homemade buttermilk

[mindstalk]

Recently I bought some cultured buttermilk to drink, then read/watched up on it. Modern cultured buttermilk is made by adding bacterial cultures, like yogurt. According to Adam Ragusea, while yogurt bacteria is thermophilic (wanting warm temperatures, thus heating the milk), buttermilk bacteria are mesophilic, liking room temperature. So you can put milk and some (live/active) buttermilk in a container, and let it sit for 1-2 days. I have done this, a couple times now.

Result: nothing like the starting buttermilk. Not as sour (also no added salt, natch), and not an easily drinkable liquid. It's a stretchable goo, much like my first batch of yogurt years ago. It in fact mostly seems like a mild yogurt, eatable with a spoon.

Given where I live, possibly my kitchen wasn't warm enough even for mesophilic bacteria to be happy.

Instructions from https://www.foodiewithfamily.com/homemade-cultured-buttermilk/

Cost? Well, the _cheap_ buttermilk from my local store was $2/quart, and that didn't promise active cultures; the one that does was $3.50 a quart. Milk is like $4 for a half-gallon aka 2 quarts, so making your own has a big saving.

Comments

[squirrelitude]

The storebought cultured buttermilk is probably made using a mix of single-species inoculant cultures, and is not really a stable "starter" culture in its own right. If so, backslopping that into fresh milk is going to give you a different product than what you started with, since the species composition will change (although yeah, temperature will also play a role; not sure which is more important here!)

Probably what you made is more like långfil, with strains that produce hefty polysaccharide chains -- like kefir or filmjölk, but more so.

It might be possible to turn it into a stable culture, although I've never looked into that in any depth.

[squirrelitude]

Incidentally, I recently asked a cheese maker how cheesemaking *used to* work, before modern microbial supply laboratories. Nowadays you generally order a selection of monocultures and inoculate pasteurized milk with that. But what about 500 years ago?!

Apparently each cheesemaker would maintainer what was essentially a starter, feeding it milk on a daily basis and removing some as needed in order to serve as the starting culture for a cheese (just like you'd do with sourdough starter.) The stable starter culture wouldn't have varied too drastically from one place to another; timing, temperature, milk source, season, and cheesemaking technique would account for the differing flavors and character of the cheese.

I imagine the starter would have been something like buttermilk in nature, but didn't think to ask.

[mindstalk]

Interesting!