Ever wanted to find a powdered milk that tastes good?  You’re not alone.  So just in case you don’t want to go through the expense and hassle of trying out every kind of powdered milk you can find, read on.  I did it for you.

After a comment about the flavor of powdered milk on another post, I hatched a plan to have folks try a bunch of different kinds of powdered milks to maybe find one that tasted good so this reader and anyone else who wants to know (including me) will know which brands would be best to buy because you know powdered milk is not cheap.  I had some super help with this milk experiment from Emergency Essentials, Grandma’s Country Foods, Walton Feed, Blue Chip Group (now Augason Farms), and Honeyville Grain who all donated some of their milk for the review.  Thank you to all of you–we couldn’t have done it without you!

So here’s the basic setup.  I gave each milk a letter A through J.  Yes, we tried 10 kinds of milk.  2 powdered milk alternatives, 2 regular non-instant powdered milks, 5 instant powdered milks, and regular old skim milk in a jug thrown in just for fun and science (but nobody knew which one it was).  There were also two kinds of chocolate milks which I labeled R and S.  A friend and I mixed up each kind of powdered milk and let it chill.  Then we had people taste them and grade each on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being really bad and 5 being really good and let them write any comments they wanted to about any of them.  This happened over two days.  Then I totaled up the scores, divided by the number of tasters, and did some other fancy math statistics tricks I learned from my third grader and came up with the results.  We’ll start with Milk F–the real milk, then we’ll go in order from A to J which were all the regular milks.  I’ll give the review results on the chocolate milks in another post.

Milk “F” was Great Value brand fat free milk from Wal-Mart.  This is the standard.  If we want something to taste “like milk” this is what it should taste like.  No, I don’t think fat free/skim milk tastes like milk any more than you do, but because all of the powdered milks are non-fat, we are using non-fat milk to compare them to.  It’s average taste score was 3.46, with scores ranging from 2-5 and the score chosen most often split equally between 3 and 4.  Okay, for all you parents of grade schoolers, that is “mean=3.46, range=2-5, mode=3, 4″.  Got it?  Ingredients: milk, vitamins A and D.

Milk “A”: Honeyville Milk Alternative. Available from and donated by Honeyville Grain.  $11.99/can

Honeyville’s milk alternative is not 100% milk.  It has a whole slew of ingredients including sweet dairy whey, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, corn syrup solids, and vitamins A and D3.  The instructions say to mix it into warm water.  We used the same mixing pitcher to mix each kind of milk, of course washing it in between.  This one mixed up fairly easily.  It took 2 cups of powder to make a gallon of drink.  It was kind of thin, you might put more than that in.  This one didn’t score too well on the taste.  It average score was 2.09 with a range of 1-4 and the most common choice being 1.  This milk settled/separated over time after being mixed, so you’d want to keep it in a container that you could easily mix it before pouring.

Milk “B”:  Morning Moos Milk Alternative. Available from and donated by Blue Chip Group (now Augason Farms).  Also available at some Utah Wal-Marts and Associated Foods Stores.  $11.89/can.

Morning Moos is the second in our milk alternative group.  This is not 100% milk.  Its ingredients include sweet whey, creamer (including corn syrup solids), coconut oil, sugar, nonfat milk, vitamins A and D.  The can claims great results when using it for cooking due to the high percentage of whey.  I’m not sure I’d use a milk alternative to substitute for milk in a recipe.  I think I’ll stick with real powdered milk.  However, this milk alternative had the highest score among all the milks sampled for taste.  So maybe some for drinking or putting on cereal would be good to have around.  It mixed easily into warm water.  It also took 2 cups of powder to make a gallon of drink.  Morning Moos average taste score was 4 with a range of 2-5 and the most common choice was 4.  I’m kind of partial to real milk, but if I was storing just for drinking and wanting it to taste good, I might get me some cans of Morning Moos.

Milk “C”: Western Family (Store Brand) Powdered Milk. This particular brand is available at Associated Foods stores.  I’m guessing it is a comparable taste to other store brands.  I really didn’t want to test all the store brands I could find, so this is it.

