Powdered milk can be a nuisance to use for the occasional coffee or chocolate drink but a food scientist told me what to do. Thoroughly mix a quantity of dry instant coffee or drinking chocolate. Apparently the very small particles of coffee stick to the fatty milk bits so that all you need to do is mix a little cold water with this powder to make a paste then add the hot water, magically there are no lumps!

-- john hill (john@cnd.co.nz), November 19, 2001

Answers

Mixing two powders together will often interfere with the electrostatic charge of both powders so that both will more easily dissolve into water (or air as we've seen with the antrax attacks). Mixing powdered milk with instant coffee, cocoa, sugar, flour, whatever will make the whole thing more easily mixable. This works pretty well for getting flour to mix into water for making gravy as well.

={(Oak)-

-- Live Oak (live-oak@atlantic.net), November 20, 2001.

I make my own flavored coffee mixes and this is very interesting because it always clumps. Thanks for posting this.

-- Ann Markson (tngreenacres@hotmail.com), November 20, 2001.

Well I swear, I just past my 50th birthday and I never heard of that.

Thanks Live Oak!!

I guess for gravy you could mix the flour with granular boullion???

MissJudi

-- MissJudi (jselig@clemson.edu), November 20, 2001.

How well this works depends on how much of one powder/flour/etc you mix into another one and probably the relative particle size. A teaspoon of salt mixed into an entire cup of flour probably won't do you much good but the hot chocolate mix I make uses something on the order of five and a half cups of powdered milk, two or three cups of sugar and a cup and a half of cocoa and it dissolves well into either hot or cold water.

One powder that is big and chunky won't help a much finer textured powder a lot but two fine powders together will.

={(Oak)-

-- Live Oak (live-oak@atlantic.net), November 20, 2001.