What Do You Mean You Don't Have Milk Powder in the Pantry? (2024)

So, you just made thischocolate cake with brown butter frosting. It was great. Now you have a bag of milk powder and you don’t know what to do with it. Yes, you could make that cake every week for the next nine weeks and no one would complain. But there’s a lot that milk powder can do. Let me show you the ways.

First of all, what is milk powder?

Milk powder is simply fresh milk with nearly all the liquid evaporated. The resulting powder is a matrix of milk protein and milk sugar, or lactose (the thing that makes you feel like an inflatable pool float if you have anintolerance). We’re focusing oninstant nonfat milk powder, the kind most available to home cooks at the grocery store. Find it in the baking aisle or by the milk flavor mixes like strawberry Nesquik and Ovaltine.

It’s these proteins and sugars that make milk powder incredibly valuable, undergoing changes when heated to make things more creamy, moist, foamy, tender, and caramelized. While milk powder exists in multiple forms and has thousands of commercial uses (Nutella, emulsified meats like sausages and hot dogs, and as a testing medium in some medical labs), here are some ways to harness its powers in your cooking.

Use milk powder for…

The brownest brown butter

Butter browns if you cook it long enough because its milk solids begin to toast and caramelize.Adding milk powder—a powerhouse of milk solids—to the browning butter magnifies this effect tenfold.Toast anywhere between 2–4 Tbsp. milk powder per 1 stick butter.Enjoy the brownest brown butter you ever did see, like in thistoasty, rich frosting to spread over chocolate sheet cake.

Bigger, bouncier bread

The added protein and sugar from milk powder improves the structure and texture of yeast breads, making them loftier and more tender. It also intensifies the color of the crust, making your breads beautifully bronzed. Molly Marzalek-Kelly, senior recipe developer at King Arthur Baking Company, says milk powder helps yeasted breads “have a higher rise and softer texture. Milk powder lends an added level of tenderness while also helping to increase the item’s shelf life. Meaning, your baked goods will stay fresher longer—something that can be a very welcome bonus, especially for smaller-sized households.”

This tip is best for enriched breads like brioche ormilk bread, which will benefit from this increased softness (unlike, say, a crusty sourdough boule).Add 5% of the flour weight (or 1 Tbsp. milk powder for every 1 cup, or 125 grams,flour), incorporating it with the rest of the dry ingredients.

While it can be trickier to get your hands on, it can be worth it to purchase high-heat milk powder,such as King Arthur’s, if you’re looking for the most dramatic results. It’s different from the low-heat milk powder that makes up the majority of what’s on supermarket shelves, and is frequently used by professionals and in commercial baking. A difference in the processing of the milk changes the way the proteins behave, helping your bread shrink less and hold on to more moisture.

Extra creamy ice cream

The lactose in milk powder is extremely absorbent, holding up to 10 times its weight in water. A scoop added to anyice cream base quickly sucks up excess moisture while the milk proteins provide extra creaminess and enhanced aeration. Milk powder “is an excellent emulsifier,” writes Rose Levy Beranbaum inRose’s Ice Cream Bliss. “It bonds with both the liquid and fat in the base, preventing ice crystals from forming when the ice cream is in the freezer.”Add 2–5% of the total weight (approximately 3 Tbsp. milk powder for every quart of ice cream base), simmering it with the dairy ingredients and sugar.

Thick, dense yogurt

If youmake yogurt at home and it’s somewhat lackluster, thin, and runny, consider a scoop of milk powder. The protein boost makes the yogurt set up so firm and thick, you could cut it with a knife.Add 2 Tbsp. milk powder for every 1 cup liquid milk, whisking it into the cold milk to dissolve; then heat, cool, and add the yogurt culture.

Can I use milk instead of milk powder or the other way around?

When a recipe calls for milk powder, definitely don’t use liquid milk instead. It throws off the balance of liquid to dry ingredients, resulting in a wetter dough or batter than intended. If the recipe calls for ¼ cup or less of milk powder and you don’t have any, just skip it and know that the final result might be slightly less tender and light, but should still remain mostly unaffected. Anything more than ¼ cup and the milk powder is too essential to the recipe to cut out.

If you don’t have fresh milk on hand, you can reconstitute milk powder and use the resulting liquid instead.Dissolve ¼ cup milk powder in 1 cup water to use in place of milk. This works seamlessly where the milk is a small or hidden part of the recipe, like acake, but less so when it is integral to the flavor of the final outcome, like apanna cotta.

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