The 24 Hour Milo
Milo is a type of chocolate powder that you can add to milk/water to make a hot chocolate. It’s malted and has a very particular flavour. It’s popular here in Australia, but also in parts of South-East Asia, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia, where it’s often mixed with sweetened condensed milk.
The thing with Milo is when you add it to a liquid it takes a while to meld together. Milo is a sort of a powder, but actually more like granules then something like sand. So when you mix it with a liquid you have to stir and stir and stir to get it to combine. Often you’re left with this floating layer of unabsorbed Milo powder on top of the drink. Worst case, you’re drinking plain milk with a cough-inducing layer of chocolate on top. Not great.
About ten years ago I worked out that if I left the drink for a few minutes, it becomes way better. A lot more of the flavour ends up in the liquid and you get something pretty rich and tasty. This is the 5 minute Milo, just give it a couple of minutes and it gets a LOT better (I also recommend soy milk and have a few other tricks up my sleeve).
Since I worked out to leave it for 5 minutes, I’ve wondered ‘what would happen if I left a Milo for 24 hours?’. In my head it could become something just like luxurious and smooth and tasty. Finally, after about a decade of day-dreaming, a few days ago I made one, put it in the fridge and thought ‘ what a weird thing I’m doing, this will make a good newsletter topic’. And here we are!
Typing it out now, maybe it’s a bit odd for a 33-year-old to be this into a chocolate drink but, here’s the thing, I really do have a sweet tooth. I love pastries, chocolate, ice cream and all that good stuff. I’m not ashamed and have no interest in cutting sugar out. What a bland life that would be.
When I was a kid, though, there was a lot of stuff we just weren’t allowed to have. Milo was one of those things. No matter what, my Mum just would not buy it from the shop. I suspect she thought we had enough sugary things (true) and that my brother, sister and I would wolf down the Milo instantly (also true). We also weren’t given Rollups or Nutella – popular lunch snacks at that time. I remember lots of kids in Primary School having these ultra-processed, plastic-wrapped junk food and just looking at my lunch and being like ‘seriously?’.
It’s not that I grew up in a super healthy household (we had a lot of ice cream), but I think that I did grow up in a household with some clear rules/boundaries. I think that’s ended up being a good thing. To some extent it doesn’t matter what the rules were, but just that there were some. It’d be difficult to explain why my Mum didn’t want us watching South Park, or why we could watch the Simpsons sometimes, but not other times. Why weren’t we allowed Rollups, but a bowl of ice cream after dinner was standard – does it make any sense?
I don’t think it does, but I don’t think it needs to. It was good, I think, to just have some ‘this is the way it is’ sort of lines in the sand because that’s life, isn’t it? You don’t get everything you want and having a code or an ethic is important, but the content of these things is often very arbitrary. For example, I have no problem ignoring a ‘no right turn’ sign on a street near my house if it’s a quiet time of day and there’s no traffic, but if someone doesn’t signal when they turn oh man that pisses me off.
Maybe this is a quirk of mine. I find rules, laws and guidelines sort of completely abstract and silly. If the purpose of a law is to improve road safety, but turning right on this street is fine right now, then why should it be against the law? Of course, that is illegal and I am breaking the law, but I sort of don’t care, because I’m not endangering anyone. There’s a line in the Arthur Miller play ‘Under the Bridge’ where one of the characters says ‘the law isn’t a line about what’s right or wrong’, which means there’s a lot of ‘right’ things that are illegal and lots of ‘wrong’ things that are legal.
We all live in these complex situations of ethics, our own morals, legality, social acceptance and learned behaviour. It’s a mess and we don’t often realise how much we’re skillfully navigating when we just keep on trucking. It gets a bit overwhelming when you list it all out, but easy if you just live your life.
So, due to these rules, I must have had very little Milo before becoming an independent adult. And I think that’s totally fine, and I learned something from that. But, when all is said and done, how was the 24 hour Milo? Did it reach new levels of richness and taste like heaven itself?
Well, I hate to say it, but after all that day dreaming and waiting, it really didn’t taste any different from the 5 minute Milo. Time doesn’t improve everything.
Till next week.