Who hasn’t gotten part of the way through a bowl of cereal only to discover that the milk has gone off? Thankfully, researchers at Purdue University and the University of Tennessee are helping avert such traumatic starts to our morning with a new, non-chemical treatment that promises to extend regular milk’s shelf life to around 2-3 weeks — and without affecting the nutrients or flavor.
The technology they’ve developed involves increasing the temperature of milk by just 10 degrees for less than a second. For those keeping track at home, that’s well below the 70-degree Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization. Even so, the quick heat blast eliminates more than 99 percent of the bacteria left behind after pasteurization.
“The developed technology uses low temperature, short time (LTST) in a process that disperses milk in the form of droplets with low heat/pressure variation over a short treatment time in conjunction with pasteurization,” Bruce Applegate, Purdue’s associate professor in the Department of Food Science, explained to Digital Trends. “The resultant product was subjected to a taste panel and participants had equal or greater preference for the LTST pasteurized milk compared to normally pasteurized milk. The shelf was determined to be a minimum of two weeks longer than the standard shelf life from pasteurization alone.”
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