This is an instant powdered milk and mixed up the easiest of all.  It dissolved readily in warm or cold water.  It also didn’t taste very good.  It was the classic powdered milk taste.  Ick.  It is 100% milk–ingredients: nonfat dry milk, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3.  It took 5 1/3 cups to make a gallon.  Wow.  That’s a lot of powder to get a gallon of milk.  Seriously, I had no idea there was as much variance as there is in the amount of powder required to mix a gallon of milk.  The other drawback with this kind of powdered milk is that it is packaged in a box–not good for long term storage.  Average taste score was 2.15, with scores ranging from 1-4 and the most common taste score was 2.  My favorite comment on this one: “Bitter, tastes like old milk.”  There you have it.  So if store brand boxed powdered milk is what you usually buy, I have good news for you–There ARE better tasting powdered milks out there.

Milk “D”: Country Fresh Farms Instant Powdered Milk. Available in my Wal-Mart baking aisle for $9.99/can.

For starters, this stuff was a big pain to mix.  We tried mixing it into warm water and it clumped pretty severely, so then we tried mixing it into cold water which made it worse.  We ended up throwing the whole cold water pitcher out and starting again with warm water.  Holy hassle, Batman.  This stuff repelled water.  We joked as we were fighting with it that it would probably be the best tasting just because it was such a pain to mix.  It actually did turn out to have pretty good flavor.  Its average taste score was 3.29 which was almost as good as real milk.  It is 100% milk–ingredients: 100% real instant nonfat dry milk.  It doesn’t appear to have vitamins added.  It took 5 1/3 cups to make a gallon, so you don’t get very many gallons out of a can.  Probably 2-3 gallons.  So even though the cost of the can isn’t as high as some of the others in the experiment, your cost per gallon is pretty steep.  Taste scores ranged from 2-5 on this and the most common score was 3.

Milk “E” Country Cream Instant Non-Fat Milk.  Available from and donated by Grandma’s Country Foods.  Also available at Utah Macey’s stores and some Associated Foods stores.  $12.99/can.

This milk mixed up easily in warm or cold water.  We used warm for the experiment (after the trouble mixing milk D, we just mixed everything else into warm water), but I have mixed this into cold and not had a problem.  This was a pretty good tasting powdered milk.  I liked it, but one farm lady thought it tasted like calf milk.  It’s average taste score was 2.77, but the most common score chosen was 4.  The few that didn’t like it, really didn’t like it, so that brought the average down.  Scores ranged from 1-4.  It took 3 cups to make a gallon, so a better mix ratio than some of the others.  Ingredients: 100% real instant nonfat milk, vitamins A & D.  I’d buy this milk.  Especially when it goes on sale at Macey’s (too bad there’s not a Macey’s near me–that is one place I miss since we left living in the civilized world).  You  might get a can and test it out before buying a case of it just in case you’re one that doesn’t like it.

Milk “F” was the regular milk in a jug we discussed at the top of the post, so on to milk “G”.

Milk “G”: Rainy Day Foods Instant Non-Fat Milk.  Available from and donated by Walton Feed.  $13.00/can.

The ingredients on this one were nonfat dry milk, lactose, vitamin A palmitate and vitamin D3.  The instructions say you can mix into cold water.  We used warm again and it mixed easily.  This milk had more “flavor” than some of the others.  A common comment was “sweet”.  For some uses, like baking, I don’t mind my powdered milk having “flavor”, but for straight drinking, I don’t like it so much.  It took 5 1/3 cups of powder to make a gallon of milk, so this was on the high end of the mix ratio.  Maybe if you mixed less in it wouldn’t have as much flavor.  The average taste score on the Rainy Day instant milk was 2.81, with a range of 1-4 and the most common score chosen was 3.

There is one more instant powdered milk, but it got out of order in the lineup, so the next two milks are Non-Instant or Regular Powdered Milks.

Milk “H” Rainy Day Foods Non-Instant Dry Milk.  Available from and donated by Walton Feed.  $10.80/can.

