# Buttermilk (from butter) questions.



## WildernesFamily (Mar 11, 2006)

We make a lot of butter, and I thought the milk that drains out was buttermilk. Now I see that something has to be done to it before it is true buttermilk. It has to be cultured?

It's so confusing because when I looked up how to make buttermilk from raw milk online, all I found was how to make buttermilk from whole milk, not the buttermilk you drain off of butter.

Sooooo... please help. To culture my butter drained buttermilk, what should I do? Is there a way to get it to culture without any added ingredients? I do have Mesophilic Starter (MM100-101) that I use for making soft cheeses.

And what do *you* do with the buttermilk that drains off your butter when you make it?


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## mozarkian (Dec 11, 2009)

We make all our own butter here, but neither of us like to drink buttermilk so I can't help you with the how-tos of "real buttermilk", but the liquid left after making butter works perfectly to make buttermilk biscuits, pancakes, and in baking. I usually make a double batch of biscuit dough when I make butter and then freeze the unbaked biscuits. Then it's easy to pull a couple out and bake with supper or pop in the toaster oven to go with gravy at breakfast.


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## francismilker (Jan 12, 2006)

If you will take the liquid/whey/buttermilk that's left over after you make homemade butter and put a small amount of cultured storebought buttermilk in it you'll have cultured buttermilk after about 12 hours of sitting on the counter at room temp. You can then use some of that batch to culture your next. 

Once it thickens you can refrigerate it. I'm not expert at making it "great" but my wife uses it for cooking so we make it quite often. You might want to post this over on the "dairy" sub forum to get more responses from the professionals.


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## gone-a-milkin (Mar 4, 2007)

francismilker said:


> If you will take the liquid/whey/buttermilk that's left over after you make homemade butter and put a small amount of cultured storebought buttermilk in it you'll have cultured buttermilk after about 12 hours of sitting on the counter at room temp. You can then use some of that batch to culture your next.
> 
> Once it thickens you can refrigerate it.


That is exactly what I do. Normally I make buttermilk with whole milk though. The little bit of left-over liquid from making butter gets fought over and consumed instantly upon draining the butter off.

Or: you could sour the cream before making butter, then the liquid from that is much more like storebought buttermilk.
However, not everyone prefers soured butter.


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## WildernesFamily (Mar 11, 2006)

Thanks so much everyone! I'll sour the cream for the next batch of butter and maybe then I can just use that each time in the sweet butter buttermilk to culture it.

Our family has so much culture! Ha.


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## francismilker (Jan 12, 2006)

WildernesFamily said:


> Thanks so much everyone! I'll sour the cream for the next batch of butter and maybe then I can just use that each time in the sweet butter buttermilk to culture it.
> 
> Our family has so much culture! Ha.


I'm not sure if simply souring the cream will get you cultured buttermilk. I think it's a bacteria culture you need. I don't remember quite what it is called but doesn't store bought milk say something like, "acidophulus cultured" buttermilk. I think IMO that you'll have to introduce the right kind of culture to it and then it'll grow in each batch from the original introduction. I'm no expert though so other feel free to chime in.


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## JDog1222 (Aug 19, 2010)

I, L O V E this guys page: just look under buttermilk http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/cheese/cheese.html

*CULTURED VERSUS OLD FASHIONED BUTTERMILK:*
* "Cultured buttermilk," commonly available in US supermarkets, is not the same as "old fashioned buttermilk," about which I get many questions. The latter is the liquid which remains after churned butter is removed. The two buttermilks bear few traits in common. See the following description of churning butter for the differences.

*CHURNING BUTTER:* 
In "olden times," farm families would let freshly milked milk sit for half a day and skim off the cream which had risen. This cream would be set aside in a cool place, around 50-60 F. Each milking's cream would be added until several gallons had accumulated. In the meantime, naturally occurring bacteria in the cream would cause it to slightly sour. This souring increases the efficiency of churning. The accumulated, slightly sour, cream would be churned at the optimum temperature (approximately 58 F) such that the butter was firm enough to separate out, but soft enough to stick together into a mass. The butter was removed, washed in very cold water to remove the remaining milk, and salt worked in to preserve it. The remaining liquid after the butter was removed was called buttermilk. I call it "old fashion buttermilk," which is slightly sour, has the consistency of milk, but is slightly paler. It has flakes of butter floating in it. Commercial manufacturers sometimes add colored "butter flakes" to imitate the old fashioned buttermilk. However, the two products are very different, cultured buttermilk being thick and tart, old fashioned being thin, and slightly acid, depending on how sour the cream got before it was churned.

*MICROBIOLOGY OF BUTTERMILK:
*See the page on Smearing and Staining of Bacteria to learn how to see these bacteria with a microscope, and the page on Milk Fermenting Bacteria for a demonstration and discussion of _Streptococcus lactis_, which is the bacterium which performs this fermentation. Below is a photomicrograph of buttermilk which has been smeared and gram stained. Cells of _Streptococcus lactis_ can be seen as purple spots in a row. Casein is the pink mass covering most of the image.


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## uncle Will in In. (May 11, 2002)

JDOG <> you discribed my Grandmothers butter and buttermilk. She was born in 1864. When I was a kid, she milked one old cow and let the milk set until the next milking. She skimmed the cream off the top, and put it in a 5 gallon milk can that the
creamery picked up once a week. 
She took cream (sour) from the can to churn for butter. We drank the buttermilk right after the butter was removed. That butter had a better flavor than any thing made with fresh milk or cream. The buttermilk tasted like cultured tastes except it had tiny lumps in it.


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## cathleenc (Aug 16, 2007)

this has been covered pretty thoroughly but essentially two different ways to make buttermilk

1) add a buttermilk culture to regular milk to cultivate the correct flora and fauna. You can use either a) store bought buttermilk or b) a powdered buttermilk culture purchased from dairy supply houses like http://www.dairyconnection.com/

2) make cultured butter (allowing cream to ripen for 1-2 days at room temp before churning or using a purchased cultured butter culture from dairy connection to culture the cream) and then the resulting 'buttermilk' will have the correct acidity and tang that we all associate with buttermilk.

For our household, non-cultured butter is kinda bland. Cultured butter has layers and layers of flavor and is delicious!


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## gone-a-milkin (Mar 4, 2007)

cathleenc said:


> For our household, non-cultured butter is kinda bland. Cultured butter has layers and layers of flavor and is delicious!


I agree with you completely. The rest of my family? Not so much.
They really don't prefer cultured buttermilk either, except for in baking or batter-fried stuff.


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