Does it also bother you when the milk always bursts out of the utensil when it is heated? Well, I used to wonder in my moments of despair why does milk burst when heated.
While cleaning the burst milk, I wondered every time if there was a proper reason behind it.
To help understand your queries relating to why does milk bursts when heated, we are here to discuss them briefly.
A pot of milk on the gas heating is one thing that you can never put your back at. The moment you turn your back, there are high chances of the milk bursting out while heating.
Why Does Milk Bubble Up When Heated
As we all know, cream and milk include a high quantity of casein protein in it. These proteins accumulate at the surface area as it is heated. Once the milk is adequately heated, it results in steam bubbles from the bottom of the pot.
These bubbles are pushed with force to reach the rich layer of protein at the very top. The casein protein stabilizes the steam bubbles, preventing them from bursting to result in heating the entire pan. As soon as the bubbles reach the top layer and the pan heats up, Voila, that’s your cue for the dairy disaster.
How Do I Stop My Milk From Bursting
There is not only one but various ways to prevent the dairy disaster. To resolve your “why does milk burst when heated” query, we are here with two effective tips.
Milk Bursting When Heated – Let The Vapor Evaporate
The best way to prevent the milk from spilling out while heating is to cover the milk but only half of it.
By covering the milk utensil with a plate or protector while heating the milk, it will be beneficial to leave some space for evaporation passage.
While heating the milk, you must cover more than half of the utensil to avoid any spills. To cover up the milk utensil, you can use a plate with small holes or a lid that lets the air pass away.
If you are having trouble finding a perfect cover, you can also put a simple plate over the utensil and keep a spoon in between the plate and the utensil. This way, the spoon will maintain a little bit of space between the spoon and utensil and let the water vapor evaporate.
The space between the cover lid helps to prevent the vapor from getting trapped under the cream later and hence avoid spilling heated milk.
Use a Large Utensil When Heating Milk To Prevent It From Bursting
To avoid milk spills, you can also try to use a large utensil. For example, heating the milk in a large OTG utensil pan like a 4-quart saucepan can help prevent the disaster easily.
In the small utensil pans, the bubbles get tightly packed. This means that they don’t have space to expand and thus resulting in a huge milk spill when it’s heated. However, in a large pan, the bubbles can go bigger. Thus expanding to the point the casein protein can not prevent them from exploding.
Therefore in a large pan, there cannot be enough bubbles to heat up the entire pan at any given point.
