Reference point
Pour a glass of cold fresh milk and smell the surface at once.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Faint, slightly sweet, with a very faint grassy note and a shapeless fatty layer. There is almost nothing to hold on to.
That is the point of this entry. Fresh milk is the reference for “almost no smell, but not no smell”, and it is useful because every other dairy product is measured by its distance from it.
Condensed milk, cheese, fermented tofu — all three are milk that has travelled far. This entry is the starting point.
How to smell it
Smell the cold milk first, then leave the glass out for fifteen minutes and smell it again. Warming makes the compounds rise more strongly and the smell shows much more clearly — the quickest way to see how temperature affects smell.
Why this one is hard
Because it is so faint that people call it odourless. But anyone who has smelled spoiled milk knows milk has a smell — just at a low threshold while it is fresh.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Fresh milk
Gourmand family
Fresh milk is almost empty; condensed milk is full of lactones and furanones formed by concentration under heat. One is the starting point, the other the result.
Scientific note
The faint grassy note in fresh milk comes from the cow’s feed and passes straight into the milk through the blood. Milk from grass-fed cows differs from milk from cows fed concentrates, and the difference can be measured. The shapeless fatty part comes from short-chain fatty acids at very low concentration; when milk spoils, these are what increase and turn into a harsh sour smell.
In Vietnamese life
Fresh milk is a new drink in the history of Vietnamese food — most Vietnamese adults have low lactose tolerance, and drinking milk became common only from the late twentieth century.