What's up with that? For nearly three weeks all I could do from three separate gallons of 2% milk, reg'lar and organic, I just could get it to microfoam correctly? All it would do was boil and not stiffen or foam properly in any way? I was beginning to get worried about my Olympia Cremina that there was a problem of some sort? Finally this morning I was at Costco and picked up a gallon of their milk, and this evening voila, perfect...anyone else go through this?

Ciao!
paul

porsche917k wrote:...anyone else go through this?

No, not really. Although some milk is easier to steam, I don't recall a jug of milk that simply wouldn't perform.

Not that I doubt it happens; I had a friend in France who would go on and on about the qualities of "summer" versus "winter" cheese, presumably affected by how green the grazing was during the seasons. I could not appreciate the subtlety he wished to convey in French, but I certainly appreciated his talent for creating a perfect selection of cheeses for dinner. How I miss those "dangerous" unpasteurized cheeses!

Returning to your question... perhaps you got some milk that was overpasturized / overprocessed.

While I have never been able to create anything resembling latte art my stretching of soymilk, and occasionally cowjuice, has been passable for the last 6+ years with Silvia. recently the grand old lady was replaced on the counter with a Vibiemme Domobar Super. Unfortunately I had read a lot of the reviews here and elsewhere about its steaming and I was trying not to force it. "Force it" is a relative thing, and I found that I had evidently never been forcing it, so when I took it a bit easier all I ended up with was really hot milk. Even with a steaming thermometer to monitor the process it did not improve.

It was frustrating so I plugged one hole with a toothpick to slow things down and it started to improve. After a couple of weeks I took the toothpick out and things are back to normal.

At the beginning things were so bad that, looking back, I now actually suspect that there was something in the boiler that was affecting the process.

The moral of this story is that I am not much help... Seriously, if you have recently descaled the machine, there could be some residue of the cleaner or even a change in the local water.. or not.

porsche917k wrote:anyone else go through this?

Dairies aren't infallible. I once got two gallons in a row (probably a week apart) with a layer of beautiful cream on top. Something I hadn't seen since I left Europe. The first one threw me off so badly that I had a gallon of milk that had turned. I was sniffing and poking when the old memory surfaced and I frightened my girlfriend with my reaction.

Was the cream on top due to picking up the unhomogenised carton/bottle. I did a quick search but could find nothing comparing unhomogesied with homogenised. Has anyone done this?

But to stay on topic, I've had weeks when I've got variations. I have one child who will turn his nose up at "fresh" milk sometimes and I'm convinced the supermarket has left the milk sitting out the back for a while unrefrigerated and it has soured slightly. Would this make it harder to get good microfoam?

I suspect the differences over the seasons has been reduced somewhat as they now give you 4%, 2% or less than 1% fat rather than anything to do with what the cow produced yesterday.

Rosemary

I would suspect this might be the case...even though the three weeks/gallons came from three different places...Whole Paycheck, Shop Rite, and the local convenience store...and now even though the current gallon in the fridge is near a week old and from Costco, it's still working the way it should!

Rosemary wrote:
But to stay on topic, I've had weeks when I've got variations. I have one child who will turn his nose up at "fresh" milk sometimes and I'm convinced the supermarket has left the milk sitting out the back for a while unrefrigerated and it has soured slightly. Would this make it harder to get good microfoam?


Rosemary

I was getting terrible microfoam for several days.
It turned out to be pieces of Teflon Tape partially plugging the steam wand.

Rosemary wrote:Was the cream on top due to picking up the unhomogenised carton/bottle. I did a quick search but could find nothing comparing unhomogesied with homogenised. Has anyone done this?

It was the same brand of milk from the same store that I had been the habit of shopping at for years, as it is right down the street from my house, and the milk was from the same dairy. My guess is that there was a bit of an issue with the machinery that reduces the whole milk from the cream, and the 2% from the whole, and real milk straight from the cow somehow got to the shelf. I didn't complain, so I never got an explanation! ; >

Hi,

I've experienced this phenomena before and there is an explanation.

Milk does have seasonal variations and summer milk is some of the most problematic. The animals are stressed due to heat and the quality of the feed has dropped off from it's summer peak. The fat globules in the milk are compromised and the lipase activity is generally higher. All of these factors lead to increased glycerides and free fatty acids which suppress the formation of foam. This is also made worse as refrigerated shipping is least effective in the heat of summer and milk may experience several significant warming events before it makes it to your fridge (ie. when the truck is being loaded, during the day as the delivery truck is heated by the sun and opened and closed repeatedly, when the crates sit on the loading dock before moving to the cooler). Each time the milk warms, more foam killing compounds are liberated into the milk giving you the totally un-frothable milk that you've experienced.

Second, in our highly industrialized food system it is likely that the local milk supply is processed in one or two plants in your area that are served by regional dairy farms. This means that the milk that you buy at one store may actually be the identical product to the one being sold at the convenience shop. The label will be different but the milk will be the same.

Finally - one thing that I've found helps is to find a brand of ultra pasteurized milk that you find acceptable and use this when the local supply is really bad. This is really "shelf stable" milk even though it is kept in the cooler. What this gains you is some stability from the time the milk is packaged until consumption. I buy Horizon organic whole milk for this. The steaming properties are still pretty poor but quite a bit better than the local refrigerated supply over the summer months.

Eggs are another summer atrocity but that is another story all together...

Good luck,

Cory

Thanks Cory
Do you know if homogenised or unhomogenised has better foaming properties?

Don't get me started on eggs. It has taken me years to find good fresh eggs and then last Christmas we had temperatures in the low 40's (celsius) and a lot of the poor chicks curled up their toes and died. (They are genuine free range chooks)

Rosemary