Have you noticed many “milk” products are not even really milk. But stuff with additives.
Yogurts are the absolute worst products. Even so called healthy “Greek” yogurts are full of junk. Sorry folks; I really do not want black carrot juice making up for lack of color in the fruit.
I was thinking of breaking out the ice cream churn and cranking out some fresh buttermilk and blueberry ice cream. Tangy and sweet bites.
But I looked around for good buttermilk. Most of them are striped of fat and have stuff added to thicken it up. The company running the defunct Gustefanson’s farm had an honest 2.2% fat real buttermilk. Have to cross over to Florida to get it.
Borden {also a bought out shell} offers doctored up 1% or something called Bulgarian Buttermilk. 5% fat:
I dont drink milk… but do a little heavy whipping cream and butter in my coffee.
I do eat hard aged cheeses.
I have to avoid carbs… can do all the fat and protine I want.
I eat low carb berries… raspberries strawberries blueberries blackberry, with a whole milk greek yogurt… and also include some high fat low carb nuts in the mix (walnut, pecan, sliced toasted almonds). That mix… berries, nuts, yogurt… is a good mix… i really like it.
i make my own. not hard to do. just use the last of your old batch to start a new one. i make a gallon at a time from raw milk from a farm nearby. delicious.
I’m kind of shocked you can’t get good whole buttermilk in Georgia. We get a brand at a few places including Walmart that is whole, cultured buttermilk: the ingredients are cultured milk and salt - " * Gourmet buttermilk, world-famous, our buttermilk is a taste from the past! You can see the actual flakes of butter: Gallon, ½ gallon, quart, pint, ½ pint."
I know a few 75+ who drink it; I only use it for baking and cooking.
The yogurt ingredients at the store do make me wince. Even the upscale, supposedly low sugar varieties. I’d rather just add my own fruit or honey to plain.
once my butter milk gets down to 1/4, i top off the jug with whole milk, turn the light on in your oven and throw it in there in the morning. by evening, its buttermilk again. been do this for 5 years now. also, buttermilk and yogurt don’t spoil if kept properly. I’ve left some for months in the back of the fridge and it was still good.
sometimes your culture can eventually develop the “wrong” kinds of bacteria and get an off taste. if that ever happens you can just buy a new container of buttermilk or yogurt to restart. Otherwise it’s as easy as Steve says
When we lived in North Florida there were still a ton of small dairies you could buy freely from. We made buttermilk Ice Cream a lot. A habit we picked up in Oklahoma.
I keep nagging the woman to get an instapot so I can easily make my own french yogurt.
I’m watching our Snubian goat mom in the back. She turned on her babies and we are bottle feeding them. They are Nubian and Saanen crosses and made very good and slightly creamier milk then many goats. When we sell her babies we can stay in all sorts of dairy products. Her sister should birth soon. We should get better then 2 gallons a day from both of them.
Not many people in this area drink buttermilk straight. I’ve gotten a questioning “huh” when I’ve been at a meat and three and asked for a glass of buttermilk to enjoy with my chicken livers.
I didn’t grow up in a family of buttermilk drinkers but I will destroy a half gallon by myself in short order. It is true that they are not all the same: the flavor of the Mayfield Whole Cultured Buttermilk that I am tucking into at present is a bit weak compared to some buttermilks I’ve been able to find locally. The ingredients are not disappointing though: cultured milk, salt.
I seem to recall that the best flavor I’ve tried so far is Marburger brand buttermilk, which is available locally from Walmart.
The buttermilk ice cream y’all speak of sounds intriguing. I’ve never heard of such a thing before but will now be on the lookout.
I like buttermilk on its own too- I haven’t seen that brand but there’s a little local dairy by my friends’ place that sells their own. I usually pick that up. it’s pretty strong, rich.
Yup, still the best tasting buttermilk that I’ve tried in this area. I picked up a quart (the largest size they offer in my local store) this morning and I opened and drank it all this evening. Give it a try if you can find it.
Per my recent reads, heavy cream and fermented options like the real yogurt I make are relatively ‘good’ for most people, compared to unprocessed standard grocery store milk.
I’ve been grabbing a container of my yogurt plain and bringing it to my job site where I’ve been harvest black raspberries, dewberries, and now blackberries to mix in.
Lately I’ve been fermenting most of the milk I consume and doing it myself. You could do that too (like @steveb4), making yogurt, buttermilk, farmer’s cheese, etc. Good starter mixes are available online.
The trick is to maintain a proper temperature. I have a small device that I use for sous vide, mostly venison. It is designed to heat water to a temperature and then hold it there. So I put the inoculated milk in a pot, then drop the pot into a larger pot containing the heated water. Set it and forget it – one day later it’s done.
The result is as pure as the milk you start with. Moreover, it is very resistant to spoilage – the fermentation drops the pH to a level that most microorganisms can’t tolerate. For example, I make a product called koumiss that gets to around pH = 3.6 to 3.8.
That sounds like a very interesting process. How does it react to higher cream product? Sometimes in the spring the girls give an 18% cream content when they get fresh green hays.
I haven’t tried a high-cream recipe yet but judging from the recipes available here, it’s not a problem.
I’m easing my way into it. I’ve done unfermented farmer’s cheese / paneer (basically just curd), some simple fermented cheese (feta, mozzarella, lactic acid cheese), and fermented milk where the whey and curd are not separated (yogurt, kefir, koumiss). None of that is terribly difficult.
ive made yogurt with raw milk and it came out just fine. once i get mine to 185f i cool it to 110f in a cool water filled sink then i wrap it back on the stove with a heavy blanket overnight.
