Like a full moon on a warm southern night, buttermilk makes something special happen. The magical touch of buttermilk creates fluffy pancakes, sweet cakes, and cooling soups. It’s the special ingredient for tart ice creams and curry chicken marinades. Buttermilk can become Italian or German cheese. It lends a refreshing flavor to Indian beverages. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like the “fishy” flavor of fish, you need to keep buttermilk in your refrigerator because it mellows the strong taste.
Sure, other things, like moonshine and sweet iced tea, may spring to mind more quickly than buttermilk when thinking about iconic southern liquids. But can a shot of Kentucky bourbon do as much in the kitchen as buttermilk? I don’t think so.
Buttermilk is truly representative of the South—both the traditional South of country farms and the evolving region of creative chefs and international influences. And I believe that buttermilk is an essential ingredient for cooking of all kinds. Without it, there would be no cloud-soft biscuits in which to insert country ham. No silky buttermilk pies. And, heavens, no tender-crispy fried chicken.
In agrarian times, buttermilk was simply the liquid that remained after the butter had been churned out of fresh cream (using an old wooden butter churn and plenty of arm power). So, in a way, the name is a little confusing—I guess it should have been called “no-butter” milk, although a little bit of the butterfat remained behind. But there is much more to the process than just the churning, especially in modern dairy production.
However, the qualities that make buttermilk good for cooking haven’t changed. The best buttermilk starts with the best milk, of course, and the South is lucky to be seeing a growth in small dairies that produce quality milk. Seek them out to find buttermilk that is rich and thick, with a pleasantly sour flavor reminiscent of yogurt. In fact, good-quality buttermilk—that nice and thick kind—can be substituted for yogurt in recipes. Be sure to adjust the recipe to handle the additional liquid so there is no change in the dish’s texture. Yogurt can be a stand-in for buttermilk, too, with the addition of a little liquid.
Read on and I’ll tell you about ways to create magic with buttermilk in your own kitchen. My recipes will allow you to bring buttermilk into your life all day long, from breakfast through dinner to sweets and snacks. You’ll learn about the history of buttermilk in southern cooking and how today’s food fans continue to explore the ingredient. You’ll get tips on selecting and using buttermilk so that you get the best flavor in your dishes. Not all buttermilks are the same.
Many people have asked me why I wanted to write an entire cookbook about buttermilk. My first encounter with buttermilk was the same as that for many southerners—seeing my father crumble leftover cornbread into a tall glass, then fill it with buttermilk that was left in the refrigerator after making the cornbread. I tried a spoonful from his glass. It tasted really different, with the chunky texture and lip-puckering flavor of the buttermilk, especially for a kid. (Making that snack was also the closest my father ever came to cooking; he could barely heat up canned soup.) Cornbread was one of the few things my mother would take the time to make from scratch, and she always purchased buttermilk for it. So I grew up thinking that it was a rare but sometimes absolutely necessary thing.
As an adult, after the first time I made buttermilk pancakes for breakfast, there was no going back. Not only did that single ingredient lift average pancakes to a different plane in flavor, but it made them as fluffy and light as a dream. I wanted to know more about that sorcerer buttermilk.
Also, as fabulous as cornbread and pancakes are, I wanted to help people think beyond them, to answer the question that I’ve been asked so many times while writing this book: “What am I supposed to do with the rest of that carton of buttermilk in my refrigerator?” There is so much, people, so much you can do. I’ve even talked to some who use it instead of regular milk in their breakfast cereal.
Let’s start with how the magic happens. What is buttermilk, exactly? The traditional answer is that it’s what’s left after the butter is churned from cream, but the process is more complicated than that. I turned to Lynn G. Turner, emeritus professor of food sciences in the Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, for the complete picture.
The old wooden butter churn uses gravity to separate the butter from cream, and the motion of churning makes the fat globules in the cream come together. As the butter forms, the pH of the liquid drops, meaning that it becomes more acidic. The texture and proteins change, and the butter becomes more gel-like as it forms. Churning removes as much liquid as possible from the butter, which typically is about 80 percent fat. After the butter is gone, what remains is the buttermilk, which is fairly acidic and still contains a small amount of fat.
In the days before refrigeration, buttermilk was left sitting out—frugal southerners would never throw it away. That’s when the second part of making buttermilk would take place. Bacteria in the air and on the wooden churn paddle would change the lactose in the buttermilk to lactic acid, and natural fermentation would take place. “You hoped the good bacteria outnumbered anything that might cause food-borne illness problems,” Turner explained.
In the hot weather of the South, fresh raw milk had a very short shelf life. Natural fermentation would extend the usable life of the buttermilk, and southerners came to relish the tart flavor.
