How Skim Milk Impacts Your Baked Goods, According To A Pro Pastry Chef

If you are baking and the recipe involves milk, you'll almost certainly see whole milk listed in the ingredients instead of skim. This presents an important question: If all you have is skim in the fridge and you don't feel like making a run to the grocery store, is using skim milk really going to impact how your baked goods turn out?

Baking is a precise thing, so swapping out even relatively similar ingredients can often mean big changes to the outcome. You'll often hear different answers to the milk question, with some places telling you it's fine while others say the lower fat in skim milk will hurt the flavor and texture of your recipe. So we decided to clear this up by asking an expert, world renowned pastry chef Adriano Zumbo, exactly how much of a difference skim milk makes in your baking.

If you are worried about using skim milk, don't be. As Zumbo told us, "Yes, it's perfectly fine to use skim milk in baked goods. Skim milk is practically water with a smidgen of fat, but not enough to make any difference really in a baked good." If that small loss of fat is still a concern (whole milk is roughly 3.25% milkfat), he notes that, "You can easily balance anything lost by using... other ingredients, such as different fats... to make up for using skim milk."

So, if you do use skim milk, will there be any change at all to your baked goods? Adriano Zumbo says, "Skim milk will have very little effect on your bakes flavor and texture compared to whole milk." As he explains it, the rich flavors of a sweet baked good cover up most of the change. "There are so many other imparting ingredients with stronger flavors like sugar, butter, chocolate, vanilla, etc. Even in a tres leches cake where milk is key, the most powerful and noticeable ingredients are the evaporated or condensed milk and cream," he says. 

Zumbo ended his advice with a poetic bit of Zen thinking, telling us, "Milk in a cake is like air in the atmosphere; there's plenty of it but you never notice or think of it when you eat it." For him the only real question around using milk is whether it was in the recipe to start, explaining that adding milk to a recipe that didn't initially call for the liquid will forever alter the texture. Too much moisture and excess liquid can have "catastrophic effects," he warns. So, the next time you're prepping your favorite cake recipe and you only have skim on hand, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that even a world-class pastry chef wouldn't care if you made the swap.