Where I grew up buttermilk is a fairly popular drink in hot weather. There are usually a few days during the summer where I kind of crave a cold glass or two. I’ve learned never to cave in unless I can get actual buttermilk, though, since the thickened white stuff sold commercially in the US is gross (thick? wtf) and the flavor is buttermilk-like at best. Pretty yucky stuff to drink imo, and I don’t think it makes a lick of real difference in any recipe I’ve ever added it to. Skim would work equally well, seemed to me.
1 Like
Watered down skim milk yogurt (the real thing).
1 Like
No. At least not a dairy farm.
It’s dead easy to make, and Italy surely has good raw milk. Just buy a liter of raw whole milk, let it go sour, add it to a sealed container and shake the shit out of it until most of it congeals. The solid is butter, the liquid leftover is buttermilk.
The milk has to be raw, though. Will not work with store bought.
2 Likes
It’s kind of a weird product. Appears in tons of recipes, but I’m not sure how much genuine buttermilk is actually sold. So if I buy buttermilk from a typical grocery store in North America, not even that is actual buttermilk? It’s also some kind of weird concoction?
Plus that name … it sounds so appetizing! Yum, butter + milk! But it doesn’t taste anything like that, does it?
I’ve never seen actual buttermilk for sale in a NA grocery store. It’s all a weird concoction ime. A weird gross concoction.
It tastes tangy and sour irl. Like I said, it’s an acquired taste. It’s not all that different from its name.
By the way, I also like sour pickle juice in the summer. Completely different from buttermilk, obviously, but it’s similar in that tangy and tart is what I sometimes crave when it’s hot. Gose beer, too.
2 Likes
This was common in the Texas summer when we had football practice. I never drank it myself, it’s just too gross for me.
I prefer lemonade or ice team in the summer.
Yes it’s common nowadays as a recovery drink in amateur football, especially in the south.
It’ll definitely put a pucker in your day.
One of these days I have got to travel around the United States just to try the regional food. Sometimes it’ll win for me, sometimes not, but I’ve got to at least try it. Sour pickle juice initially sounds awful, but if I think about it “tangy and tart” isn’t that far removed from lemonade - especially lemonade made without the insane amounts of sugar that’s typical now.
2 Likes
You need to go to Cracker Barrel when you go.
1 Like
You would bring that up when I’m here in Taiwan. Cruel.
One thing about the South, though. All the university towns (especially) have really good southern-style diners of the kind Cracker Barrel is modeled on. Austin, Oxford, Athens, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, etc. The higher the income of its residents, the higher the odds of finding excellent down-home dining and in multiple mom-n-pop restaurants.
They make better food than the average household in the US (frozen and microwaved TV dinner)
I’m sure it happens.
You can definitely get it in supermarkets, at least around our ways.
Lucky you. Where I come from, no supermarkets sell raw milk so no supermarkets sell real buttermilk. We have plenty of containers that say they’re buttermilk, but every time I’ve ever bought one it was not buttermilk inside. It was white, it was a little sour, and it was thick, but it was not the real deal.
eta: it appears that supermarkets sell what’s called cultured buttermilk, a homogenized dairy product. What I call buttermilk is probably called traditional buttermilk. It is not pasteurized nor homogenized, and it appears to be a traditional food in western Asia (among other places). I’ve never seen traditional buttermilk for sale in any supermarket, only the cultured kind.
I can’t see what a supermarket selling raw milk would have to do with someone making buttermilk from raw milk and selling it at a supermarket, but whatever. All I know is they sell products labeled as “buttermilk” which you use for baking and no one in their right mind would drink. It’s probably not the same thing as whatever amazing dairy product you’re talking about.
At least we agree that it’s not fit for drinking. 
1 Like
It’s probably not worth arguing over buttermilk anyway 
No, they use the leftover liquid from the butter churning, and they start from fermented (cultured) cream.
We’ve been over this already. They use raw milk for the butter churning, no?