I only use milk for my coffee in the morning and the odd white sauce. Since I prefer skim milk in my coffee anyway, I just keep dried skim milk powder on hand and reconstitute it with hot water (so I put liquid milk, not straight powder, into my coffee). Much more pleasant than milk that has been frozen; gah the texture of that is scary!

The milk that I buy is non homoginized so I don't think this will work if I plan on drinking it. But for baking and cooking purposes this is a good tip. I tend to just look for recipes that use a lot of milk like yogurt, flan or ice cream.

good tip, I was wondering if I could do this.

Any thoughts on how well nondairy milk would freeze? Due to a dairy and soy allergy, we experiment with a lot of nondairy milks (flax, rice, hemp, oat, etc.). We have found some are better for drinking and others are better for baking. Do you all think freezing nondairy milks would work the same?

When I find I have too much milk, I just make more yogurt. Then I have an excuse to make frozen yogurt ...

my mom used to do this

Does this also work for heavy cream?

I agree with TravelingRae about using dried skim milk. It's great if you just need a little bit of milk for a recipe. I get the instant stuff that you can reconstitute in cold water. I even have it occasionally with cereal.

I wishI had this issue, we go through 8 litres of non-homogised full cream milk a week and there is just the two of us.
I have tried freezing milk but hated the taste it had even with only using it for cooking and powdered milk...well we will leave that for combating black spot on the roses and adding to my homemade bread in my breadmaker.
We each consume 250-300mls of milk as a drink for both breakfast and with our evening meal and have found both our weight and cholestrol dropping.
We live in NZ so maybe your milk in USA is different but a 2 litre of milk here is $5.19 so we use every scrap.

I do this regularly! I learned it from my mom. You can do it in ice cube trays as suggested (I measured - mine create an approximately 1/8 cup sized-cube) OR I sometimes freeze it a cup at a time in ziplock-type plastic containers. It's not something you'd want to drink when it's thawed but it works for cooking perfectly!

@Cicely'sMom, i can't speak to flax, rice, hemp, oat, but I can tell you that almond milk most certainly does not freeze well :\

Excess milk get turned into: yogurt, buttermilk, ice cream and cheese.
However, I have access to non homogenized milk.

For freezing dairy products I recommend the book:
"Jeni's Splended Ice Creams at home" by Jeni Britton Bauer.

Sweet Dreams... Mickey.

This is good to know for customer information during cooking classes. I wouldn't have thought of this since "leftover milk" is a foreign concept to me. The nine year old goes through two gallons a week, at least.

My fridge just broke down today (just the normal fridge part, not the freezer.. yet) and my roommate threw the bags of milk in the freezer. This is so weirdly relevant to me! I'm not even going to dare to touch that milk once it's thawed (plus I feel like it will find a way to explode in the freezer regardless). At least I can let him know he can use it for cooking and baking although I am certain he'll drink it anyway.

I have done a lot of 4-6 week research cruises at sea, and this is how they keep the milk fresh for the later parts of the trips. It doesn't taste 100% the same as fresh milk, so if that bugs you at all, this may not be worth it. Honestly, milk is so cheap and our freezer space so valuable (smaller freezer) that it really isn't worth the trouble. Plus I would only drink it if it were my only choice because I was at sea!

Are you in Canada? I can see that Canadian milk bags would make this a lot more convenient. The milk cartons in the US take up too much space to be that practical in the freezer, and ziplocs could come open too easily! I didn't like milk bags for daily use (I like being able to seal my milk closed so it doesn't taste like the food being stored in the fridge) but it would definitely be easier for freezing!

As a kid, my parents did this all the time. With 7 kids in the family, they didn't want to go food shopping more than once a week. So we'd buy a week's worth of milk and freeze it in the big upright freezer.

Sometimes it got a bit grainy when it thawed, but not enough to stop us from drinking it. We always got whole milk, but I wonder if low fat or skim milk might not have the "grainy after thawing" problem?

If I'm going away for a weekend or longer and there's an open carton of milk in the fridge, I'll throw it in the freezer. It will still be fresh when I get home, and I won't have to rush out to buy milk for breakfast right away.

If I had a choice between frozen milk or UHT milk, I 'd go for UHT... It is standard in most European countries. You can just put it in storage in the cellar, garage or wherever, and buy even for months ahead. I can't imagine it tastes worse than frozen milk.

You can use ziplocks for this and they freeze flat, which is great. But I only freeze a cup at a time if I have to freeze it. And usually I don't need to. I've gone to buying quarts at a time since we don't drink it.

We drink Kosher supervised milk from a small local dairy. When they have a machinery problem or a trucking problem we don't get delivery to the local Kosher markets. We rely on the milk that's in the deep freeze. It's second nature to stash two cartons in the fridge, two in the freezer. After a slow thaw, believe me, it's very drinkable.

well, I do grocery shopping on the weekends only, typically on Sundays and each week I buy 4 litres of milk. Usually, each Friday night finds scratching my head whether I should finish the last remaining bit of milk or save it for Saturday morning's coffee (I hate black coffee).
Milk never goes to waste in my house - and I live alone. I could easily drink a half a litre a day.

well, I do grocery shopping on the weekends only, typically on Sundays and each week I buy 4 litres of milk. Usually, each Friday night finds scratching my head whether I should finish the last remaining bit of milk or save it for Saturday morning's coffee (I hate black coffee).
Milk never goes to waste in my house - and I live alone. I could easily drink a half a litre a day.

Has anyone tried freezing buttermilk? We don't drink it as is but I use it in baking, and can't buy less than a quart at a time. I'd love to freeze the rest for next time. thoughts???

Skim milk works too. Personally I hate it, but I freeze it for other family members. Works.

At $4.50 a pop at Whole Foods, goat milk is a MUST freeze. Well, really all milk. Otherwise, why throw money down the drain? Been doing this for years.

Skim and 1% milk freeze well in gallon jugs. I've never noticed any loss of quality in taste or texture.

My experience with frozen milk is similar to what Xarchady said: it becomes grainy. My family would shop once a month because we lived in a very rural area, so we'd freeze several gallons. It was disgusting! I quit drinking milk because of how nasty is was. The fat separates & becomes chunky sediment in a sweet, watery glass of ewwwwww.

Freezing buttermilk works just fine. If you want to preserve the quality and prevent grainy textures, freeze dairy products quickly and use fresh product only. They need to be in the coldest part of your freezer. I use one gallon freezer bags filled about 3/4 full and put them on a cookie sheet.