Learn how to make cultured buttermilk or whole milk! It’s great for using in your baking recipes or as a culture in cheese making.
Welcome to another “Milk Mustache Monday” where I share how I’m desperately trying to keep up with all the milk accumulating in the fridge now that we have a family cow. Granted, my dear children are doing their level best to spill as much as humanly possible- even the baby who has taken to trying to kick her Daddy’s milk over since she sits in front of him in the center of the table. But alas, it continues to accumulate nevertheless. Praise the Lord for the abundance!! Today we’re learning how to make cultured buttermilk!
Homemade cultured buttermilk is even easier than making yogurt which is pretty darn simple. And it is a real blessing to the household economy because if you keep your culture going it is so much more frugal than buying buttermilk from the store.
You basically have three options for making homemade buttermilk.
1.) Make Cultured Butter and then your buttermilk is already cultured.
2.) Make Sweet Cream Butter and then culture the buttermilk.
3.) Add buttermilk culture to whole milk.
Obviously, the first option is the easiest. The work is done and the buttermilk is already cultured. But if you’re like us, we really don’t care for the taste of cultured butter. Or sometimes you need a higher yield than you’ll get from true buttermilk which makes using a buttermilk culture in whole milk a great option. Is it real buttermilk? No. But it ends up tasting just the same.
Ready for this recipe? Are you sure? It’s so super difficult and I don’t want to be held responsible for any injuries sustained in the making of this recipe. I don’t know if it will work with pasteurized milk without purchasing a culture. I’ve never tried or been interested in doing so since I can buy pasteurized cultured buttermilk even more easily than I could make it simply by taking two steps beyond the gallon milk jugs, reaching to the top shelf (not always easy when I’m 5’0″ on a good day), grasp the carton, pivot, and place in the cart.
How to Make Cultured Buttermilk from Whole Raw Milk or Fresh Buttermilk
Method One Using Cultured Buttermilk from the Store
•Get a jar of raw milk from the refrigerator. A pint will suffice unless you’d like to make a mesophilic starter for cheese making, then I’d use an entire half gallon.
•Add ½ cup of cultured buttermilk per quart of plain buttermilk or raw milk.
•Shake it very thoroughly and then set it in a warm place.
•Wait 24 hours. By now it should be thickened to about the consistency of yogurt. If not, wait until it is. It could take another day or two. (If it doesn’t thicken up in 24 hours try increasing the ratio of cultured buttermilk next time.)
Method Two Using a Buttermilk Culture Packet
(Buy Buttermilk Culture Powder Here)
• Warm your raw milk or buttermilk to about 86 degrees. Sprinkle the contents of the culture packet into the warm milk.
•Allow it to sit and rehydrate for a couple minutes and then stir it in well.
•Wrap the pot (or you could transfer them to jars first) in a fleece blanket and allow it to set up for about a day until it has thickened.
When you’re running low on cultured buttermilk, just be sure to reserve that ½ cup of buttermilk from the previous batch to add to your next one and then just repeat steps four and five!
13 Scratch Made Recipes Featuring Cultured Buttermilk
•Buttermilk Ranch Dressing
•Buttermilk Biscuits
•Milk & Honey Cupcakes
•Homemade Mesophilic Starter Culture for cheesemaking
•Strawberry Buttermilk Sherbet
•Cucumber Buttermilk Soup
•Spiced Buttermilk Cake with Pears
•Buttermilk Roast Chicken
•Peach Buttermilk Ice Cream (or here’s one for Blueberry Buttermilk Ice Cream)
•Pumpkin Buttermilk Pie
•Creamy Buttermilk Potato Salad
•Buttermilk Pancakes
What’s your favorite way to use buttermilk?
My Mom used to take 4 cups raw milk & add 1/4 of white vinegar and let it sit for half hour.
I have mesophilic starter in powder form and add a little to some raw milk to make buttermilk. Can I use this buttermilk for the mesophilic starter culture in the recipe for Farmer’s cheese?
I don’t see why not 🙂
I would like to know if it is possible to make mesophilic starter with dahi (yoghurt).
I don’t want to say for sure, yes or no, but I think it might depend on how hot your yogurt was cultured. I add mine to the milk at 110-120 so it’s definitely thermophilic so I’ve never tried. If you have a low temp culturing yogurt, it’s worth a shot.
Hi Quinn. I have twice tried without much success to make Farmhouse Cheddar cheese using raw buffalo milk. I followed cheese making instructions that was available online.
The problem is that the cheese after drying for 3/4 days becomes very dry and crumbly and tastes quite sour. I used 2 gallons milk, 1/4th tsp mesophilic culture,1/4th tsp liquid vegetable rennet and 2 tbsp ground rock salt .
I let the milk ripen for 1 hour after adding mesophilic culture, then added the rennet and waited 45 minutes till I got a clean break. Then I cut the curds and waited for 5 minutes before bringing up the temperature to 100 deg. F. and maintained the temperature for a further 30 minutes. Then I drained the whey for 30 minutes and put the curds into a cheese press. I pressed the curds for 15 minutes using 10 pounds of weight and then flipped the cheese and increased the weight to 20 pounds for 12 hours. The cheese at that point was well set and the color had changed to a nice yellow . I then let the cheese dry in the fridge for 4/5 days. After the cheese was well dried, I cut a small piece to check its taste and texture, I found it was very dry/crumbly and sour. What am I doing wrong? can you please help?
When you use the buttermilk culture packet, how much milk do you need?
It should come with directions. I imagine it varies depending on the product.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Bless you for this recipe, and now that I have made my very own first time cultured buttermilk, how much culture do I use to make a gallon of milk into queso fresco?