About That Lemon Juice Thing
Posted by Sunday on Feb 6, 2010 at 8:26 pm in Food Rant, Pet PeevesSo there I am, digging through my recipe archives¹, looking for something to do with the rest of my quart of buttermilk when I remember that Smitten Kitchen did a buttermilk cake a while back and off my fingers flew.
Unsurprisingly, the cake is amazing. It’s perfect. And as it took 30 minutes to assemble and 30 minutes to bake, an hour after starting I was rewarded with a lovely, fragrant cake that I had little intention of sharing with anyone.
The downside is that the recipe re-fired an old irritation I have for the whole “milk + lemon juice = buttermilk” wives tale. And it pains me to see Smitten Kitchen trooping along with it — it causes such a hitch in my giddyup to see my beloved bacteria-laden buttermilk impostered so poorly with acidified milk. You see, milk and lemon juice together does not make buttermilk. It makes, as mentioned one sentence ago, acidified milk, which is not really the same at all.
A fair comparison is to say that thickening milk with gelatin is the same as making yogurt. Sure, it looks similar, and all it’s missing is that critical fermentation process. Additionally, some of the more authentic buttermilks (like Knudsen) add small flecks of butterfat to the milk to boost flavor, making it a lot more like the actual stuff you would theoretically get from the making of butter (hence the name – buttermilk is actually the residue from making butter) (or rather: used to be, it isn’t any more). You might even be able to find honest-to-goodness real buttermilk if you have a local dairy representin’ at your farmer’s market.
This isn’t to say that milk and lemon juice together don’t make an interesting product — they do — it’s just that I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t just use buttermilk instead. An even better substitute would be mixing equal parts plain full-fat yogurt to whole milk, but again, what is this, the Cold War? Is there a ration on buttermilk? The stuff keeps forever in the fridge, why not just buy a pint?
Still, that’s life, I guess. Some people care about human rights. I care about buttermilk.
(Seriously, this recipe is great. Go get it.)
¹A pile of print-outs and unlabeled lists of ingredients.
February 6th, 2010 | Food Rant, Pet Peeves
I read somewhere recently that butter itself used to be cultured because people would skim the cream off of milk as they used it and let it sit around until a sufficient quantity was collected to make it worthwhile to churn some butter, so all butter was full o’ bacteria as was the buttermilk. Yum?
I read that too! I think this is the inception for the “sweet cream butter” you sometimes see, which is weird because it’s not actually sweet so where did that term come from? Could it have simply referred to unfermented butter?
The butter would have been tangy. I wonder if that’s good?
Having grown up in rural South Carolina, I have first-hand experience with ‘real’ butter and other dairy products. Every Saturday me mum would throw we kids into the back of the car (seat belts, child car-seats … hahahahaha! fuckin’ funny), and off we’d charge, down to the Welchel farm. We’d get chicken eggs the size of yer friggin’ head (always brown, never saw a white egg there), fresh-churned butter (blocks wrapped in waxed paper with a giant ‘W’ stamped in the top, heh, cool!), whole and butter milks.
Here are some anecdotes:
- REAL butter is white … wtf? Yep, if it’s not white, color has been added kids! Btw Sunday; I’m fairly sure ’sweet’, in reference to butter, simply refers to no salt added. I may be wrong, but that’s highly unlikely ;0}
- REAL buttermilk does indeed have succulent ‘pearls’ of pure, delicious butterfat all through it. The liquidy part is surprisingly thinner than what you buy at the store today. I’m not exactly sure, but I believe maybe a thickener, like carageenan has been added. Trust me when I say genuine, thinner buttermilk is light-years tastier!
- You only had three choices of milk and most folks only drank two. There was buttermilk and, what Southerners call, sweetmilk (which is just regular, whole milk). The third was called ‘blue John’ (for it’s color when held up to the light). The only comparison I can offer is modern-day ’skim milk’ or non-fat. It was almost entirely reserved for adding to animal feed by farmers and I have no recollection of human folk drinking that shit!.
- Farm fresh eggs, which thankfully many of you have experienced, have the most incredibly bright orange yolk and have a very distinct, rich flavor. The shells are tough as hell, you never found a sickly thin, opaque shell. Nope, there is NO substitute for free-range, happy chickens scratchin’ in the dirt.
Sorry guys, I know I totally just depressed many of you, including myself! … (please don’t throw sickly eggs at me Kate!)