Non instant milks just don’t have great “milk” taste, and this one was no exception.  They do, however, generally cost less per can and usually are more concentrated than instant milks so they use less powder to make the same amount of liquid milk.  That all equates to more milk for your money.  When you’re baking or making canned milk substitutes or cheeses, it won’t matter how great your powdered milk tastes as a liquid–you’re not pouring it over your cereal.  I’m all for stocking less expensive non-instant powdered milks for everything but drinking straight.  We mixed this as the directions stated–mix the powdered milk into a small amount of warm water, then add the rest of the water either warm or cold.  Maybe that’s what we needed to do on milk D.  It worked great.  Ingredients: Non-fat milk powder.  The milk was not tasty with an average score of 2.0, scores ranging from 1-4 and a most common score of 1.  One commenter simply said, “Bad!”  Now before you go thinking how low those scores are, of the two non-instant milks we tried, this was the better one.  It took only 2 cups of powder to make a gallon, so it’s really good on the mix ratio also.

Milk “I”: LDS Cannery Non-Instant Powdered Milk.  Available through LDS church dry pack canneries.  $7.05/can.

Okay, this is the least expensive powdered milk right now, and the one I have the most of and use regularly in baking and cooking.  It was also solidly scored the worst tasting of all the milks we tried.  No, I did not use the 12 year old stuff from my food room, I opened fresh stuff canned a month before the experiment.  I had some folks about cry when they found out how bad it tasted because that was the only kind they had stored.  But like I said before, I don’t care how it tastes as liquid milk when I’m making cheese or baking with it.  I actually like the added flavor in my breads.  So don’t despair, all that powdered milk you have from the cannery does not need to be replaced with something else.  Maybe just supplemented with another brand to be used for drinking.  The commenter who called that last milk “Bad!” called this one “Worse!”.   Its average taste score was 1.75 with scores ranging from 1-4 and the most common score chosen was 1.  It took 3 cups to make a gallon, so actually it makes the Rainy Day brand comparable in price for the amount of milk you can make from the can.  Ingredients: nonfat dry milk, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3.

Milk “J”: Provident Pantry Instant Non-Fat Dry Milk.  Available from and donated by Emergency Essentials.  $14.95/can

This milk arrived in the mail in time for the second day of testing, so some of the people didn’t get to try it, but quite a few still did.  It scored best of all the instant powdered real milks with an average score of 3.5 (actually slightly higher than regular skim milk), scores ranging from 2-4 and its most common score was 4.  It mixed easily in warm water and took 2 2/3 cups to make a gallon of milk.  It has a low mix ratio, but is also the most expensive can of milk we tried, so wait for a sale here if you can.  I’d definitely pick some of this up for drinking.

Wow, are you still reading?  Amazing.  We made it through all the regular white milks we tried.  I’ll cover the chocolate varieties in the next post, so now for you visual people, here’s the information in a table.

Milk Alternatives:

Instant Powdered Milks (and real milk):

Non-Instant Powdered Milks:

I first heard about square foot gardening a few years ago from a friend who swore by it. Looking at his garden, I could see why: he had a bounty of chiles and tomatoes to make any salsa enthusiast drool. At the time, I was unaware that there was a book involved; I thought that it was only a fad. Turns out there’s a little more to it than that.

I picked up All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew last year towards the end of the growing season. After careful consideration, I have broken the emphasis of this book into four main points:

• They all said I was crazy.
• But I’m not crazy.
• You can be like me.
• Let me show you how!

This has been troubling for me, largely because these are the same main points found in various self-help books, most of which seem to be geared more towards selling books than helping the people that buy them. But in Mel’s defense, there does seem to be a logical reason for this.

Gardening and farming is steeped in millenia of tradition. Things have been done much the same way that they have always been done. The problem is that while technology advances, many gardeners cling to old, proven habits, unwilling to believe that something better could exist. And so when an efficiency expert shows them such improvements, he gets snubbed. The writing style in this book is clearly designed to convince people to give Mel’s methods a try, so that they can prove to themselves that it really does work.

