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QueSrah
member
My freezer milk is all spoiled
QueSrah
member
WTF?
This is the second Monday in a row that I've pulled milk out of the freezer (the big box kind that's in the garage) and the milk is spoiled. Last week I thought it might be a funky flavor from the plastic bag (not that that would be right either), but today I tasted it and it was foul. What the heck happened??? The milk was from Dec. and Jan. - not *that* old, and I religiously use the oldest milk first. We got the big freezer sometime in January, and I've read milk can be stored for up to 6 months in one of those. I was kind of bummed to dump 20 oz. down the drain this morning (thankfully I'm ok enough with giving her formula that it didn't cause me to break down in tears after yet another night without enough sleep). I'm kind of concerned to even put new milk in that freezer now.
Anyone have any suggestions for what may have happened?
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Re: My freezer milk is all spoiled
Could it be a lipase issue? I thought I might have a problem with that so I did some research on it a while back. Here's a link from Kelly Mom
https://www.kellymom.com/bf/pumping/lipase-expressedmilk.html
Sorry, don't know how to make it clicky. The lipase info is about 1/2 way down.
wow that's so weird! did other food in the freezer go bad? I had hundreds if not a thousand oz in our garage freezer and would have had a nervous meltdown if it had all gone bad. And yes, you can keep it there for at least 6mos! One time I accidentally left the lid open but the freezer kept working (it was in the middle of the winter too) and all the food stayed frozen. If all your other food in the freezer is OK, I'd call the bag manufacturer and ask if they'd had problems like that before. It doesn't sound likely, but I can't think of what else it could be!
I doubt it's a lipase issue - I never noticed the funky milk smell before last week, and I started giving her frozen milk once a week in early February.
We don't keep a lot of food out there - mostly the stuff we had in the freezer when DD was born that I can't eat now that I'm on a no-dairy diet. Maybe it's time to have DH cook some up and test it out...
We've lost power once or twice, but only for a few hours. The food in our indoor refridgerator was fine, so I can't imagine the freezer we rarely open thawed out... could it?
Probably not. Maybe open a bag of milk that is newer and check and see if that one is spoiled?
Oh jeez, that sucks. I've randomly opened bags that seem to have lipase issues (weird smell, soapy taste), when others have been fine. My only thought was that I maybe froze it right before it went bad (I try to clear the fridge out regularly, but sometimes I lose track of days) and that it went bad as it thawed.
During the snow storms, my biggest fear was our power going out - just because of the 100s of oz of milk I would have to save!
That's a possibility...these bags are from when I was still home on leave, and I know I wasn't exactly on top of things at that point
It gives me hope that the rest of what I have isn't bad too...
One other thought... you said that the milk you tried today was from December, but you didn't get the deep freezer until January. Where did you store the milk before you got the deep freezer? Could the December milk just be spoiling because it was in the regular freezer first, so it just isn't going to keep as long as it usually would in a deep freezer?
I'm not sure where you stored it when it was in the regular freezer, but I was told by an LC not to store it in the door or near the sides of the freezer if possible, because if your freezer is a self-defrosting freezer (ie doesn't build up ice inside it, which most are these days), it runs a sort of "defrost" cycle every so often to keep it frost free, and it can cause your milk to thaw just a bit. It probably wouldn't affect the rest of the food in your freezer, but because the milk is in such small packages, it can. I'm not sure I believe her, but maybe this happened?
Our regular freezer sucks - there really isn't anywhere deep inside to store anything. (We have a side-by-side fridge/freezer, and the darn thing will *barely* hold a pizza box in the freezer. There's no way to keep more than one little pouch of milk away from the sides and front.) Even if it's not an ideal storage space, it seems weird that the older milk was fine, but the newer milk isn't. I've always kept any milk on the same shelves, so weird that it wasn't happening consistently from the start. I guess I'll probably never figure out exactly the cause, but I'll have to start covering all my bases - move milk out to the big freezer more quickly, store milk in the inside freezer closer to the bottom to make sure it stays colder, make sure to freeze the milk first thing Friday night and not let it slide to the next morning.
Nope - no mother's room. I would hesitate to store anything in our fridges here at work because they are cleaned out every quarter. I'm annoyed enough when my non-dairy creamer is tossed out, but I can't imagine losing my milk!