What is a good substitute for milk?

We’ve all had those moments where we are making a recipe but the milk has expired or – especially true with kids- it has simply just disappeared. What can you do?

One thing that my mother always taught me was to keep cans of evaporated milk in the pantry for just these issues. While keeping powdered milk on hand is something that many people do, even keeping powdered milk can be problematic. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer to keep the evaporated milk on hand.

For using in a recipe, you can substitute a 1:1 ratio of evaporated milk and water into any recipe calling for milk. So if my recipe calls for 1/2 cup of milk, I can use 1/4 cup of evaporated milk and 1/4 cup of water for the 1/2 cup.

The taste is very much the same. You cannot tell the difference.

Whenever stores have their evaporated milk on sale, I will generally pick up a few and store them in my pantry for emergency use. Of course, I also cook quite a few recipes using evaporated milk, such as my mom’s macaroni and cheese plus good ol’ southern milk gravy.