Honey preserving Milk?

[dlskidmore]

I found this interesting abstract about how honey helps preserve milk, and wondered if anyone has used this and has ratios and information on how much it extends the life of raw milk?

A second study notes that Lactobacillus acidophilus is especially senstive, so you probably would not want to do this to milk intended for yogurt or other cultures.

I was not clear from either abstract if pasturized honey was used, or if the bacteria in raw honey had a contributing effect.

[sanhestar]

this seems to be the complete study:

http://nopr.niscair.res.in/bitstream/123456789/5238/1/IJEB%2045%285%29%20459-464.pdf

[dlskidmore]

Huh. Sounds like it has to be raw honey (pasturization boils off hydrogen peroxide) and raw or low heat pasturized milk (cofactors in the milk make hydrogen peroxide more effective and are broken down under high heat pasturization.) I still was not clear about the dilution rates, the precise rates given were for petri dish culture, not for liquid state culture.

[Mike Rock]

For what it’s worth, I have a bag of dried apple slices twenty years old. I mixed honey and water at a 1:1 ratio and dipped the apple slices and let them drip and dry on a screen. They are as good and fresh as they were twenty years back, a tad bit browner but not as brown as a bruised apple is when you slice into it. I eat a few each year. From the looks of things I could bake a pie tonight with those apples and no one would notice.

God bless.

Mike

[Andy Carson]

Although I think this is interesting, I think a couple big hurdles must be overcome for honey to be used as a practical preverserative for milk. One, the concentration of honey used for the turbidity assays and long term bacterial counts was 50 mg/ml. That comes 50 grams per liter, about 189 grams per gallon, or about 0.42 lbs of honey per gallon of milk. This is alot of honey, a 50 cow dairy would have to use more than 20 TONS of honey a year to apply it at this rate… My other concern is that the inhibitory effect is not even across bacterial species. It is likely that many of the “natural” bacteria (natural is a loaded word here because milk in the udder is largely sterile), such as lactobacilus, “spoil” milk in a predictable and largely harmless way that is easy to taste and smell. Selective inhibition leaves “room” for pathogenic bacteria (esp catalase positive pathogens) to expand and possible cause disease. The same sort of pattern applies to pasturized milk which often picks up this “sewer” smell that I associate with pseudomonas rather than the moer comforting “buttermilk” smell that I can smell from older raw milk. I am still pretty convinced that the best “preservative” for milk is clean technique, fast refrigeration, and minimal storage.

[near horse]

I think Andy makes a good point. We can mask or remove the indicators we associate with spoilage of a food while still leaving behind opportunistic bacteria etc. That was somewhat the case in some research related to Vit E extending the shelf life of meat. Vit E slowed the oxidation of hemoglobin to myoglobin or metmyoglobin (if I recall correctly) and thus allowed meat to stay “pink/red” longer. When chemically assayed, the end products of breakdown/spoilage were still present even though the meat “looked” good. In short – Vit E (fed to animals prior to slaughter) masked our visual cue that meat was spoiled/aged etc while doing nothing for actually “extending” the shelf life of the product.

I know it’s not milk or honey but just making a point.

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