The discovery of evaporated milk (and the best gelato ever!)
While condensed milk was familiar to me, evaporated milk came to my place only recently.
Everything started during the lockdown. As I had more time for cooking, the turnaround of fresh milk drastically increased. At the same time, we were trying to limit our outgoings to the grocery shop to once every 15 days.
From here, my husband’s idea: replacing fresh milk with the evaporated one for cooking (besciamelle, gelato, brioche dough…).
Actually, I had no clue of the existence of such a thing as evaporated milk. Our first rendez-vous happened as soon as my husband came back from one of 15 days-cycle grocery shopping.“You see? We can use this one to cook, instead of fresh milk!” He screamed enthusiastically.
I gave a perplex (and even a bit disgusted) glance to the canned milk, thinking what the heck I was going to do with that. Canned milk, instead of the fresh one??? How you can even compare the two?
But one evening, I decided to bravely test the evaporated milk to make some gelato. I stir with perplexity all the ingredients and I pour everything in the gelato maker. I changed my mind at the first taste. Such a velvety, creamy and smooth gelato! I never managed to achieve that result after zillion attempts with different gelato additives. How is that possible? Is it all thanks to the evaporated milk?
What is evaporated milk
A milk deprived of 60% its water content through an evaporative process. Differently from condensed milk, that is very sweet, evaporated milk does not contain added sugars. After evaporation, the milk is then homogenized, canned and thermally treated to be sterile and allow a long shelf life (even longer that 1 year), at room temperature.
How to use it
Evaporated milk can replace the fresh one in all recipes that call for that (besciamelle, egg custard, gelato…). Usually, it needs to be diluted with water, in a proportion of about 1:1, to obtain the hydration of fresh milk.
I do not recommend to drink evaporated milk as such, because, as all thermally treated milks, it does not taste as good as fresh milk (it actually reminds me the formula I used to feed my daughter).
What’s about the gelato, then?
By checking the list of ingredients, I have noticed that evaporated milk contains carrageenan. I already mentioned carrageenan when talking about the additives used for gelato. Carrageenan is a family of polysaccharides extracted by an algae. They have jellying, thickening and stabilizing properties and are widely used in the food industry (they are also present in many whipping creams).
Furthermore, I did not dilute the evaporated milk to make my gelato. The lower water content has probably prevented the eccessive hardening of gelato, while stocked in the freezer.
After an initial skepticism, evaporated milk is now a powerful ally in the preparation of my gelato :)
Would you like the recipe? Well, you’ll have to wait next week for that ;)