Today, most of the buttermilk you find in supermarkets is not produced by churning. Dairies create it by adding commercial cultures to what older southerners call “sweet milk.” Usually, dairies add two different cultures—there are several to choose from—to change the lactose to lactic acid. The cultures do what letting a pitcher sit on the kitchen counter used to do, but in a more controlled manner—they cause the fermentation that gives buttermilk its tart flavor and typical buttery aroma. “The quality of cultured buttermilk depends on the raw material, the length of fermentation, the temperature, the type of culture. It’s like making wine or cheese,” Turner said.
Before manufacturers add the cultures, they give the milk a heat treatment similar to the one used to make yogurt, according to On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee (Scribner, 2004). At the proper time, the milk is cooled to stop the fermentation and gently agitated to break up the curds that form to create a smooth, thick liquid.
A variation on the typical process produces “Bulgarian buttermilk.” Yogurt cultures are added to or replace the typical cream cultures to produce a more acidic buttermilk that resembles yogurt.
Some wines and cheeses are better than others, and it’s the same with buttermilk. Some kinds are thick and rich additions to cooking, others thin impersonators. How can you tell the good ones? To talk about buttermilk quality, we have to look at the milk it comes from.
In the 1880s, centrifuges were used for the first time to separate cream from milk. Until then, you let the milk simply sit until the fat separated—hence the saying “Cream rises to the top.” Bottled milk would have a thick plug of cream at the top, requiring it to be shaken up for each use.
Shortly after the use of centrifuges became widespread, scientists invented a test to determine the precise fat content of milks from different sources, according to Anne Mendelson, Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk through the Ages (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Combine these factors with the growth of homogenization, which keeps milk fat dispersed throughout the milk, and the result was the ability to develop different kinds of milk with precise levels of fat.
Today, industrial-scale milk production starts with removing all the fat from the milk. Then the fat is added back in amounts that meet industry standards for fat-free milk, 2-percent-fat milk, or whole milk. Some of that milk eventually becomes buttermilk. Some small dairy farmers say that this process, plus the heat involved in high-temperature pasteurization, damages the flavor of buttermilk.
“We make whole-milk buttermilk. That’s the problem with buttermilk today, that there is no whole milk today,” said Tom Trantham, owner of Happy Cow Creamery, a small organic dairy in Pelzer, South Carolina. “When you homogenize and take the cream out, then squirt some back in, you’ve already damaged the milk and it can’t function like it’s supposed to. We don’t take anything out.”
What industrial milk production means for buttermilk is that the carton you pick up in the supermarket dairy case could have any level of fat content, and the flavor and texture will vary widely. Read the label to check the amount of fat. For most cooking, especially baking, buttermilk with some fat—even better, full fat—will provide better results than fat-free versions.
You’ll also find that drinking full-fat buttermilk from a small dairy, if you can find it, is an entirely different experience. It’s almost like yogurt, with satisfying thickness and appealing tang. Look for buttermilk from small farms for better cooking as well.
Thick glasses of buttermilk have sustained many southerners on days when there wasn’t much else to eat, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it has worked its way into song and literature.
The most famous musical offering involving buttermilk is “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” written in 1946 by Hoagy Carmichael. The songwriter was born in Indiana, but southerners should be willing to claim him because he also wrote the beautiful “Georgia on My Mind.”
“Buttermilk sky” is an old term for a sky that’s covered in rows of small, lumpy puffs of clouds that look like the curds of thick, old-time buttermilk. In the tune, the singer is going to meet his love and plans to pop the question if he can get a little help from above—a plea for the buttermilk sky to work its magic. Both Willie Nelson and 1940s bandleader and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, native Kay Kyser have recorded the tune as well. Here’s a piece of buttermilk trivia: Mike Douglas, who eventually became a talk-show host, sang on Kyser’s recording of the tune.
While we’re singing about buttermilk, let’s dance to it, too. Most versions of the playground favorite “Skip to My Lou” include a lyric about a fly in the buttermilk. The tune was popular at frontier parties in the 1800s, and its roots are likely Scottish. Both in Scotland and the American frontier, buttermilk was a part of cooking, and it was just natural to sing about it.
Southern literature is awash in buttermilk. Characters in William Faulkner’s novels wash down turnip greens with it, carry it in Thermoses for lunch, and wrap jugs of it in wet gunnysacks to keep it cold for traveling. (See Go Down Moses, The Reivers, and As I Lay Dying, to name just a few.) It shows up so much that you could forget that Faulkner’s favorite beverage was bourbon.
