Tesco, OT

A quick sample of stuff in the fridge shows that things with a "Use By" tend not to have a year. These products are also ones with fairly short shelf lives, things like milk, yogurt, etc. ie. They aren't intended to be kept very long or indeed keep...

What are the products? Once frozen the Use By clock effectively stops ticking and one has to use a bit of common sense, eyes, nose and taste to see if something has "past it".

"Best Before" generally does have a year and is on less perishable products, some of our current stock is BBE sometime in 2016...

Personally we don't pay much attention to dates but do use common sense, eyes, nose and taste to determine if something is edible or not.

I use a marker pen to write the date of freezing onto almost everything that goes into my freezer.

I've found, by experiment, that semi-skimmed milk can be kept frozen for about 2 months; beyond that it doesn't seem to come back ok when thawed, with the water & creamy parts refusing to mix. I find it odd that length of freezing-time affects milk this way.

But who wants semi skimmed milk in the first place:-)

Certainly not me, but it seems most people use it now and have lost their taste for 'whole' milk. Personally, I prefer non-homogenised milk, because it has a better 'mouth-feel', and the cream can be separated before it goes off. Unfortunately, Waitrose is the only supermarket that sells it, as "organic". The problem is that the EU standardisation process to reduce the amount of fat from 4gm/litre to

I don't see why anyone would want to freeze milk, but it sounds like non-homogenised milk would still be in its original separated state after 2 months.

These aren't chest freezers. Going by the *if it is that far back/down* it must be older than the stuff above principle, mostly this is 2 years plus.

Lots of Farmers Market stuff as well.

While best before dates have to include the year, the inclusion of the year is optional on use by dates, so it probably varies by product.

Colin Bignell

I assume you mean 40gm and 36gm per litre.

We just went away for a week, so the left-over unopened 4-pinter went into the freezer and came out again today.

Personally I use the 1% stuff if I can, but never the 0.1%, because that doesn't go on cereals at all well.

It's also worth saying that you get used to the thinner stuff. Full-fat seems goopy to me now.

As a child I liked getting the "top of the bottle" for cereal, but these days I find whole milk too creamy for tea, so use semi-skimmed as a compromise. It also does no harm in trying to reduce my weight.

You're probably out & about every day. I'm not, varying between bedbound & housebound quite a lot of the time. I'm not sufficiently regular in my pattern of day to day life for it to be sensible to get milk delivered, and usually manage with milk bought roughly once per week on what is often my only time up and/or out of the house each week. Having a few 1pt milk containers frozen is a useful fallback; I do make sure they are used and replaced within 6 weeks of being frozen.

I stuck with whole milk for years after most had switched to semi-skimmed which always seemed too watery to me. Then I swapped to that 7-day stuff to reduce wasted milk and eventually to the semi-skimmed 7 day stuff. Now, as you say, I have a bit of a dislike for whole milk.

I agree with attitude towards full-cream cows milk - and now consume goats milk - full fat. As I only use it on cereal, I really do notice and prefer it. Half-fat goats milk isn't a patch on it.

I use semi-skimmed and my wife has skimmed. We only buy full-cream when smaller grand-children visit.

Same here, except on cereal. I can now manage 0.1% fat, or even unsweetened soya milk, in the several cups of tea I drink each day.

Cheers, Rob

If it is Tesco's own brand email them and ask them. However I think you will find that if the product has no year on the date, then it was not out of the shop's freezer, it was out of the chillers and your sister decided to freeze it. In which case I think you aren't supposed to leave them in the freezer more than a few months.

In message , Tahiri writes

OK. I was being lazy knowing the astute shoppers on this group:-)

All at the tip now. I'll follow up the email suggestion though.

Yes, sorry. I should have said 4gm/100ml as stated on the bottle.

Yes indeed, everyone says it, but I actually prefer no milk at all rather than half-fat. So if and when I decide to cut down on cholesterol, I'll give up milk altogether, like I should have done when I was three!

What, you eat Weetabix dry? Gosh.

My cholesterol appears to be abnormally low.

My parents had some rare breed pork in the freezer for 7 years. (I would tease them that it was probably now extinct pork - the farm it came from has long since gone.)

We finally eat it a couple of weeks ago. The outside had freeze- dried a bit, which made for the best crackling I've ever cooked, and the meat itself was lovely.

I like skimmed milk, even on cereals. But not the fresh stuff as that's like water. The UHT stuff is completely different.

I have been using it for so long that I can't stand other milk, even the

You soon get used to whatever you use, some even like soya milk.

I might need to drink some full fat stuff having a cholesterol figure below 2.

I once stayed in a B&B where the LL served up a plate of (literally) fry up swimming in grease and then presented me with a jug of thinned down emulsion paint (I think it was) to put on my cornflakes.

Sorry, but take the fat off of the plate and put it back in the milk please

tim