As I read through this book, I considered the logic very carefully. The aforementioned bullet points were such red flags for me, I was certain I would find more. I have not. Once you get past the self-promotion and look at the actual details, square foot gardening seems pretty sound. The techniques seem well-thought out, and well-tested by the author. The biggest flaw, as far as I’m concerned, was that so much time was spent trying to convince the reader how much fun everything is, and how the rest of the world is crazy, but not the square foot gardener. It got annoying fast, and was the biggest reason why it took me so long to finish reading it.

Without spoiling the rest of the book for you, a few of the concepts described are:

• No More Tilling: Since you never walk on the soil that the plants grow in, it never gets compacted, and so needs no tilling.
• More Efficient Growing Area: Instructions on seed packets are designed with walking space in mind. The nature of the square foot garden changes the walkway rules, and allows for plants to be grown more closely together.
• Mel’s Mix: Even James Dyson doesn’t talk about his vacuum as much as Mel talks about this growing soil. But annoying as it is reading that over and over, it does seem like a decent mix. But I have yet to test it myself.

Once you cut out all the fluff, you are still left with valuable information. There are growing charts and detailed descriptions of common plants, and information on how to best grow them. There are building plans for the gardens, and for accessories for the gardens. Yesterday I threw out all of my old tomato cages from last year, in favor of the trellisses described in the book. Even if I did nothing else the book suggests, I will be using those.

If you are planning to put together a garden in your back yard, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of this book. I don’t know that you should follow every instruction to the letter, but you should at least consider it. I suspect that at the very least you will pick up some excellent tips, and perhaps you really will go all out and put together a square foot garden just like Mel says.

If you have toyed with the idea of a garden in the yard, but haven’t committed to anything yet, it is still worth a look. Go to the library and check it out, or find a friend who’s already bought a copy. Give it a read. You may not go with a full 4×4 garden, but maybe you’ll decide to put a 1×2 garden on your porch. But don’t expect it to win any writing awards. I suspect that if you took out all the fluff, the book would be somewhere around 25-50% smaller, but the remaining information does seem to be good. Give it a shot.

Square Foot Gardening Book

All New Square Foot Gardening Cookbook: Taking the Harvest to the Table

Square Foot Gardening Grids, Set of 2

For anybody who does have questions, come on back and read more.  And yes, the LDS Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) does actually teach to have at least a 3 month storage of regular use items, and has consistently taught that you should have 1-2 years of more long-term storage.

As a bonus to our Prepper Network readers and friends, use the code “prepper” to get 10% off the class!

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18 FEB 2010
INFORMATION MEMORANDUM
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We saw disaster strike in Katrina, and saw the hordes of people suffering, starving, and sleeping in the stadium. Looters went after such unsustainable items as beer and potato chips, rushing in a frenzy to find whatever they could to “survive” until things blew over.

As one example of many, consider the following news report of the massive looting that took place after the hurricane had hit:

Click here to view the embedded video.

More recently, we have the example of the earthquake in Haiti where some of the pictures plainly illustrate the importance of being prepared, including this one:

Clearly, the place to be in the aftermath of a disaster, whether man-made or natural, is anywhere but in public unless your security can be assured, or the circumstances require you go out and assist others. Chaos reigns in these environments where unprepared people fight over the most basic of supplies, and masses swarm around any relief that is provided from external sources. Looting is rampant, conditions are often unsanitary, and one’s security is anything but certain when surrounded by desperate people resorting to desperate actions to feed themselves and their families.

Not all disasters result in such chaos, however. The most recent example we have to learn from is ongoing at this moment, and far more tame than the other examples mentioned here. I’m referring to the so-called “snowpocalypse” pounding the eastern seaboard with several feet of snow. The federal government has been shut down for a few days, people are cooped up inside of their homes, and the store shelves are bare:

(Images via gawker.com)

We have ample examples from which to learn, if only we will let these experiences serve as catalysts for our own preparation. It’s not necessary that we suffer through such circumstances ourselves to learn what we can do in the future. Indeed, it is more advantageous that we learn from the mistakes of others in order to be better prepared if and when we are faced with the same situations.

