Zero waste milk routine

Finding a good supply for milk seems to be one of the challenges of many zero wasters. In San Sebastian, we are lucky to have fresh milk vending machines and one of them is just around the corner! It has reusable bottles for sale (both plastic 😦 or glass 🙂 ), but we just re-used glass bottles that we bought orange juice in. The machine lets you chose between 1l or 1/2l of milk. The milk is local and since there is less intermediaries, the agriculteur probably gets a fairer price for his milk. At least that’s what I hope…

The down side (or is it?) is that since it is fresh, it only conserves for 5 days and after that it becomes sour. But that is not a big worries because there is plenty of nice things to do with sour milk. On top of my list came cottage cheese and pancake. I did not get the time to throw myself in the cheese-making adventure yet, but pancakes are definitely in my range and they raise much better with sour milk.

Sour milk pancake

For the first try, I used this recipe. Since there was not specific instruction to mix the ingredients, I mixed them in the order of the recipe. After putting the milk in my mixing bowl I wondered if it was not a mistake, but it worked well and the big advantage is that I got an idea of how much sour milk I had and scaled up a bit the rest of the ingredients, especially the flour. The first batch was too salted, so when milk got sour again I tried it with only 1/2 teaspoon of salt, which is way enough. We had them for diner, first savoury with tomato, cucumber, cheese and cream fraiche, then sweet butter and honey. And the best part is that there were some left for breakfast.

Local yogurt found in a glass jar at the supermarket.

We now decided to only get 0.5l at a time to avoid having to make pancakes too often (I know it is delicious, but not the quickest meal for busy people), but in the (distant?) future I want to try to make my own yogurt and this will  be a terrific way to stop the kitchen from being invaded by a new glass pot every week.