Milk going strange in the freezer

[HappyAsASandboy]

Alongside EBF my 5mo twins, I've been expressing when I can and freezing for times when I need to leave them.

I haven't left them all that often, but when I have, it has been a bit hit and miss whether they'll take a bottle. I have also found that the EBM looked bitty and smells strong (though not really 'off') shortly after defrosting and bringing up to room temperature.

Looking at Kellymom and other sites seems to indicate that my milk may have excess lipase, causing it to smell and taste funny more quickly than other mother's milk. The advice seems to be to scald the milk prior to freezing as this denatures the lipase (and some other goodies, sadly).

I have started experimenting today, tasting my frozen milk to see if the newer milk is less affected, but it doesn't seem any better . I have also scalded some and frozen alongside some non-scalded from the same expressing session to do a taste session in a week or so.

Does anyone have any experience or advice?

Does the defrosted milk actually taste different? Breast milk does separate really quickly when left standing. does it re-homogenise when you shake it?

It does remix when it has separated in the fridge, but once it has been frozen, it gets different tiny specks of white in it. Those don't mix in with heat or movement.

I does taste horrible. Not really 'off', just very strong, the has a really really horrid aftertaste and sort of sticks to the back of my tongue. It smells off if you heat it even slightly though - just putting it in a hot-from-the-steriliser bottle makes it smell bad

I've just seen the very similar thread from Saturday. Didn't mean to duplicate, sorry.

Has anyone successfully scalded for any length of time? Or found another solution?

This happened to me - I found that when I froze milk, it didn't really last for more than a week, two at most, and then it needed to be brought to room temp fairly quickly (I mean leave it out of the fridge to warm up - I found heating it made it taste and smell totally 'off') - and I couldn't leave it standing around once it was at room temp (my fresh BM lasted at room temp for a few hours, nowhere near the epic timescales kellymom suggests.)

I know what you mean about separating - it's not a layer of 'cream' on top, that happens in the fridge, that's fine - it's more like curds, or the manky bits you get in cows milk when it's gone off.

I read a lot of stuff about how babies 'didn't mind' the taste of freezer milk, if it tasted funny, and I'm afraid I ended up not really trusting it. My milk tasted so vile it made me sick! As a first time mum, I was torn between assurances that 'babies don't mind' if milk tastes funny, and my common sense telling me that if it made ME feel ill, I wasn't going to feed it to my baby. After a week in the freezer, it got a 'painstrippery' tang - then a very strong sour taste, and then frankly, I think it was 'off', I really do. DS definitely took a bottle of fresh BM much better than he did milk that had been frozen and seemed a bit weird. I couldn't stand the idea that I might be away from him, and DP or someone else would be trying to force a bottle of 'off' milk on a hungry and confused DS.

Scalding was a huge pain in the arse, and I wasn't convinced it made a huge difference in terms of 'freezer life'. As it also destroys some of the benefical elements in BM, I really didn't feel it was worth it.

I was utterly gutted to start with - I found all this lipase stuff out when I found that my considerable freezer stash that I'd built up over several months was all off, apart from the most recent week.

I stopped freezing, basically. I found my milk kept fine in the back of the fridge for about 3/4 days (4 was pushing it) - 3 day old 'fridge' milk was actually better than week old 'freezer' milk (no tang or curdy separation). So I just used the fridge. For a while I had one bag of 3/4 ozs in the freezer as an 'emergency' feed, but had to remember to use that once a week, and then replace it.

It meant I had to plan ahead a lot more than I wanted to in terms of expressing - I loved the idea that a freezer stash gave me a little bit of flexibility, that I might be stuck in a huge traffic jam and take 3 hours to get back to DS instead of one hour but feel happier knowing there was frozen milk there if needed.... However, it didn't work for me.

Wish I could be more helpful, but all I can recommend is just using the fridge. Doesn't help if you wanted to build up a big stash, I know.