I think I concur with you, what is sold today as "buttermilk" isn't really the same as what they would make themselves at home on the farm in the olden days.

When I was quite little, back in the 1960's and early 1970's, my mother would sometimes want some buttermilk like she had growing up on a farm, where they milked their own cows, churned their own butter, etc. The process also yielded a small amount of actual butter, to be used separately.

What she would do was actually take cream and half and half, mix it together, put it into a bowl, and go at it with a hand mixer. It would go through a stage sort of like whipped cream, and then it would go beyond that, and the butterfat would start to coagulate out and accumulate on the beaters and around the rim of the bowl. Keep going long enough, and you ended up with a mass of butter floating around in a pool of liquid after you scraped down the beaters and the rim of the bowl. The liquid that remained behind was the buttermilk. I sort of recall that you can also do this in a blender, and it ends up the same way, with the butter clinging to the rim of the glass.

I think it was actually mostly whey, with enough milk proteins on other things in it to be sort of white, but I recall it as being less white than even skim milk. And, it had actually little tiny flecks of butter floating in it.

Also, it was NOT sour at this point, unless you started with cream or half and half that was already beginning to sour. You could LET it get sour if you wanted to.

Now, she said that, for much of the year, the buttermilk they had on the farm WOULD be sour, because they had no electricity and little cold storage, just an icebox, not big enough to store large buckets of milk, so, it sat out, and turned sour after about 12 hours. But, in the colder times of the year, it wouldn't sour as fast, and they would have "sweet" buttermilk.

What you buy in the stores now doesn't remind me at all of what she used to make. Basically, what they sell now is the milk version of sour cream -- same flavor, just a lot more liquid. And, definitely NO flecks of butter in it, since it's pretty much all low fat or non fat to start with.

I think I'll have to pick up some cream and half and half and try this. I hope I've gotten the details right, since I was under 10 when I recall her doing this.

Also, I think if you mixed cream and whole milk, you'd get less actually butter, but a higher yield of buttermilk.

You can easily make your own butter & buttermilk from pure cream. I own a partial share in a dairy cow, so every week my husband and I get a gallon of pure, unpasturized (raw), whole milk. This gives me +/- 2 C of cream every week. This also works with pasturized cream though. If you're buying it from the store, heavy whipping cream is what you're after.

You now have two options: Leave the cream out for 8-12 hrs. This lets it come to room tempurature, and sour just the tiniest bit. In my experience, this makes the actual butter making part a lot faster.

Or take the cream directly from the fridge. For those squeamish about souring, or heebiejeebies about what might grow in the milk if it's not refrigerated, this works fine. It just about doubles the time it takes me to make butter, but tastes the same.

Put your 2C of cream in a glass quart jar. Now begin to shake. Shake steadily & evenly, but not necessarily very vigorously. I hold the jar in both hands with my hands wrapped around the barrel of the jar (not with one hand on the lid and one hand on the bottom), hold the jar parallel to the floor at about chest/chin height, and rock the toward and away from my body. I time it so that there is a definitive "splash" of the cream against the lid, and again on the bottom of the jar. I know that sounds complicated, and there really is no "right" way to do it, as long as you're continually agitating the cream.

After a while (with room temp cream it takes about 15 mins for me), you will be able to see the cream starting to form lumps, then all of a sudden, there will be one big lump of butter in the middle, and a bunch of liquid left over. This liquid is the buttermilk, and as Denninmi said, it is not sour nor thick like storebought buttermilk. I carefully pour it out of the quart jar into another container if I want to keep it, then put the new butter into a small tupperware container.

The butter then needs to be rinsed with cold water, and worked until it's smooth. I just use the back of a metal spoon and add cold water from the tap to my container, then smoosh the butter around with the back of the spoon. When the water comes out clear, press as much of it as you can out of the butter, add as much salt as you like, then refrigerate (or leave out) as you like! Homemade butter & buttermilk all in one fell swoop.

Depending on the fat content of your cream, you will get about 3-4T of finished butter from 2C of cream, and about 2C of buttermilk.

As to taste....It's hard to describe. Nothing like storebought buttermilk. It tastes like....Watery milk with butter flavor, kinda. LOL Hard to describe. For the price of 2C of cream, and 15 mins of work, I recommend trying it yourself. If you don't like it, you're not out much, and if you do, you've discovered a whole new world!

I remember making butter (and hence buttermilk as a byproduct) as part of a project for school once, in about junior high. I used the jar-shaking method and the results tasted great. I also remember my older sister's boyfriend being completely dumbounded by this activity. "You mean you can MAKE butter??!!!!" At eighteen years old, he'd had no idea where it came from. (I was raised a big-city girl too, mind you, and was only slightly more savvy about such things till I started vegetable gardens, so I shouldn't laugh too much. I still remember opening a big seed package of peas and exclaiming, "Hey --- pea seeds are PEAS!" ;-p )

But I'm curious as to what was different between keepitlow's shmancy Whole Foods buttermilk and the "real" thing. I would have though the only difference would be that rather than having "flecks of butter," the remaining little bits of fat were incorporated back into the milk --- isn't that what homogenzied means?

Can some of you farm types help clarify?

Thanks!

Zabby, city girl going back generations
(my grandmother owned a farm property as an INVESTMENT property, and my mother was the only kid in her class who couldn't even keep a Victory Garden alive)

So the big difference between "real" buttermilk and storebought buttermilk is that storebought buttermilk is cultured milk, not the leftovers from making butter. Most containers of buttermilk will say this. So what does that mean? No idea. LOL Ok, seriously. It's sorta like the process of making yogurt, where you encourage certain types of bacteria to grow in the milk, giving it the thickness & sourness we're used to. You can do this at home too, it's about like the process to make sourdough. I found this on the intarwebs (never done it before, so YMMV). For those of you who don't know what "clabbered" means, it's when the milk sours & thickens, but not to the point yet of chunks. I'm also guessing your starter has to be from raw milk, as the necessary bacterium will be dead in pasturized milk.