Photo Via Flickr User un_photo

Recently we had a reader ‘Lonnie’ write in with the following excellent question, that I’ve heard asked in other forms too;

Was thinking about the earthquake in Haiti, and if that happened along the wasatch front. I live in Utah county in a 2 story home with a basement. My food storage is in my basement. What if the earthquake totally destroys my house and my food storage is buried under the rubble of what was my house? It won’t do me any good when I can’t GET TO IT! Any suggestions on mitigating that problem?

Well Lonnie, it looks like I’m finally going to get around to addressing your question, and hopefully in a helpful manner. I think your question itself gives the necessary questions you will need to ask yourself in order to solve your concerns.  Today of course, you are worrying because of the recent disaster in Haiti, but similar questions ocurr after hurricanes, flooding, and most any other form of disaster. The more news coverage devoted to the disaster, the more people begin to question their own security. Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution to any complicated, personal issue. Each individual must consider what disasters they are most likely to encounter, then which of those to begin preparing for. No one can cover every scenario so don’t waste your time trying. Stick with those issues you believe are germane to your situation, research your options and begin preparing. Not only does this guide you in what food and supplies you will need, but how you store them.

As you have mentioned, here on the Wasatch Front, we are surrounded by fault lines that could cause any number of problems, and thus are a condition we should prudently prepare for. Lonnie, like most of us along the Wasatch Front stores her food in the basement. This makes sense, there is usually more space; stable, cooler temperatures, and it’s not ‘in your face’ all the time or competing with your decorations for attention. However, that’s a lot of house sitting on top of everything should it all come down due to a geologic event. To me this brings a couple of things to mind:

1. Should you put all your food storage in a single location?  If possible, spread things around a little.  Maybe that means doing something like having an attached cellar if you somehow have the space and time, but I know many of us don’t.  I have a part of my garage that is well insulated so I can put certain canned goods out there.  A lot less house will land on it in that case.
2. Support and Protections. In the case of an earthquake or other event, houses rarely completely collapse. Based on their position in the house and proximity to supporting structures, furniture, etc. your preps may be well protected. You can keep that in mind when you situate your food storage area. And if you don’t have enough support already, you can add some protective devices either to your house, or just around your storage locations (better containers, shelving, etc).
3. Accessibility.  Even in a really bad earthquake, and if your house really does fall down, that doesn’t mean all your food is lost.  You will actually have more concern about food damage from fires, or from any water damage than from the collapse itself.  Sure some cans, and definitely glass jars will break, but many will still be good, just hard to get to.  But I’m sure it will be possible to do so with some work.  If you’re hungry, and you know you’ve got a years supply (mostly) of food under a floor or two worth of scrap lumber, you just know you’ve got some great seasoned firewood to cut before the BBQ, and that’s the *worst* case.

Now, the best thing to know before it happens is how to prevent losing your food storage, or other supplies in the case of a disaster (in this case an earthquake, adapt to floods or any other region’s favorite flavor of doom). Remember that if everything you have is in a single location, then Murphy will cause that to be the epicenter of whatever disaster you have. We all know that’s how he likes to work. Find out ways to possibly take advantage of more than one place in your house. If you are just extra lucky, maybe you have close family that you can trade storage space with, or maybe you have a storage unit, or somebody with property might have a cellar, barn, or shed.

Second, remember that some storage items shouldn’t be kept together. Maybe you have a nicer generator, or camp stove. Well of course you don’t want to keep that fuel near your food. Even without a natural disaster, that is a potential disaster on its own. But also think about what other things won’t mix well if shaken (or stirred). Are your liquid filled glass jars located above cardboard cake mix boxes or are those sealed mylar bags protecting your dried mixes?

