Long term nonfat dry milk storage
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I've stored GV and Sams choice instant nonfat milk for years. The oldest I've used was packaged in 2014 and used the last packages in 2019,maybe early'20. No change in taste that we could detect. Although we only use it for cooking.
Some we packaged in 2018 that we used recently had turned a dark brown and clumped up around the oxygen absorber. Only 3 packs were like that if I remember.
All our instant milk now is fairly new. Packaged in 2019 -2021. Not seeing any issues with it so far.
For drinking milk (dry) we like LandOlLakes brand. It's not an instant dissolving milk, takes quite a bit of stirring and gets frothy. After it settles down and chills it's hard to distinguish from 2%
I usually package milk in convenient to use portions. Cups, quarts, 2 quarts and gallon, all in mylar. The smaller sizes are great for camping. The gallon size usually gets opened and put in a pantry container and used as needed. We tape the package mixing instructions to the container.
The instant milk like GV and Sams I measure by volume. The LandOLakes gets better consistency measuring by weight. It's really dense.
About 5 years is as long as I've went on dry milk. We rotate through it pretty fast. I'm not allowed to use refrigerator milk for cooking if the grandkids are here, or it's me making the trip to the store for cereal milk. And nobody likes lukewarm powder milk for breakfast.
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I have a single box of that already, thank goodness. I do want storable cheese and butter if anyone knows a good way to get it online.
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At Walmart you can get Augason Farms powdered butter in a #10 can for $17-20 when they have it, a decent price for over two pounds.
They also have a cheese powder that's over three pounds that's around $20-25 but that's more like a Mac and cheese type taste imo. Augason Farms stuff is also on Amazon. It's usually more expensive there but if you watch, prices drop now and then. Freeze dried real cheese in #10 cans you can find on Amazon and other sites but it's pricey, $50 and up from what I've seen.
They also have a cheese powder that's over three pounds that's around $20-25 but that's more like a Mac and cheese type taste imo. Augason Farms stuff is also on Amazon. It's usually more expensive there but if you watch, prices drop now and then. Freeze dried real cheese in #10 cans you can find on Amazon and other sites but it's pricey, $50 and up from what I've seen.
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It tastes like hell when its fresh so you shouldnt notice any change long term. LOL
I drink it, not just cook with it. In my opinion, 20 years is only if you are going to just cook with it and don't give a damn what something tastes like as long as "it still has calories."
I would consider 10 years the outside with good storage conditions, but then that's as long as you can probably store the canned butter to make it into decent-tasting 2% or whole milk as well. (And that's the key to taste. All skim milk tastes like bad water. You need some butterfat in it for good milk flavor.)
Either the LDS or the WalMart Great Value nonfat powdered milks will reconstitute into fresh-tasting milk once you have added the missing butterfat back in, assuming you use and replace your cool basement supply within 10 years and your ambient household temp supply within 5 years. (Although the WalMart instantized will take up much more storage space than the LDS non-instant, which will become instantized itself once you add the butterfat back in.)
The longer you store it past the above times, the more the flavor will go off in my opinion. And for everyone who is convinced there is no way nonfat powdered milk will ever taste good, please try mixing up some fresh product with 5 g to 8 g clarified butter/ghee per cup (depending on whether you want 2% or whole milk), and then mixing that up into milk as I have detailed elsewhere here numerous times. You may find yourself very surprised.
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Have you tried it with vanilla? I keep seeing that people use a few drops of that for flavor as well.
The LDS advice on milk storage:
On Storing Milk
On Storing Milk
People will advise you to use more nonfat milk powder to make it "creamier," to add sugar to make it taste better/make little kids love it, to add vanilla to make it taste better, etc. They are all ways of disguising the unsatisfactory taste of skim milk.
Use noninstant nonfat milk powder, which has better flavor than nonfat powder subjected to instantizing, and add butterfat to make it into 2% to whole milk. End of yucky skim milk taste because it's no longer skim milk. Not exactly surprising. Cream/butter taste good, right?
Butter powder is less expensive because it's cut with a lot of nonfat powdered milk to powder it. Per ounce/gram of butterfat, it's not cheap, and it doesn't taste/perform like actual butter other than in baking with adjustment for the milk content.
