Warm Milk?

0 Comments

I'm open to trying new things, but within reason. So it took me a while to try milk in France. I mean milk coming out of boxes and not even refrigerated is not something that the American in me wants to try. But eventually I got brave enough to try it, after I had left it in the refrigerator long enough for it to get cold. And it doesn't taste bad, it just tastes different. But why do the French do this?

In the US we use the pasteurization process, something that was invented in France, ironically. This gives our milk a short shelf life and it needs to be kept cold. But in France they use a sterilization process instead. They boil the milk until its clean enough to drink, and then they box it up. This gives milk a shelf life of around six months before being opened. The bright side is that you never really have to worry about your milk going bad. The downside is that it does have a different taste than the milk that you are used to back home. I don't mind it so much, but it's just different. So if you're in France, don't freak out too much about the milk not being refrigerated, it's not as weird as you would expect it to be.