Cultured buttermilk? Never heard of it before. All we get here in Denmark is the old kind - leftovers from butter churning. What is the difference between the two (in terms of flavor, thickness, etc.)?
Buttermilk is a very common beverage in the Netherlands. The cafetaria at my workplace offers the choice between four main beverages: coffee, tea, milk and dbuttermilk.
OP here…
I’m totally happy drinking the supermarket cultured stuff; tastes great to me. My local store also sells a ‘premium’ buttermilk that runs $2.39 a quart.
However, I also live a half hour away from a dairy that sells the real McCoy (in glass bottles, yet). It’s thick, creamy, and…dammit, I want some now.
mmm
Cool, so you’ve had both! How do they differ?
ETA: I kinda want to go make some butter now so I can try traditional buttermilk…
If it’s thick and creamy, I doubt it’s the “real stuff.” It’s no doubt better than what you buy at the grocery store, but that’s because it’s fresh and possibly full-fat.
The history of buttermilk is this. Until the 20th century, butter was almost always made from milk that had started to sour. The reason was simply that people wouldn’t churn butter every day, but would save up milk over a week or so to churn into butter. Unpasteurized milk doesn’t have to be cultured; it has lactobacillus in it from about the moment it comes out of the cow or aquires them very shortly thereafter. How quickly they produce a noticeable change in the milk depends on how many bacteria there are, how the milk is stored, the temperature, etc. So how sour and thick the milk being churned into butter was depended on where you lived, the time of year, and how often you made butter.
The buttermilk was just a byproduct. People weren’t about to throw away a perfectly good source of calories, so they drank it and used it for cooking. In the first half of the 20th century, people started to move into the city from the farms, but they still craved the same foods they grew up with. Buttermilk was a popular beverage, but the commercial dairies that supplied towns and cities made their butter from pasteurized milk, so the liquid left over was little more than whey. So they started making cultured buttermilk. I suspect the stuff sold today is made more for cooking, where a strong flavor and thickness helps, say, pancake batter, more than it is for drinking, but I could be wrong.
BTW, I believe butter in Europe is still made from slightly cultured milk, to mimic the flavor of butter from farms. That may account for the greater availability and popularity of “traditional” buttermilk there.
I haven’t read any replies yet. I love buttermilk. Didn’t always, but from sometime in my teen years I developed a taste for it. These days the only milk I have is skim and that for cereal. It’s been a good while since I had buttermilk at home just to drink, but if the restaurant (country style) has it on the menu I will order it.
Cultured buttermilk offers similar stomach benefits as yogurt. I drink a little every day and eat yogurt.
Now that you mention it, I remember seeing a kind of European style butter called “cultured butter” at Whole Foods last time I was there. I wonder if butter made from cultured milk tastes different from that made from fresh sweet milk.
It has more of a cheesy flavor.
Yes, buttermilk is awesome, though as a drink I like ayran (yogurt+water) even better. I like buttermilk for cooking certain South Indian curries.
Buttermilk lovers may be interested to know that a byproduct of homemade ghee is the foam composed of milk solids and water that separates from the butterfat and you skim it off the top and save it. In a way it replicates the processes of separating cream from milk and butter from cream, on the next level. The flavor of the foam is everything that makes butter flavored like butter, minus the fat (which is the ghee). It’s like a very thickened, foamy buttermilk with a concentrated sweet and sour buttermilk flavor. I call it gheeclabber.* It goes well in lots of things, anywhere you’d use butter for flavoring.
*After “bonnyclabber,” from Irish *bainne *‘milk’ + *clabair *‘of the plunger of a churn’, i.e. buttermilk.
Cannot abide buttermilk itself but like buttermilk doughnuts.
For cooking? Sure, bring it on.
By itself? Blech. My dad likes it straight, though.
Straight up Cow’s Buttermilk? No… not a big fan, Although I have drunk large glasses of it at times, so as not to waste… with a little bit of salt. It is an excellent dairy addition/substitution to most recipes however, and much superior to milk in that aspect. I do like goats milk better, perhaps because of cow’s buttermilk, I prefer the taste of the goat’s milk and its cheese and buttermilk to the Cow Dairy.
Actually, I have had it with salt and black pepper as well, not singularly salt. It is better that way.