You’ll find characters sipping buttermilk in the fiction of Walker Percy, Truman Capote, and Eudora Welty, who writes about the “buttermilk man” hawking buttermilk and dewberries as he walks the streets of a small southern town.
Besides including buttermilk in fiction because it was typically found in rural southern homes, authors also may have used it in many works to suggest that a character represented the common man.
Poet Maya Angelou once said: “‘Public’ and ‘poem’ go together like buttermilk and champagne.” But she changed her mind enough about the public consumption of poetry to write poems commemorating President Bill Clinton’s inauguration and other events. And I know some bartenders who might take that comparison as a challenge.
As much as we love buttermilk in the South, we can’t claim exclusive ownership of the ingredient. Fermented milks such as yogurt and buttermilk are widely used all over the world. In India, lassi is a smoothie-like beverage that contains buttermilk or yogurt combined with ice or water. Usually savory flavors are preferred over sweet ones, although mango lassi is popular.
Quark, a cheese made from buttermilk, is a staple in Scandinavian, German, and Eastern European cooking. It is similar in texture to a creamy ricotta cheese, and its name comes from the German word for “curd.” Quark is sometimes flavored with herbs or garlic. Its mildly tart flavor—thanks to buttermilk—is great on a baked potato or paired with sweet roasted beets in a salad.
Russian and Polish cooking is full of cold beet and cucumber soups that are enriched with the tang of creamy buttermilk. In Morocco, meals often end with cooled, sweetened couscous mixed with cold buttermilk.
A variation on buttermilk, kefir, originated in the Caucasus Mountains between Europe and Asia. A complex fermentation process makes kefir effervescent, tart, and slightly alcoholic, according to McGee’s On Food and Cooking.
In the South, older cookbooks that mention “sour milk” as an ingredient usually are talking about buttermilk. A century or more ago, it was something that southern families just had in the house and used because it was on hand, perhaps without specific recipes at all.
Buttermilk took on a new role around 1800 with the advent of chemical leavening as a quicker alternative to yeast for baking, according to Mendelson’s Milk. These ancestors of baking soda were alkaline leaveners, so they required the addition of an acid ingredient to produce the carbon dioxide that makes breads and cakes rise. And there was acidic buttermilk, just waiting to do the job. Plus, it added its unique flavor to the dish. The usefulness of buttermilk in baking with the new leaveners led to the appearance of cultured buttermilk, which has been sold in grocery stores since the 1920s.
The quality of the buttermilk you can buy today varies, and you will notice the difference. One of the few dairies in the United States that still combines churning with culturing is Cruze Dairy Farm near Knoxville, Tennessee. Cruze buttermilk, which is craved by southern chefs, is almost as thick as yogurt and has a rich flavor. Compare it to the thin gruel of some mass-produced buttermilk, and you’ll see the ingredient’s possibilities.
Many small southern dairies, like Cruze, are restoring buttermilk’s good name. Some are as secretive as the CIA about how they produce their buttermilk. “You’d be giving away my trade secrets,” said Tom Trantham of Happy Cow Creamery when I asked how he makes it. “We do have a paddle in our pasteurizer. We use the finest culture money can buy, salt, and our milk. That’s it.” He starts with whole milk from his grass-fed cows (no fat-free buttermilk here), which is pasteurized at the lowest safe temperatures to preserve the flavor.
He pays homage to buttermilk at the creamery’s store by offering a twist on the classic southern treat of cornbread and buttermilk: cheddar Goldfish crackers and buttermilk, combined in a Mason jar with a stem like a wine glass and stirred with a silver spoon.
The return of quality buttermilk is inspiring chefs and food fans all over the South to use it in new ways. Olive & Sinclair, an artisan chocolate company in Nashville, Tennessee, has created a buttermilk–white chocolate bar. “Just being southern, I love the tang that buttermilk has, and one thing that white chocolate is missing is there’s no bite to balance it out. I thought that would be awesome. That would be the best thing since white chocolate was invented. We started making small batches and it really worked,” said owner Scott Witherow.
Even chefs who don’t cook with southern accents have seized the mystical power of buttermilk. Andrea Reusing, who cooks with a definitely Asian touch at her restaurant Lantern in Chapel Hill, uses the ingredient quite a bit. “We do a couple of different cold soups, we dredge catfish in it and occasionally chicken, we do a ton of pastries and chickpea dumplings for an Indian stew, using chickpea flour and different spices,” she said.
Now it’s time for you to try this at home.
* Look for the best thick and tangy buttermilk you can find. Fat content varies, so read the label. A higher fat content will make a difference especially in the richness of ice creams. Try to find buttermilk that does not have added gums or stabilizers and has active cultures, especially if you want to use it to make homemade cheeses; those that do will say “active cultures” or “live cultures” on the label. Whatever kind of buttermilk you purchase, shake it well before using because it can separate.
