We use stainless carafes for milk at work. How do you keep them from forming the build up of milk on the spout. we put them in the dishwasher everyday but milk scum builds up. Please help.
I used to have goats, 26 of them, and I became a student of milk flavor. The cleaning process for a milk contact surface is three steps: The cold water rinse, the acid detergent, then the acid rinse. The three steps need to be circulating for twenty minutes each for a setup at a dairy with all those tubes. You can disassemble and use brushes but you are risking serious health consequences. I would switch to glass pitchers with lids that sit in bowls of ice. How the heck are you going to know that you got the milk residue out of a stainless steel carafe? The slightest bit will be a bacteria jungle. I would not touch milk out of one of those. I tried putting a little bit of milk in my thermos of coffee but it went bad in half a day.
Look in housewares or baby wares at a store for those long brushes that are used for spouts. They exist, I just don't know what the primary use is. I used them for cleaning the tube in a coffee pot. Good luck.
Soak them in your pan sink (I'm guessing that you have a 2 or 3 way sink, for pots and pans, in your dishroom), with either a large, slightly diluted batch of coffeepot cleaner (the kind that you use in your coffeemaker system, to clean the tubes and pots), or with white vinegar and water, one gal. vinegar to each 2 gallons of water- the buildup is primarily calcium-based, and it'll take it off, if you let them set in there overnight (have your morning dishwasher run them, first thing in the morning). Ecolab, and some of the other chemical suppliers for kitchens, also have products to deal with that sort of thing. You can also use Limeaway, but I wouldn't recommend it, as it can be really caustic on skin. (Your safest, and greenest option, is the vinegar, although you may have a hard time convincing your foodservices manager that it's worth the expense.) Good luck! ;o)
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