Hacker News Reader

Comment by lagerstedt | Hacker News Reader

The Wikipedia article seems to suggest that it's very popular in parts of Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process...

Here in Sweden no one really buys UHT milk. I guess all stores carry it but it's rather a niche product. However, during recent years we have gotten something that's sort of in between UHT and regular milk. I don't know exactly what the process is, maybe they it's just pasteurize it for a bit longer. You need to keep it refrigerated but it will last for weeks. Some people claims it taste a bit different. To me it tastes the same as regular milk. It tastes nothing like UHT though.

View on HN

I think it is "ultra-filtered" milk. Somehow it's filtered to reduce microbe counts, and pasteurised at a slightly higher temperature than standard.

Yes, definitely better than UHT.

That's microfiltered milk and it's actually much worse than UHT:

Microfiltration (MF) of cheese milk has been proposed as an alternative to bactofugation for removal of bacterial spores. However, while good separation efficiency can be obtained, this technology has some drawbacks. First of all, for an efficient MF process, the milk would have to be skimmed prior to MF, which means that the cream phase, constituting ∼10% of milk volume, cannot be treated with MF and would require a high heat treatment to ensure inactivation of spores. Secondly, the MF retentate will typically constitute a considerably large volume than the bactofugate, again meaning that a large volume would have to be sterilized. Together, this could mean the involvement of a considerable proportion of sterilized materials being included in the cheese milk when applying MF for spore removal, with negative effects on cheese-making and cheese quality.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biolog...

In short, microfiltered milk is taken apart, sterilised or filtered separately, and then put back together again- probably the most processed kind of milk you can find in the market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com