The utter horror of UHT milk

00:00 09:56

Candida Crewe has narrated this article for you to listen to.

On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon at sparrows to catch a train to Rome. We badly wanted coffee.

I came to coffee late in life and am infantile and uncool in my love of frothy buckets of what is effectively a hot coffee milkshake. It is almost all about the milk, preferably whole and organic but, at the very least, fresh. So it was that Starbucks – which uses conventional milk in the UK – twinkling
and open in the middle of the freezing station, made the heart lift.

I recognised in my childhood that the French did everything better than us except for two things: loos and milk

I took one sip and nearly spat it out. That inimitable taste and stench of UHT, or ultra-high temperature processed milk, made me heave. Coffee snobs who complain about disgusting coffee may be blaming the wrong element of their flat white.

Pasteurised milk, which has an official shelf life of four to six days (but in reality, lasts several days longer), is heated to no more than 70°C. This kills off bacteria to the extent that it prevents people getting stomach bugs. But the 135°C demanded of UHT desecrates every bug, several enzymes and a few vitamins besides. This means UHT milk doesn’t have to be refrigerated, and an unopened carton will last till your dotage (OK, nine months), but it also wipes out the whole joy of milk’s original incarnation and transforms it – and in turn your coffee – into something monstrous.

I have no beef with the Starbucks bean. But that morning, the milk threw me straight back to my childhood holidays in France. I recognised then that the French did everything better than we did except for two things: loos (those urine-drenched Yeti footprints with a hole in between them over which you had to squat) and milk.