Wise Bread Picks
For many people, powdered milk is a dirty turn of phrase. Even if you can’t bring yourself to drink it as your beverage of choice, there are numerous ways to incorporate it into your cooking repertoire that will save you major bucks, especially with the holiday baking season coming on.
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Make your own fat free evaporated milk. This is super easy and quick. Canned evaporated milk can cost well over a dollar for a small can, adding drastically to your baking budget. One of my favorite things to do with the homemade version is to make a double batch of pumpkin pie filling and bake it in a rectangular dish without the crust. This makes a nice low fat pumpkin dessert that’s more like a pudding. Add some fat free whipped topping and you are good to go.
- Mix it up a quart at a time to have on hand for baking and regular cooking. Some of the things you can whip up quickly with reconstituted powdered milk? Pancakes, waffles, quiche, omelets and cornbreads. I’ve never noticed a difference.
- Make your own sweetened condensed milk. This is another canned item that is popular with seasonal baking recipes. The store bought version is getting outrageous! Try whipping up your own at home for increased savings.
- Have it on hand for certain dry baking mixes. If you liked the article on making your own bread mixes, this technique comes into play with some of the recipes. Powdered milk is also present in some of the other homemade baking mixes as well such as biscuit mix, cornbread mix and more.
- DIY fat free cream soup base mix. I mix this stuff up by the gallon at least. It’s dry, stores well in an airtight container and works great for sauce and soup bases, as well as casserole binding. You’ll also need corn starch and your seasonings of choice.
These are my five favorite ways to use the product. There are many more ideas out there, but for me, these are the least time consuming and have the greatest savings impact for our home and lifestyle. Here’s a link to a page on making many things from scratch using powdered milk to get you started. If you have any other ideas you think are huge holiday money savers, please post. We’d all love to save as much money as possible this season, I’m sure. Have a great week, everybody!
