It’s found in many Anglo-Saxon recipes, I have also mentioned it in some of my experiments without salt and without sugar but what’s buttermilk? How to use it? Today I reveal you all the curiosities discovered through my experiments.
Buttermilk is the liquid residue from the processing of cream, transformed into butter. (If you missed the homemade butter recipe and therefore how to get fresh buttermilk, you can find it here). Already in the past, women after beating the butter in the churn (-zangola- in italian) for hours and hours, collected the remaining liquid and put it in the air to let it ferment. Then they used it in the kitchen.
Its characteristics are:
- Its taste is pleasantly acidic.
- It favors a more decisive taste to the dishes.
- It has the ability to soften the meat fibers.
- Makes soft cakes and breads of all kinds.
As soon as the preparation of the butter is finished, the buttermilk is liquid. Transferring it into a bottle or a glass jar we can keep it in the fridge and drink it instead of milk or use it in our recipes. For 5/7 days its appearance will seem like milk after which, thanks to the fermentation process, a bit like it happens at the end of the cheese curdling process, a denser part (the fermented buttermilk) and a liquid part almost transparent will be formed (the serum). At this point we can eliminate the whey by filtering everything through a clean cloth without wringing and then using fermented buttermilk obtained in our preparations.
EVERY RECIPE ITS OWN
What I understand is, after having tried several experiments and sometimes with results not quite as I would have liked, that it is very important to use the right consistency for each dish you want to prepare, sweet or tasty it is … In many recipes it is written x ml (oz) of buttermilk but they don’t write what type of buttermilk, so you may find yourself dry a dough that was supposed to be soft and liquid and vice versa. So be careful which type you decide to use to avoid finding yourself some unpleasant inconveniences.
For any doubts I am available, while below, you will find gradually all my recipes already divided between fermented buttermilk or liquid.