much paneer

According to this page, a gallon of whole milk only gives about 14 ounces of cheese - and two percent will probably yield less than that.
posted by soelo at 9:21 AM on August 18, 2020 [5 favorites]

You can freeze milk. In most baking and sweets recipes you can replace whole milk with 2% without problems. Things may feel a bit less rich but still be lovely.
posted by koahiatamadl at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

There's a Colombian soup recipe that uses lots of milk: https://www.skinnytaste.com/changua/
It's one of my favorite comfort foods because I love poached eggs. You can serve it with crusty bread/toast.
posted by zdravo at 10:17 AM on August 18, 2020

Crepes:

1.5 cups of flour
6 eggs
3 cups of milk
(a little sugar if you want)

It's like making pancakes, but the batter is much more liquidy so it spreads out. Makes about 12. A bonus is that toddlers can help make it.
posted by tacit_urn at 10:18 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

If you don’t find anything in time, you can just freeze milk.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:26 AM on August 18, 2020

Yes, for the paneer, a 2 litre (0.56 gallons) container only made about a fist size (200g)of paneer, so you won't make that much!
posted by sedimentary_deer at 11:38 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

You can substitute milk instead of water in oatmeal for a richer cereal. Just be careful to stir every once n a while and not let in boil over.
Our family has a special holiday breakfast where we make cream of wheat (cooked kind, not instant) with equal substitute milk for water, extra sugar and 1/2 egg per person (we use liquid egg substitute, if you use regular eggs, beat first and then either add at the very beginning so it heats gradually with the milk or add some hot cereal to the egg to warm it and then add the egg into the pot with just a minute or two left.)
posted by metahawk at 1:53 PM on August 18, 2020

My great aunt, when she still had a farm, would make something called milk fried chicken in English. I think it might be a French Canadian recipe, likely passed around by the ladies at church. My aunt's version was pretty plain - browned chicken pieces seasoned with salt/pepper/savoury baked in a casserole with a thickened sauce of flour & milk, [a pretty rustic Béchamel]. She made enough to feed a dozen or so people with big appetites so it usually required a litre or more of milk. This version, a more reasonable amount for a family, is the one I use and it is based on famed French Canadian cook Mme. Benoit's recipe.

Milk Fried Chicken

For the Chicken:
1 small chicken, about 3 lb or so, cut up in pieces as for fried chicken, about 8 pieces or so
1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp ground white pepper
1/4 dried savoury or dried sage, depending on your preference
a pinch of turmeric or paprika, this is mostly just for colour so it is optional
[Also optional, I sometimes add a big pinch of mustard powder]
about 2 tbsp of fat and more reserved if you need it (whatever fat you have, it needs a high smoke point, usually chicken fat or pork fat was used but feel free to use something that is more convenient for you)

For the Milk sauce:
3 tbsp flour
2 1/2 cups milk

Mix 1/4 cup flour with salt, pepper, sage or savoury, turmeric. Dredge chicken pieces thoroughly. Melt the fat (if you need to) and get it hot. Reduce temperature if you have to medium and brown chicken all over. Place pieces in a baking dish.

In the remaining fat in the pan, add 3 tbsps of flour and stir until blended with fat and fond. Add milk, deglaze the pan, cook until mixture is creamy and smooth. Pour over chicken in the baking dish.

Cover and bake at 350F for 45 to 60 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:53 PM on August 18, 2020

Egg custard is one of my ultimate comfort foods, and to agree with MiraK, I'm sure it'd be fine with 2% milk. Here's a recipe I've used, modified, with perfect results. One of the comments says to temper the eggs to avoid scrambled egg texture, and though I'm not sure it's required, I did: scald the milk (while beating the eggs and then the sugar and salt). Add the hot milk gradually to the egg mixture. Stir in the vanilla after that. I like more than a pinch of nutmeg on top -- enough for a light coating.

I made it in a single dish rather than individual cups, so it needed longer to cook. When I checked by jiggling, it never looked set, but poking it revealed that in fact, it was. If you've got a thermometer, I read that it should be between 160 and 180, and mine was great at 180. I'm not sure if 160 would have been firmly enough set.
posted by daisyace at 5:41 PM on August 18, 2020

Make ricotta.
posted by shadygrove at 6:37 PM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

On the pudding front there is also British macaroni pudding. It's a dessert. It contains elbow pasta. British cooks got a bit too creative during wartime rationing and we have been living with the consequences ever since, but still, I used to love it growing up.

(Pouring) custard uses up milk and goes well on, for instance, a warm apple pie. Or (and?) you can make a trifle out of it.

Neither of the above will suffer from 2% milk.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 9:26 PM on August 18, 2020