Danielle Moore
Who doesn’t know this: just let the milk on the stove out of your sight and it spills over. Or even worse: burned. It doesn’t have to be. We will show you what tricks you can use to boil milk and make it delicious and easy to prepare.
Hot milk is a staple ingredient in a variety of dishes, from pudding to rice pudding to béchamel sauce. But boiling needs to be learned. Unfortunately, milk quickly foams over or burns in the pot. That’s annoying, because once burned, the milk is undrinkable. Spilled milk, on the other hand, can usually only be removed from the stovetop with a lot of scrubbing.
Boil milk: What happens in the pot?
But why does cow’s milk burn so quickly? Fats, proteins and carbohydrates are responsible for burning. If the milk is heated, the latter react in the form of lactose with the proteins in the milk. This creates a mass that sinks to the bottom of the pot and sticks there. It is this layer that burns, rendering all milk undrinkable.
There is also a simple physical explanation for the rapid boiling over: when the milk is heated, a thin skin forms on the surface. This prevents the water vapor that forms from escaping. The warmer the milk gets, the greater the amount of water vapor that collects under the skin. If the pressure is too great, the skin tears, all the water vapor escapes upwards in a short time and the milk boils over.
Milk boils even at medium temperatures
You can prevent both of these evils by taking simple precautions. The most important rule is: Never take your eyes off the milk on the stove. Otherwise you might miss the moment when the milk boils over and the mishap is over.
It is also sufficient if you heat the milk on a medium instead of the highest level. Due to the lower temperatures, the milk heats up more slowly and more evenly. This reduces the risk of the milk burning on the bottom of the pot.
To ensure that the milk heats up evenly, it should also be stirred regularly with a wooden spoon while it is being heated. This is how the warm layer near the ground mixes with the cold upper layer of milk. Important: As soon as the milk rises to the edge of the pot, it is ready and can be removed from the stove.
Boil milk: The trick with butter
Professional chefs are happy to reveal other tricks to prevent the milk from boiling over or burning. For example, milk should not burn if the pot is rinsed out with ice-cold water before boiling.
The risk of the milk boiling over can be avoided with butter or a metal spoon. For this, the inner edge of the pot is brushed with butter or a small piece of butter is added to the milk. The fat in the butter prevents a skin from forming on the milk.
You can also place a metal spoon in the milk so that the water vapor under the skin can escape while it is heating up. This should protrude over the edge of the pot. The water vapor can climb up the spoon and escape because the metal heats up faster than the liquid. Another advantage: In contrast to the variant with butter, the metal spoon does not give off any taste of its own to the milk.
Boil the milk in the simmering pot
There is a special pot especially for heating milk and other heat-sensitive ingredients or food. The so-called simmer pot has double-walled edges and floors, between which there is a cavity. This is filled with water, which is used as a heat distributor. As a result, the ingredients in the simmering pot are heated by the warming water in the space between the pot – almost like in a water bath.
This process is gentler because the heat is transferred more slowly to the inside of the pot. At the same time, the pot walls in the simmering pot do not heat up to more than 100 degrees, because the filled water starts to boil at this temperature. The result: milk warmed up in the simmer pot neither boils over nor burns – a win-win situation.
