Cultured buttermilk

In Chinese supermarkets, you can often find a set of little bottles of flavored, sour "yogurt" in the refrigerated section. It's very artificial and filled with sugar, but very tasty. It turns out that cultured buttermilk reminds me of that.

I got into researching buttermilk when I read in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian that you can make cheese using buttermilk. It was a fascinating idea which lead me to wonder if you can make your own buttermilk as well. It turns out that you can!

Just to clarify, in the previous post, I made butter, which made old-fashioned buttermilk as a by-product. Old-fashioned buttermilk is not the same as cultured buttermilk, which is what you buy in the stores. Cultured buttermilk is milk or cream that has been invaded by a kind of bacteria, kind of like how yogurt is made. In fact, yogurt is made exactly the same way except it is invaded by a different bacteria. As long as the bacteria culture is alive, you can use the old batch of cultured buttermilk to make a new batch of cultured buttermilk.

To make cultured buttermilk from cultured buttermilk, use a 1 to 3 ratio. One part buttermilk to 3 parts milk. Mix together and leave it at room temperature for 24 hours at least. The process should not take longer than 36 hours. You know it's done when it tastes sour and tangy and when it coats the side of your glass. When it has the flavor and consistency you like, put it in the fridge. If you don't plan to use it right away and don't plan to drink it, you can also freeze the buttermilk.

Honestly, I didn't think I would particularly like the taste of buttermilk. However, when I tried it, I found that I couldn't stop sipping! I experimented a little by mixing a little bit of juice into a little bit of buttermilk and it was great! This is a very happy discovery for me indeed.

What's more, adventuring into this territory has opened up many other avenues of exploration. For instance, you can make sour cream or creme fraiche by adding 1 tablespoon of cultured buttermilk to 1 cup of cream and let stand for 24 hours or until desired consistency. Stir and refrigerate for 24 hours after for best flavor. I think technically, sour cream is made from light cream and creme fraiche is made from heavy cream. I never really was clear on the difference between the two.

From your chilled creme fraiche or soured cream, you can then go on to make cultured butter the same way you'd make regular or sweet cream butter. If you don't have or want to use buttermilk to inoculate the cream, you can also use yogurt with active cultures. Just make sure the yogurt doesn't have any thickeners, like pectin, in it.

Buttermilk can also be used as a cheese starter. Generally, you add the starter to the milk, let it sit for about a day and then add the coagulating enzyme, otherwise known as rennet. If you don't want to use rennet, I think you can just let the milk sit until it clabbers, or forms lumps. For more information on making rennet-less cheese, check out this link:
http://www.alpharubicon.com/primitive/cheesedragoona.htm

This is really fascinating stuff to me and is an amazingly awesome welcome into the world of cultured diary!