What are homogenization and pasteurization?
Pasteurization and homogenization are two different processes. Louis Pasteur discovered pasteurization in the mid-1800s. Pasteurization is a compromise. If you boil a food, you can kill all bacteria and make the food sterile, but you often significantly affect the taste and nutritional value of the food. When you pasteurize a food (almost always a liquid), what you are doing is heating it to a high enough temperature to kill certain (but not all) bacteria and to disable certain enzymes, and in return you are minimizing the effects on taste as much as you can. Milk can be pasteurized by heating to 145 degrees F (62.8 degrees C) for half an hour or 163 degrees F (72.8 degrees C) for 15 seconds. Ultra high temperature (UHT) pasteurization completely sterilizes the product. It is used to created “boxes of milk” that you see on the shelf at the grocery store. In UHT pasteurization, the temperature of the milk is raised to about 285 degrees F (141 degrees C) for one or
