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<DIV>Before the buttermilk thread dies, I have to add my own buttermilk
story. When my children were small in the early 1970's, we lived on the
family ranch in Southern Oregon. My grandfather, who lived next door, kept
a milk cow and was generous with gallons of milk. Being a good "granola
mama" of the time, my meals were organic and my cooking was healthy and from
scratch. With lots of fresh whole milk, butter making was part of my
routine. I didn't spend hours with a butter churn though, I just poured
the cream in the electric blender and butter appeared in a very short
time. When the butter forms, buttermilk is left. My kids loved
it. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Fast forward to the early 1980's; we were living in Alaska and milk
was made from powder and water. No more fresh cream and no more homemade
butter. On a trip down the Alcan we stopped for breakfast at a cafe
in Centralia. My son, who was about eight at the time, looked at the menu
and when the waitress came to take the order, he asked for pancakes...and a
large glass of buttermilk. We were puzzled and even the waitress tried to
talk him out of it, but he was firm in his request. When breakfast arrived
he took a big drink from his glass of buttermilk and I will never forget the
look on his face! We were all watching him and all began laughing at his
reaction. "What were thinking?", I asked. "I thought it would
be buttermilk" he replied; "but this is just ROTTEN!". It was only then
that I realized that he expected the home grown variety, not the sour cultured
kind. The waitress saved the day by sprinkling a packet of sugar in the
glass and stirring it in.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>So, there were two schools of old-fashioned butter making...one tradition
was to allow the cream to sour before churning; the other tradition was to make
the butter from sweet cream. Buttermilk from the sour
cream is much like clabber. Buttermilk from the sweet cream
is sweet and tastes much like milk with tiny fleck of escaped butter in
it.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The best use of today's cultured buttermilk, aside from baking, is to mix
is with mayonnaise and blue cheese for an excellent salad dressing!</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Carla</DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>