The worst case in an earthquake means you don’t have *any* need for that food you’ve been storing.  As our friend the Preparedness Pro says, “Wouldn’t it be ironic if I was crushed under my wheat in a disaster?”.  Let’s step back one level though and say you were lucky enough not be killed during a major earthquake.  The time immediately after that earthquake is really important.  We should all know that it’s not safe to just go back into a building right away, and after ensuring the safety of our family you should of course make sure the gas, electric, and water to your house are turned off.  You have a much larger chance of losing everything you have to something going wrong with those than you do to the direct effects of the earthquake itself.  This is something you will likely need some basic tools for, and must learn how to do ahead of time.  Now, if you are standing outside your house, people are physically safe, and utilities are off, then this is the time that your ‘72-hour kit’ was designed for.  During that time you can use the resources in that kit to make sure your family has what it needs, and you can begin to assess the situation.  Aftershocks are likely in the few days following an earthquake, so you don’t want to be poking around in a house that is now more likely to collapse, but you can begin to assess the situation. Maybe your house really wasn’t that damaged, and you can move important resources outside. Maybe everything looks just fine, and you can begin to look closer for any harder-to-find damage points.

There are some disasters we can never be truly ready for, and others where you might just get the short end of the stick and lose everything.  But in giving honest thought to the problem, you’ll see that we can take basic steps to improve our chances for even large disasters.

Forum

For people interested in forum discussions, we have two available places to talk.  The APN forums will allow you communicate with the other utahpreppers, as well as other state prepper groups.  Also available is the new LDS Preppers, a similar concept but geared for the LDS readers.  By keeping with the rest of the groups, you can participate not only in the Utah discussions, but also any other regions, or specialty topics you wish.  It’s a great resource to communicate with other preppers, without having having to come out of your well-stocked mountain retreat (ok, a little humor there).  If you need to understand a little bit more about what a forum is, check out the wikipedia description.

Chat

If you like real time discussions, you can now join us in our chat rooms.  These chats are accessible to computer novice, as well as the geeks among us.  For the novice, you can easily go HERE and join the chat rooms in your browser (no software to install).  Just click the link, and you will be prompted for a nickname to use, then it’ll log you in and you will have a page to  There are several rooms available, the most important ones being the #preppers, and the #utahpreppers rooms.  Chat rooms are an ‘always-open’ type of room where you can go in and interact in real-time.  Just clicking that link will open a page with a small bar on the top that lists which rooms you can listen in (just click on one to see the activity in that room).  On the right hand side will be a list of people currently in the room, and at the bottom, you can type in a message, and just hit enter for everyone to get it.

For the Geeks, we’re all using the rizon IRC network, and you may use any IRC client (such as XChat, WeeChat, or others) to connect.

Feel free to post up your own plans, and meet a few of the folks that frequent the blog.

My first thought is to have the indoor meet-up at 10am near the entrance of the show, this lets us all browse around, and hit the things we need to first.  After that, I’m all for meeting somewhere (I’d say the nice crown burger across the street for a Pastrami-burger with fries) at maybe noon.  Please Comment if you will come, and what times (or any differences in preferences).

I’ll try to make sure and have something noticeable so you can tell our group apart :)

With most canned goods, the expiration date seems to be a suggested date and the food is actually good far beyond the date marked on the end of the can.  This has not held true for the canned milk products I have stored.  You would expect evaporated milk 10 years past its expiration date to be bad (and it was), but I really expected sweetened condensed milk only 2 years past expiration to still be useable (and it wasn’t).  The evaporated milk had turned thick and brown, and the sweetened condensed milk was brown also (it is already thick when it is fresh).  So if you want to store canned milk products, they need to be rotated frequently.  I will not be storing canned milk products anymore, instead I will be making them when I need them with powdered milk which stores a lot longer than the canned milks (and is less expensive).  Here are a couple of recipes:

Evaporated Milk
1 C water
2/3 C powdered milk
Mix together with a whisk or blender.  Will replace evaporated milk in any recipe.

Sweetened Condensed Milk
1/2 C hot tap water
1 C sugar
1 C powdered milk
3 TB melted butter
Mix in blender until sugar dissolves.  Will replace sweetened condensed milk in any recipe.  Makes about 1 1/2 cups +

I used the  non instant powdered milk.  It is okay to half or double these recipes to get the amount you need for your recipe.