Powdered cheese tastes like mac 'n' cheese because it's the same unhealthy stuff they use to make boxed mac 'n' cheese. (Real homemade mac 'n' cheese tastes nothing like boxed mac 'n' cheese.)
Freeze-dried cheese is one of the many things that are way overpriced on Amazon/WalMart these days. Do some shopping, and, while still expensive, you can find it for more like $35 or a bit less for a can containing 2 pounds, equivalent to around 3 lb of fresh grated cheese, depending on the variety of cheese. I restocked at that price or better a couple of months ago, more than the $25 to $30 I used to be able to find it for, but not outrageous given the current prices of good cheese, and likely to become even less outrageous over the next several years.
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I actually don't mind skim milk but I've not tried powdered milk yet and I've heard it has a cooked flavor, or something along those lines. Adding sugar and vanilla doesn't sound that appetizing to me in a milk, though I can see why it would be done. The butter fat makes much more sense to me, with how milk is made. Which clarified butter/ghee do you use?
I use ghee from grass-fed milk, which is why I make my own milk from powdered milk and ghee. The cost for making 2% milk with good butterfat that way is equivalent to the cost of yuck supermarket milk here and way less than that of any pastured milk.
I have a stock of Buisman ghee in cans, currently their Green Meadow brand, made from NZ milk. That was bought at an ethnic grocery at a decent price (around $15 for 2 pounds of ghee). By recent report here, Aldi is also selling some pastured ghee in 12 or 13 oz jars at a decent price as butterfat goes these days. Just protect that from light, and you should have something equivalent to Purity Farms at much less cost.
Note that you can make your own clarified butter/ghee from any good butter. Melt your butter in 3 times its volume of hot water to remove most of the milk solids (and any salt if you're using canned salted butter), resolidify the fat on top, drain the water, and then heat that butterfat over low heat to drive off all the water, skimming off what little milk solids remain at the beginning to clarify it with less work. You'll know the water is gone when the temperature of the fat rises past boiling. (Don't heat it above 250ºF.)
Also, you can use butter itself at 20% more weight per cup than ghee, you just can't premix that into your nonfat powder in bulk because of the 20% water content.
I have a stock of Buisman ghee in cans, currently their Green Meadow brand, made from NZ milk. That was bought at an ethnic grocery at a decent price (around $15 for 2 pounds of ghee). By recent report here, Aldi is also selling some pastured ghee in 12 or 13 oz jars at a decent price as butterfat goes these days. Just protect that from light, and you should have something equivalent to Purity Farms at much less cost.
Note that you can make your own clarified butter/ghee from any good butter. Melt your butter in 3 times its volume of hot water to remove most of the milk solids (and any salt if you're using canned salted butter), resolidify the fat on top, drain the water, and then heat that butterfat over low heat to drive off all the water, skimming off what little milk solids remain at the beginning to clarify it with less work. You'll know the water is gone when the temperature of the fat rises past boiling. (Don't heat it above 250ºF.)
Also, you can use butter itself at 20% more weight per cup than ghee, you just can't premix that into your nonfat powder in bulk because of the 20% water content.
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This is super helpful! I appreciate you. Earlier you said noninstant retains better flavor, I had been debating on buying great value and repacking it myself or just buying more from the LDS site, so that's good to know. I'll be stocking up on some ghee as well!
I'd go with the LDS just because the GV isn't cheaper per pound, and with the LDS powder, the packaging work for storage is already done for you, and in convenient package sizes that won't sit open too long on the shelf when you go to use it.
I find less of a flavor change from being heated in nonfat milk powder than in that UHT tetra-pak boxed milk. It provably has less damage to the proteins. You can still make cheese from reconstituted milk powder, but not from tetrapak boxed milk (or even from supermarket "fresh" milk that has been given the high-heat treatment to extend its shelf life, which is virtually all organic milk and an increasing percentage of conventiuonal milk now).
I find less of a flavor change from being heated in nonfat milk powder than in that UHT tetra-pak boxed milk. It provably has less damage to the proteins. You can still make cheese from reconstituted milk powder, but not from tetrapak boxed milk (or even from supermarket "fresh" milk that has been given the high-heat treatment to extend its shelf life, which is virtually all organic milk and an increasing percentage of conventiuonal milk now).
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That's what I was leaning towards, especially because packing powder in mylar doesn't sound fun lol! Thank you so much! 
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