Question re: milk in China

[yonitabonita]

Hi guys,

Do any of you know if milk in China is generally pasteurised and /or homogenised?

Thanks,

Y

[trevelyan]

One of the owners of the Drum and Gong restaurant on Nanluoguxiang (南锣鼓巷 -- a north/south running hutong with cafes and restaurants just east of 后海 and south of 鼓楼东大街) makes his own yoghurt.

I think he's been in Xinjiang for the past two weeks, but should be back in Beijing relatively soon. I know that he has imported some starting culture from Germany and would probably know the deal with the local milk, etc.. Just drop by and ask to be put in touch with Phil.

[Jonny Wang]

The non-refrigerated, boxed milk is all UHT (ultra high temperature, or ultra-heat treated ?) milk, which I think is a very thorough pastuerization. I think the refrigerated fresh milk we buy (guang ming, san yuan, etc.) is probably all pasteurized.

[chenpv]

Well, pasteurization is widely used for disinfection in food industry to make the product not go bad quickly, but it is not safe to use pasteurized milk in market to produce yogurt since it goes through a process of fermentation in which you purposely to let the bacteria propagate. As pasteurization, different from sterilization which kills all the bacteria, may leave some bacteria alive, there is a great possiblity that these left-over bacteria (maybe good for you, maybe bad for you) would propagate along with fermentation, making the yogurt inedible.

In our experiment class, we used defatted milk powder, sugar and distilled water. Well blended them together, Boiled it for 5 minutes, cooled it down around 30 degrees centigrade, poured in the yogurt, mixed it up, transfered it to smaller vessels, sealed the cover, put it in incubator and took a breath.

[flameproof]

I did make yogurt from local H milk and it worked fine.

I heard that many of the brands are actually made from milk powder. That's no problem for yogurt, however, it will not work in Cafe Latte (so I've been told)