I found a pretty good substitute for buttermilk for baking!

[thewayne]

It's not like I discovered it - I wish! I subscribe to Milk Street Magazine, Christopher Kimball's revenge for being unjustly turfed from America's Test Kitchen. I received a recipe in email recently that looked interesting, but it also included an article link about a "great substitute for buttermilk: kefir".

Color me interested!

As far as I'm concerned, since I don't live near a good dairy, there is no more such a thing as good buttermilk. (most people would argue that there has never been such a thing as good buttermilk!) I loved the buttermilk that I had as a kid and wanted it for certain applications, but the garbage they sold in the stores here was just that - garbage. The stuff they sell today is milk with an added enzyme culture that is just gross.

Well, Kimball's people had an epiphany and did some testing, substituting kefir 1:1 in recipes that called for buttermilk, testing it against a horror that some people use where you mix 1 tablespoon of white vinegar into a cup of 2% milk and let it sit for 5 minutes. They made biscuits, pancakes, yellow cake, and cornbread. The kefir worked perfectly in all applications, the only case where there was a noticeable difference was in the yellow cake where it was a bit denser but still had good flavor. The vinegar abomination was a fail in everything except the cake - go figger.

I've bought decent buttermilk from Sprouts in Las Cruces, but I don't get there very often and it doesn't last forever, so I added kefir to my shopping list, and tonight I went shopping. And I found some! It was actually a plain, unsweetened kefir 'smoothie' and it has a taste not unlike buttermilk - somewhat sour/astringent. My test recipe: Zatarain's cheddar garlic biscuit mix! I have a special butter recipe to make them quite a bit like Red Lobster biscuits.

And the recipe came out perfect. The biscuits were great, rose perfectly, flavor was excellent. I think the kefir adds a bit of zing, which is what I wanted. And smothered in the butter they are appallingly good! I finished off the gazpacho that I made last week for dinner, having perhaps a biscuit too many, which sometimes happens right after I make them.

So if you're like me and you sometimes need buttermilk but can't find a good one, try plain, unsweetened kefir! I don't know if it'll work in all applications, but it definitely worked for this biscuit mix.

https://www.177milkstreet.com/2019/02/buttermilk-substitute-kefir

Comments

[acelightning]

Well, it's only a month until Saint Patrick's Day. And the sweet, currant-studded tea cake they sell as "Irish Soda Bread" in most American stores is nothing like the staple bread in the average Irish kitchen during the potato famine! But some buttermilk (in any form) and baking soda, and some coarse whole-wheat flour, would make a filling quick-bread that went just fine with corned beef ;-)