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