A Half or a Pint ? (Sainsburys Organic Milk)

Member Name: Emmald

Product:	Sainsburys Organic Milk
Date:	25/10/09 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Far less intervention.

Disadvantages: None.

Although there are only the two of us we still manage to use quite a lot of milk, I usually have porridge for breakfast and try as I might I cannot enjoy a plate of porridge that has been made with water. If you make the porridge with all milk it is supremely creamy but I use half milk, half water, that cuts down on the calories and provides me with a bowl of half decent creamy porridge.

I often wonder how our normal semi-skimmed milk manages to inject any taste or goodness into anything that we eat or drink. The semi-skimmed milk is pretty watery to say the least, all in all it more often than not just like coloured water. It lacks taste too but we are assured that it does give us some of our recommended daily intake of calcium.
If I had the choice then I would probably buy the full cream Jersey milk, it does have taste and the creamy milk is delicious but it is high in fat and is maybe one that we need to use for specific recipes or for when we have guests.

I have to be perfectly honest, I am not totally convinced by that magical word `Organic`, I am going to sit on the fence on that one. But I do like the Sainsbury's Organic cheese and therefore decided to try the Sainsbury's organic milk.
A 2.27 litre bottle costs around £1.74p, that is slightly more expensive than I normally pay but it is acceptable if the product is good.
I looked at both the Sainsbury's full cream organic milk and the semi-skimmed, each 200 ml of the Sainsbury's full cream organic milk contains 40 more calories than the semi-skimmed version but I really wanted some milk that tasted like milk so decided to worry about the calorie intake at a later date!

Sainsbury's have used the bog standard plastic milk bottle that can be recycled, the bottle has a picture of a little `red tractor` on it which means that the milk has been approved by the Assured food standards ( this means that we can fully trust the product ), it has the Soil association approval too ( this is an association that campaigns for planet friendly farming ) and the milk has been approved by the Organic milk corporation.
On the plastic bottle Sainsbury's state that the milk is fine for vegetarians.

When you pour the Sainsbury's organic milk from the bottle it is difficult to detect any difference, the milk is not thick, it doesn't look particularly creamy and it smells virtually the same as any other milk, semi-skimmed or full cream.
The Jersey full cream has a high fat content that is to my mind noticeable but although every 100 ml of the Sainsbury's organic milk contains 4g of fat there is little to see.
When you drink it it tastes marginally richer and it is pleasant, I feel that it is much `sweeter` than many and I enjoy that sweetness.
In hot drinks it blends well and it does not create a fatty layer on the top of the hot drink. I have used the full cream Jersey milk and you can actually see the fat in hot tea and coffee, some people may well find this off-putting.

The Sainsbury's organic milk makes good porridge but I am still not totally convinced that it is any richer than my normal milk.
Although I find there is only a slight difference between my normal everyday milk and the Sainsbury's organic full cream milk I can fully understand why so many people would choose the organic version. So much of what we eat and drink today has been fed unnaturally and contains unwanted additives that is is a pleasure to eat or drink something that remains fresh and untampered with.

From my point of view if I intended spoiling myself then I think that I would stick to buying a bottle of the Jersey full cream milk, it suits my palette.
But by anyone's standards the Sainsbury's organic milk has to be a decent and ethical purchase.
Maybe it would cost a little more but in terms of goodness and purity I think that would pay dividends.

Summary: A few pence more but it has to be the better bet.