So buttermilk is a taste that can't be resisted. Buying buttermilk is depressing. The store is usually out of the pint size and you don't need a much as a pint. And if you are buying a quart of buttermilk, you might as well buy a whole gallon of regular milk.
The old wives (spouses?) tale is that you take a cup of milk, add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, stir and wait 5 minutes and you have "buttermilk."
But is "buttermilk" as good as buttermilk?
If you want to add straight buttermilk as part of your diet and drink it as is, the idea of mixing milk and lemon juice don't sound appetizing. Quite frankly, as much as the taste of buttermilk thrills me, buttermilk is best left to the cooking process.
The experiment was to create a buttermilk blue cheese dressing. Fat-free yogurt with blue cheese, spices, and a splash or two of buttermilk. The buttermilk taste in the dressing made a big difference.
No special trip to the grocery store. No additional cost. No extra ingredients to buy.
Seriously, if you have a household that doesn't have lemon juice or white vinegar, buy some and find uses for those ingredients.
The other depressing thing about buying buttermilk is that you have the leftover buttermilk and you struggle to figure out how to use the remaining supply. Besides, this article notes that "most commercial buttermilk is made by dairy processing plants injecting enzymes into low-fat milk." Milk and lemon juice/vinegar sound that much better.
If you already drink a lower fat milk (2%, 1%, skim), the good news is that low-fat milks are ideal to make homemade buttermilk because buttermilk, despite the name, is lower in fat than whole milk.
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