ive not posted on milk at all basically as i dont regard myself as anything of an expert in it
but coming to new zealand means an almost exclusively ‘milk with coffee’ scene, so ive spent some time with milk of late
the ‘standard’ whole milk here seems to have a fat content of about 3.3% and to my tongue, having played around with the reduced fat offerings in light blue & green top my conclusion is i wouldnt even bother with the water down versions – the standard milk seems to be ‘just right’ in goldilocks terms
i really like the 3.3% fat level – its enough, but not too much – it bonds with the coffee and is sweet, without smothering the taste of the coffee
years back i posted about having a preference for using gold top milk if you must put milk in your coffee, but with the passage of time i can see that position was too extreme – what made me realise that was a review on milk in Caffeine Magazine, a London publication, and their verdict on the gold top milk was that it tasted like someone had put melted ice cream into the coffee
bear in mind that gold top milk has a fat content of 5%, and whilst it is easy to dismiss the debate as an argument between say 3.3% and 5% fat content, i.e. 1.7%, that would be to use the wrong measure
the correct measure of relevance is 1.7/3.3, or in round numbers close enough to 50% more fat in the milk – this is a huge difference
for me, 3.3% milk fat seems pretty much perfect for the taste it creates with the coffee, and given that flat white whites and an awful lot of them are about all they drink in new zealand, they’re probably onto something
it isnt quite true that what is good for Fonterra (our largest dairy company) is good for New Zealand, but it isnt too far from the truth either
have the real thing – real butter, real cream, real sugar, real bacon, etc – if you are trying to restrict your calories get into drinking black coffee – avoid products that have been meddled with like the plague and have a more moderate amount of the good stuff instead and really enjoy what you do have. i think the unspoken issue in dietary matters is not that we are eating especially unhealthy food anymore – who has a cooked breakfast every day these days?, it is simply that we eat too much of everything