Is it just cream that is old? Heavy cream, light cream, half and half? If I buy it for coffee and it gets old can I just use it on a baked potato? And if it is just old cream, why does it expire? Also, how is it different from yogurt, they do seem very similar to me. I have wondered these things for a long time. Thank you in advance.
Sour cream is fresh cream which is fermented with specific bacteria (Streptococcus lactis and Streptococcus cremoris). If it gets old, other bacteria may contaminate it, and it will spoil.
http://intro.bio.umb.edu/111-112/OLLM/112s99/dairyBacteria.html
What is buttermilk? Is just milk with butter added to it? :smack:
No. Originally, buttermilk is what was left over after butter was made from cream, so it is naturally very low fat. Most buttermilk in stores today is cultured buttermilk, which is nonfat milk that has been fermented with the addition of a lactobacillus.
Wooooooooosh!!!
Now we know where Steven Wright goes when he is bored.
Be nice - this is GQ!
For the record, I too had thought – for decades! – that buttermilk was milk with butter in it.
But we never drank it in my circles, so I simply passed it by without thinking about it, quite content to figure what I had always figured. Then I was dieting and happened to notice that butterfat was lower in fat than regular milk, and that’s what motivated me to find out more about the subject. If not for that incident, I’d probably still be wallowing in my ignorance.
THE STRAIGHT DOPE - Fighting ignorance since 1973
Be careful. When buttermilk spoils it attracts lots of butterflies.
I once read that Abraham Lincoln’s typical lunch in the White House was a glass of buttermilk and an apple.
:: shudder ::
I’ve heard that real buttermilk left over from churning butter (which is what Lincoln would have had) tasted a lot better than the cultured buttermilk we have nowadays.
Still, that sounds like an awfully scanty lunch, especially for a big country boy like Abe.
I seem to recall reading that in pre-famine Ireland, a typical meal for the poor would be a boiled potato & buttermilk.
I developed a buttermilk phobia at a young age. My mom said that as a toddler I tried to make my own breakfast & poured buttermilk on my cereal by accident. Whatever the cause, I go a little green when I see anyone drinking the stuff. Naturally, both of my parents love buttermilk & still enjoy crumbling a piece of cornbread into a tall glass, pouring buttermilk over it, & eating it with a spoon. I cannot maintain eye contact with them when they do this. It makes me queasy even thinking about it.
Buttermilk used in cooking doesn’t bother me though.
Don’t be confused. I’d go green if I saw someone eating shortening with a spoon, but it sure does make good biscuits!
I love cold buttermilk, probably because my father drank it, though he liked it with salt and pepper in it. Back when I was still drinking, I found it to be the perfect hangover remedy.
Same here. Buttermilk is tasty. I’ve had the leftover stuff from making homemade butter, and I didn’t like it nearly as much. Then again, I’m a big fan of kefir and yogurt, too, and buttermilk is in the same general category.
So the biggest difference between sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk, and kefir, is which bacteria species are used in the fermentation processes?
And the product that is fermented. Sour cream is made from cream, whereas most buttermilk and yogurt is made from nonfat milk.
That, and which fraction of the milk is used. Yogurt usually uses whole (or reduced fat) milk. Sour cream is fermented cream, which is the high-fat part that naturally floats to the top of un-homogenized milk. Buttermilk is what’s left over after making butter from cream, basically cream minus all the fat. It’s thicker than milk, and then what you normally get in stores is fermented.
Each basically has different ratios of protein, fat, and water (and probably some differences in the types of proteins or fats), and is fermented differently, but all come from the same stuff.
That’s traditionally how it was made, but not how commercial buttermilk is made now. It’s milk (usually reduced fat milk) with cultures and sometimes flecks of butter. It is not leftover milk from the butter making process, as far as I know.