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Bette Hagman's third book (which, if you haven't yet bought, you should rush out
today on your lunch hour and find) has a squib to the effect that she prefers to
use non-instant powdered milk, but if she has to use instant, she doubles the
amount.  This got me to thinking, and to experimenting.
 
Instant powdered milk is fairly grainy, consisting of beads the size of sesame
seeds.  Non-instant milk is a smooth powder, somewhat the consistency of xanthan
gum or very fine (asian) rice flour.
 
I took two cups of instant powdered milk and put it in my blender and whirred it
up for a while.  The blender ground up the little beads and made it into a very
fine powder - very similar to non-instant powdered milk.  When I poured it out
of my blender, the two cups of grainy instant milk had been converted into just
a tad more than one cup of a fine powder.  When I made bread thereafter, I
repeated the process a few times over the next week or so to insure that it was
consistently this way, which it was.
 
I've used instant milk for baking, primarily because it appears to be cheaper
than non-instant, and I can consistently find it in main-line grocery stores,
rather than having to make a special trip to the health food store, where I pay
an arm-and-a-leg for everything anyway.  I've not yet gotten out the scales to
determine whether two cups of instant milk equals one cup of non-instant by
weight, but I suspect that it will be very close.  Knowing that I've got a 2:1
ratio betweent the two forms, I'll have to reevaluate which is actually cheaper.
 
I'm aware of the fact that the nutritionist nazis look down their collective
noses at instant dry milk, but I'm not convinced that there's much difference in
baking, once you apply the Hagman rule of thumb of doubling the measure when
using instant milk powder.
 
I'm sharing this with the Celiac list to pass along the Hagman rule of thumb,
and to tell you that there is an empiracal basis for it.
 
Regards,
 
John Cornell
Rockville, MD
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