* Because buttermilk is cultured and fermented, it curdles easily when heated, more easily than milk or cream. If you must heat it for a dish, place it on low heat just until it feels warm when you dip in a finger. Avoid stirring it directly into very hot dishes, such as hot soups. Mixing the buttermilk with a little flour before heating may help.
* Because buttermilk is cultured, like yogurt, it will keep longer in the refrigerator than regular milk. It does not freeze well, however.
* Powdered or dried buttermilk, available in canisters, is useful in baking when you want buttermilk’s flavor but don’t want to add liquid. Refrigerate open canisters to keep the contents fresh.
* To make a substitute for buttermilk, add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar to 1 cup of milk, then let it stand for five minutes, until the milk curdles from the acid of the vinegar. You will get an approximation of buttermilk by doing this, but it’s a pale shadow of the real thing.
* You can substitute buttermilk and its wonderful tart flavor for milk or cream in many recipes. (And a little added to piecrust makes it tender.) Just remember that buttermilk has a higher acid level than milk or cream, and depending on the kind of buttermilk you buy, it may have different fat content. In baking, if the recipe includes baking powder or baking soda, either will react with buttermilk’s acid to make the baked good rise. If you’re using a large amount of buttermilk, you could increase the baking soda by a small amount if you’re unsure—¼ teaspoon or less.
* Buttermilk may be used in recipes instead of yogurt, but because buttermilk is thinner, be aware that it may change the texture of the resulting dish. If making the switch the other way, from buttermilk to yogurt, you may need to add a little water to thin the yogurt.
* Give whipped cream a different flavor by substituting buttermilk for part of the heavy cream. Start with about one-quarter to one-third of the total amount of cream. Because buttermilk has a lower fat content, it would be difficult to make whipped cream from buttermilk alone.
* According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, consuming small amounts of buttermilk that contains live and active cultures (check the label because not all buttermilks contain them) can help people with lactose intolerance digest lactose.
* It is possible to make your own butter at home, which means you’d make buttermilk as well. Andrea Reusing’s staff at Lantern gave her a hand-powered butter churn as a lark. She used it to make butter for a special event—there’s no way she could make all the butter for the restaurant—and did get a bit of buttermilk. She cultured it like yogurt and used it to make pancakes for her kids. It would take a lot of churning, or time in the food processor, to get an appreciable amount of buttermilk, though. If you want to try it, use cream that hasn’t been ultra-high-temperature pasteurized (UHT on labels) if you can find it, advised North Carolina State University’s Lynn Turner. Turner said it is possible to make buttermilk at home using a process similar to the way you make homemade yogurt. “Get milk of any kind, then add buttermilk that has active cultures and it will ferment the milk,” he said. “There’s a lot on the web about that.”
Here are some things that I bet you never knew about buttermilk.
* Mama always said that buttermilk would take away freckles. Well, that wasn’t true, but the astringent quality of buttermilk coupled with moisture from the fat it contains make it a mild, refreshing cleanser. Try it, since you’ll have some around from cooking anyway. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil, then remove the pan from the heat and add 1 tablespoon of dried lavender buds. Let it sit for 30 minutes, then strain out all the lavender. Stir in 1 teaspoon of honey and 1 tablespoon of buttermilk until the mixture is combined. Apply the cleanser to your face with a cotton ball, then rinse afterward, just as you would with any facial cleanser. Store the cleanser in the refrigerator (I use a glass jar with a screw top), and shake or stir it before using to recombine it. The lavender is optional, but it adds a soothing aroma.
* Legend says that Cleopatra kept her skin beautiful by soaking in milk-and-honey baths. Considering the heat of Alexandria, her rubber duckie was probably floating in buttermilk. I can’t say that buttermilk baths will turn you into the queen of Egypt, but you could try tossing some powdered buttermilk into your bath for a moisturizing, calming soak. Add a few drops of vanilla extract for a pleasant scent.
* If you wanted to paint your barn in the colonial era, you couldn’t run down to the hardware store and grab a gallon of red. Farmers used natural pigments found on the farm mixed with, you guessed it, buttermilk. Modern manufacturers use powdered milk to reproduce the flat, matte finish of the surprisingly durable antique milk paint.
* Another installment in “Unusual Things Buttermilk Can Do” comes from a friend of mine. Her elementary school teacher had the class use colored chalk dipped in buttermilk as paint. It works as well on paper as tempera paints, without the danger of tipping over pots of paint and dirty water or spattering tables with brushes.