The Make Your Own Sweetened Condensed Milk Experiment

Sometimes I really wonder about the recipes I find. Is anybody truly using them? Or do they just get passed around, over and over again, with everybody thinking they must work.

Case in point – the recipes I found for homemade sweetened condensed milk. They were close, but not close enough to suit me. Once again, the flavor was pretty good, but the consistency was off. (I puzzled over the same thing with my Make Your Own Jamocha Shake ). I’ve decided consistency is really, really important. It’s often the deal breaker for me in a “Make Your Own” recipe.

My homemade sweetened condensed milks were too thin. You refrigerate them and they are supposed to thicken as they chill. Oh, really? Didn’t work for me. *perhaps I am just too impatient* Who knows. It was only supposed to take about an hour.

But for what’s its worth, I’m still going to share the recipes I tried, Perhaps someone else will have better luck than I did or can substitute it in a recipe where consistency might not be too critical.

Update: Since first writing this post, I tried again based on the comments below and had success. Read the updated instructions here: Recipe to Make Your Own Sweetened Condensed Milk

HOMEMADE SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK #1
2 cups non-fat dry milk powder
2 cups sugar
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup margarine – melted

Place the ingredients in a bowl and mix with a hand blender until smooth. Refrigerate in a covered container and mixture will thicken as it stands. Makes 3 cups which is supposed to equal two 15 oz cans. When I tried this I cut the recipe in half because I only wanted the equivalent of one can.

HOMEMADE SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK #2
1 cup evaporated milk
3 Tbl non-fat dry milk powder
1 Tbl sugar
7/8 cup light corn syrup

Pour about a 1/2 cup of the evaporated milk into a small saucepan. Stir in the milk powder and the sugar and heat to dissolve the sugar. Pour in the rest of the milk and the corn syrup and blend well. Equals one 15 oz can.

I thought the “7/8 of a cup” measurement was a bit weird in this recipe. I used just a little less than a cup. I also thought it a bit strange to start with a can of evaporated milk. If you’re going to buy that at the store, why not just buy the sweetened condensed milk? By the time you factor in the cost of the corn syrup, you’ve probably spent about the same amount of money. But I thought it might be a neat kind of emergency trick to turn a can of evaporated milk into sweetened condensed milk. Alas, it didn’t meet my high standards.