Substitute For Buttermilk ? Tips And Advice

Substitute for Buttermilk ?

simon 18 years ago

I have read that adding a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of milk and leaving for 5 minutes is a good substitue for buttermilk.

Can anyone confirm this please? Real buttermilk is very hard to find where I live.
Thanks
Simon

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pointsevenout 18 years ago said:

You are making sour milk, clabbered milk. It is not buttermilk. Buttermilk has a sweet tang taste to it. Sour milk has a sour taste to it. To my taste buds, it is just like drinking milk that has gone bad on its own. It might work okay as a substitute when cooking but I prefer the real thing.

To get buttermilk you need a starter bacteria to grow the buttermilk culture. There is a web site that has a very well explained process to be followed to make your own buttermilk and lots of other good milk products. It is: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese.html
Quickly what it says about buttermilk is to buy one gallon of milk and one half pint of buttermilk. Pour one cup of buttermilk into the gallon of milk (it even works with 2% milk) and let it stand just above room temperature for 24 hours. I find that putting it in the cabinet above the stove does fine and it has also worked just siting on the counter for me. Leave enough room in the milk jug for expansion because as the culture grows, it will need some new space to occupy. What works well for me is to take out 2 cups of milk out of the gallon container before I put the 1 cup of buttermilk in.
This new buttermilk you have grown will be lumpier than you are used to but is easily fixed by runnning the milk through a blender to make it nice and smooth. Pop it back into the fridge. When you get down to only 1 cup left in that buttermilk batch, pour it in another gallon of milk to make some more buttermilk. That last cup can be reused and reused and reused until the culture plays itself out. But what you are doing is growing a new culture every time you put the old buttermilk into the fresh milk. To my thinking it should never play out.
What a great money savings. Where I am from buttermilk cost close to twice as much as milk and milk is closing in on $5 per gallon.

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simon 18 years ago said:

I get my milk in 2 litre containers. 125ml of buttermilk will give me 16 to 1 proportion. I'll let you know how it turns out metrically speaking :)
Thanks again for your help.
Simon

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pointsevenout 18 years ago said:

I know the professor says to use a ratio of 4:1 and that 6:1 and 8:1 might work, and indeed they do. But I get good results at 16:1 with 2% milk.

Once you master the buttermilk you might want to venture on to new projects on his 'page, like cheese and yogurt and sour cream.

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dancegypsy67 18 years ago said:

It depends too, I think, on what you're going to use it for. farmgirl is one of my favorite bloggers and she's got a scone recipe that uses yogurt and milk in place of the buttermilk.(she hasn't posted the recipe here, so I'll link you to her blog http://foodiefarmgirl.blogspot.com/2005/12/cranberry-christmas-scones.html) It sure works for this treat!

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zena824 18 years ago said:

thanks for these blogs... I want to check them out as well.....Ive always heard that for the buttermilk as a sub but have never tried it..... I want to know how it works as well..

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pointsevenout 18 years ago said:

Why sub for buttermilk when in 24 hours you can grow your own at home? I suppose if you are not an avid buttermilk user, making a gallon at a time can be problematic.

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dancegypsy67 18 years ago said:

That's the issue for me. I cook/bake pretty much for myself, so this substitution works better for me than wasting buttermilk and money. It's good to know that if I needed a quantity, I could make some of it rather than buy it :).

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zena824 18 years ago said:

Here lately it seems like Ive picked up alot of recipes that calls for buttermilk usage.... before i wasnt using but a cup or so out of a carton and wasteing the rest of it.....

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