WCIF buttermilk?

WCIF buttermilk or Kefir in Kaohsiung? haven’t seen any in online shops either…

Never seen it here. If you need a small amount for baking, I’ve done fine substituting by adding a tablespoon of white vinegar to a cup of milk and letting it sit 5 minutes.

I’ve never seen buttermilk here either - I usually use 1-2 tbsp of lemon juice instead of white vinegar in one cup of milk, but same basic idea. (Depends on the lemons: local green seem to need two 2 tbsp to properly thicken up, whereas imported yellow only need 1 tbsp, who knows why.)

You can get powdered buttermilk from iHerb. I’ve never tried that particular product, but the one time I used a different brand of buttermilk powder I wasn’t impressed. It was still very runny and never seemed to thicken up at all.

Adding lemon juice to milk more-or-less works, but you can buy buttermilk culture on eBay. kefir … not so easy, AFAIK it has to be started from a live culture.

Is Foremost Dairy still around? They had buttermilk.

Yeah, you had to go into those restaurants to get it right. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore.

got it - thanks guys!!

Bumping this thread. Buttermilk or powdered buttermilk anywhere on the island?

My supplier sells it. (powdered)

Never seen it. I buy powdered stuff from iHerb, or add lemon juice to milk.

Basically (originally), buttermilk is the left over liquid of the fermented (cream) butter churning process. Lot’s of protein, low fat.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Buttermilk

What “should” buttermilk look like? The powdered stuff I use isn’t very thick - just a touch thicker than milk, usually. Once in a while the lemon juice + milk approach will result in a really thick liquid. (I’ve found I need more juice from green lemons than I do from yellow lemons for that.) This leads to very different results with pancake or waffle batter.

Probably like cultured (fermented) non-fat milk with some water added, and a thickened texture. Drinking yogurt like. That’s how it looked like when my mother used to drink it in the sixties (I hated it)

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Found this at Carrefour today:

…according to Google Translate, here is what it says

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Good heavens. The appearance can vary according to the season and the cow. It’s thin as water, slightly gray or blue but verging on clear and often with thin swirly strands of milk casein in it. Not unlike dirty dishwater, most times.

It’s not thick like yogurt and it’s not usually white; irl it’s probably not attractive unless you grew up among dairy cattle or your family consumed raw milk and/or made homemade butter and collected the byproduct runoff, buttermilk. Buttermilk is an acquired taste, and lots of farmers give it away or throw it out (but probably not most since it’s high in protein).

Has nobody ever made butter by hand or spent time on a farm? Buttermilk is made purdy for commercial reasons, likely wouldn’t sell down on Elm St otherwise.

Buttermilk is the leftover (whey) after the cream is churned into butter. Cream that was fermented before churned gives the sour taste to the whey after the process of churning. Buttermilk is low in fat and high in protein as the fat is in the butter and protein in the whey.

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Maybe, maybe on a field trip in elementary school? Certainly don’t remember it.

My question was more about for cooking purposes. If I’m using (rather thin) fake-buttermilk-from-powder, I’m going to get different results compared to the (thick) fake-buttermilk-from-lemon-juice-and-milk. I’m not sure what recipes assume. Not a huge deal - just idle curiousity.

Wtf is butter milk. I’m trying to make gravy and it says I need butter milk.

Read your label. In most powdered products there is an anti-caking agent added to keep the powder from 'clumping. And in dried milk products sometimes starch is added to give it a ticker consistency (viscosity).

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Bojack and Belgian_Pie just wrote at length about what buttermilk is. But for baking at home, many people add lemon juice or vinegar to milk.

See here:
https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-a-quick-easy-buttermilk-substitute-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-185757

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