Sheldon
No. The explanation here for what milk is has important missing components.
But that's not what milk is. Cold butter blasted into a water-based liquid would eventually come out of suspension unless something prevented the butter particles from touching and rejoining. That's why milk stays homogenized and a vinaigrette doesn't.
No. It doesn't. 1% milk has 1% fat. Skim has between 0.1% and a maximum of 0.5% fat. And it is homogenized to keep that fat in suspension.
This is utter nonsense. Homogenization of milk is not simply a matter of making the milk fat particles small. Homogenization is done by forcing hot milk through tiny nozzles at high pressure. The fat globules are reduced from about 4 micrometers down to about 1 micrometer (millionths of a meter). The fat attracts casein protein particles which adhere to the fat and create a membrane around each globule which interferes with the normal fat clumping. That's why the fat stays dispersed. Each tiny fat globule is surrounded by a membrane that keeps it separated from every other one and prevents them from rejoining.
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Freezers come in two varieties; conventional and frost-free. Conventional freezers stay to a very narrow range of temperatures by cycling on when the temperature in it drops below the thermostat setting by a fixed amount. It turns on the compressor, sucks some heat out of the freezer compartment and gets back down below that trigger temperature.
Frost-free freezers have much wider variability for temperatures. The reason that there's no frost in them is because they are designed to warm the interior of the freezer compartment to evaporate frost. The evaporated water is condensed onto a coil that gets heated to make it become water which is channeled out of the freezer compartment to an evaporator pan where it's heated to evaporate into the room.
Neither kind makes any difference in short-term freezing of anything. Over longer periods, the frost-free will cause a great deal more freezer burn because of the temperature variations and subsequent moisture migration. This is an absolute irrelevancy in the matter of what happens to milk when frozen. And Sheldon's prattle is, from the viewpoint of physics, absolutely backwards.
Given that the fat globules are held separate by proteins that aren't themselves subject to variations at above-freezing temperatures, this is just more Sheldon nonsense. He simply doesn't understand what milk is. And is not.
More Sheldon nasty bullpoo from the normal complement of Sheldon ignorance.
Hehe. He said "breast." hehe... Idiot.
The milk will separate into its fat and cream components. The protein matrix has never formed, so can't be broken by freezing.
Not completely accurate. Look at large blocks of ice made from water than hasn't been de-ionized and boiled to remove dissolved gases. There's always a cloudy center. Commercial ice makers make clear ice from moving water for that reason. Home-made ice cubes will all have a cloudy center. It's dissolved minerals and gases, and they've migrated to the center.
And think of freeze-distillation of fermented alcohols. The water freezes out leaving a more concentrated alcohol behind. It can be done several times, each time concentrating the alcohol further until it reaches a point where the concentration is so high that it would require extraordinary temperatures to do it again.
This doesn't take into account the nature of milk as described above. Freezing will disrupt the protein matrix surrounding each fat globule so that upon thawing, the fat will clump. The protein will, as well, and change the mouthfeel. Agitation can help to redistribute the fat, but not to the condition before freezing.
And a very nice theory it is. Except for the chemistry and physics of milk, it's lovely. The complexity of milk, however, removes it from this view.
I suggest reading "On Food and Cooking" revised 2004 for a much longer and scientifically clear discussion of milk and everything about it. Harold McGee is one of my heroes. Good science and good writing.
Pastorio
