On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, ~patches~ wrote:

> Pandora wrote:
>
> > Is buttermilk a sort of Yogurt? If I have not buttermilk how can replace it?
> > Cheers
> > Pandora
> >
> >
>
> Pandora, do you have heavy cream, the kind you make whipped cream from?
> If so, pour the heavy whipped cream into a blender or food processor
> and whiz away. The cream will separate into butter and buttermilk.
> Pour off the buttermilk and reserve for whatever you need. Pat butter
> several times to remove any buttermilk left. Add salt to the butter if
> desired. Now you have fresh butter as well as buttermilk. I use this
> method when I want to make herbed butters or cranberry butter. HTH
>


Er, uh, I don't want to start WW3 here, but buttermilk isn't made from
sweet cream. It is made from soured (cultured, clabbered, etc.) cream.

If you make butter from sweet cream, the liquid that is left is whey.
It is thim and watery and will not substitute for buttermilk in a recipe
that calls for buttermilk.

Once cream is cultured (naturally or by means of adding a bacterial
culture), it "clabbers". The churning process causes the butterfat to
clump together (as it does with sweet cream). The more the butterfat
clumps, the more whey that is pushed out of the cream. Buttermilk is a
result of *not* churning so long as to cause all the butterfat to be
forced out of the whey. (Milk is butterfat and whey; left to set, the
cream [butterfat] will rise to the top; The cream still has a lot of
whey. Churning squeezes the more whey out.)

As the cream is churned the butterfat makes tiny little clumps and bigger
and bigger clumps as the cream is churned. Cultured cream is thick and
lumpy. Therefore the "whey" part is thick. People who wanted buttermilk
did not churn the cultured cream as long as if they didn't want
buttermilk. The "whey" [buttermilk] got thinner and weaker and less
palatable (if one can call buttermilk palatable - as my Dad and Grandad
does/did. boo hiss)the longer it was churned.

Real buttermilk (from the olden days) was so thick a spoon would stand up
in it. And, it was much like thinned down sour cream with big chunks of
butter in it. boo, hiss. It made great biscuits, though.

Elaine, too