MAKING CULTURED BUTTERMILK FROM SCRATCH

1. Allow a cup of filtered fresh raw milk to sit covered at room temperature until it has clabbered (usually several days).
2. Place 1/4 cup of the clabbered milk in a pint mason jar, add a cupof fresh milk (does not have to be raw at this point), cover, shake to mix, allow to sit at room temperature until clabbered.
3. Repeat this transfer of sub-culturing several more times until the milk dependably clabbers in 24 hours. Taste a small amount to confirm that it is tart, thickened, and has no off flavors. It should taste tart not bitter, for instance.
4. To then make a quart of buttermilk with this culture, add 6 ounces of the buttermilk to a quart jar, fill with fresh milk, cover, shake to mix, allow to sit at room temperature until clabbered.
5. Refrigerate.

I churn my own butter occasionally when the price gets too high at the store and it's economical to do so.

Yep, the buttermilk is what is leftover (the liquid part) when the butter fat draws together into lumps when you churn whole milk (real whole milk, not the stuff they call whole milk in the store, lol). Buttermilk begins as simply nothing less than low,low fat skimmed milk.

You can make butter immediately from whole milk, and it has a different taste than that made if you allow the whole milk to sit and warm and 'turn' a little. It turns by the action of cultures of lactobacillus, so in that respect it is just naturally innoculated, instead of artificially innoculated like store bought buttermilk.

I use the remaining buttermilk in cooking, as I'm not that keen on it to drink. If you let your milk sit and turn a little, the buttermilk you produce does taste more sour like the store bought kind. (btw that turns my stomach, blech) If you use fresh whole milk immediately to make butter, it just tastes and looks like super skimmed milk with yes.........a litte buttery taste.

So, the "cultured" in the Whole Foods buttermilk means it was slightly soured by adding bacterial culture? Which isn't how buttermilk-that-is-a-byproduct-of-making-butter starts out but is how it becomes after a while by picking up bacterial culture from the air?

Z

That's my take on it. I supposed the commercial stuff is also thickened because my buttermilk isn't creamy. I sometimes let my cream sit and turn just a little to make a sharper, more cheese-like tasting butter. But usually not.

I should have been saying the cream you skim off the top, not the whole milk, you use to churn. You have to skim the cream off the top. My bad, it's what I call it because real whole milk has the cream in it and when we milked, we did't let it rise and skim it off but shook it up and drank it with the cream in it. Only time we skimmed off the cream was when we wanted to make butter or cheese. I'm old enough to remember when milk from the dairy wasn't always homogenised and the cream would rise to the top and you had to shake it. You'd catch folks filching the rich stuff off the top and leaving the skim for everyone else. LOL.

That's right Zabby. :)

A chef in our area has a website "Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner" and just today had a recipe for light and fluffy corn pancakes made with buttermilk and he went into detail talking about "real churned buttermilk" versus cultured. A local dairy farm sells "churned buttermilk" to some farm stands, independant groceries etc., and I saw it in the dairy case of a small market this afternoon. So there are sources for churned buttermilk if you don't want to do it yourself.

I remember when I was a little girl.. watching my grandmother churn and I thought it looked like fun (LOL) and begged and begged until she let me try. That dasher in the churn got so heavy I thought my arm would fall off. She didn't let me quit until I had given it a good try but I never asked her to let me churn again.

I still like cornbread crumbled in a glass of buttermilk occasionally or in regular milk either. Eat it for supper once in a while.

jude

I agree that there must be a difference. I had an Uncle who drank it instead of regular milk. I asked how he could stand it, and he told me that he drank the real stuff from a dairy not what was called Buttermilk from the store.

So..... when you make a recipe calling for buttermilk: does the end result change depending on which buttermilk you use?

A lot of recipes seem to assume buttermilk will be at least somewhat soured; the suggested replacement if you don't have buttermilk is to use milk + lemon juice.

Z

Back in my "old" days, butter was always made from milk that was allowed to clabber/sour. The cream was poured off of all the milk stored in the fridge... The cram/milk was allowed to sit on the counter overnight or all day whatever it took until the cream all rose to the top and the milk had soured....then poured into a churn and churned till the butter formed and the butter milk was stored for drinking or cooking......I love butter milk...fresh, homemade or that stuff from the store...If I'm lucky enough to have some cornbread, my next meal is a piece of cake.

hmmm, this has me thinking now, is store bought butter soured? If they're culturing buttermilk to try to replicate buttermilk from clabbered milk, maybe that's what's done with butter too? I'm wondering because I hate store bought butter, it always tastes sour to me, but when I make it at home with unsoured cream, it tastes good to me.

Most store brands butters are not "cultured", they are just made from milk. If you buy the European butters they are slightly higher in butterfat and many times are "cultured". There is also a Vermont based butter that is cultured, I think it was one of the "winners" in the Cook's Illustrated butter tasting.

At any rate, real buttermilk is the liquid left after butter is churned. The stuff we buy in the store is milk that has been cultured to be thick and sour.

Annie

We did that project at school when I was in the 2nd grade. We all took turns shaking the jar, and our teacher had crackers for us, so we all got a cracker with butter we made ourselves.! I never forgot that fun project. You all have inspired me to try it again!
Suzi

Suzi AKA DesertDance, could it be we were both in Miss Hess' 2nd grade classroom at Kobbe Elementary??? I remember this classroom event very well and used to tell my kids about the time I "made butter at school". Happy days!

This is all interesting and informative! Enjoyed reading about the process and the differences.