[Sca-cooks] Buttermilk?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>With all this discussion of sourdough and lactic acid fermentation, 
>i have a question entirely unrelated to bread...
>
>In the US the only buttermilk i think i have ever drunk is 
>commercial cultured dairy buttermilk. I am quite fond of the stuff, 
>especially in the summer, and can easily go through a quart in a day 
>or a tad more.
>
>Question One
>
>To the best of my knowledge, buttermilk was originally the whey (if 
>that is the appropriate word) left after churning cream into butter. 
>I believe i have never had this. I would assume it would not be as 
>thick as the cultured buttermilk, but that's just a guess. So, what 
>would its texture be and why would it be sour?

If you've been on this list a while, you may remember Ras and his 
various elegies to real Amish-style butter, and how the milk and/or 
cream are cultured and left to sour just a bit before churning out 
the butter. Even in cases where milk is left in a trough or vat over 
night to allow the cream time to rise to the top (which is a standard 
17th-century instruction for making things like clotted or "cabbage" 
cream -- see Digby, Markham, those guys), what you're doing is put 
blood-warm milk in a wooden container full of microorganisms. You may 
not be adding a specific culture, but you really don't need to. By 
morning it is well on its way to something akin to yogurt.  Maybe not 
that thick, but it is somewhat soured, and the change in pH helps 
separate out the cream phase. After a while, it will also tend to 
thicken the milk, with or without the cream.

>(side bar: i seem to recall a commercial brand that claims to be the 
>result of the process of churning butter, but as best i recall, it 
>didn't seem vastly different from my preferred cultured brand. 
>Perhaps real churned buttermilk actually isn't?)

I think that, traditionally, real churned buttermilk is sort of de 
facto cultured, hence the similarity.

>Question Two
>
>When i was in Morocco, i had a dairy beverage which name has been 
>translated into English as buttermilk, but i know nothing of its 
>production method. It was indeed thinner than the usual USAmerican 
>cultured buttermilk. But what i found most interested was the mouth 
>sensation it induced. While not in the slightest carbonated, there 
>was a "fizzy" or "tingly" mouth feel. Was this due to lactic acid 
>fermentation? I've had plenty of dairy products produced by 
>lactobacilli and never noticed this sensation. What is this? I'd 
>love to reproduce it or find a source to purchase it.

I think it's partly lactobacilli and partly yeasts. You're making me 
think of the fizz of a half-sour pickle or new kim chee (not the 
flavor, though -- I hope). While buying such a product commercially 
will probably eliminate some of that mouth feel (actively fermented 
foods tend to have unpredictable shelf lives), it's probably 
something like kefir.

Adamantius

-- 






"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If they have no bread, you have to say, let them eat 
brioche."
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", pub 1782

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