Make Your Own Buttermilk

It's funny...when we started this blog, I thought I had a long way to come in terms of being green, embracing handmade/homemade and just generally living a more sustainable life.  It was only after racking my brain for ideas to write about that I realized I've been doing certain things the HHH way for several years now! One of them was making my own vanilla, which I posted about already.  Another is making my own buttermilk!

Once I realized how easy it is to make buttermilk, I was incredulous that I ever bought it in the first place and that, indeed, it's still available for purchase and people actually buy it.  I have several recipes that use buttermilk as an ingredient, and it was always a pain to buy it specifically for the recipe.  First of all, it comes in a milk carton, and most recipes only call for 1 or 2 cups of it.  So then I'd have the buttermilk carton sitting in my fridge and I'd feel compelled to rack my brain for other recipes that feature it as an ingredient and then to promptly make those recipes before it expired.  Not anymore!

Cookbooks are a comfort to me, and they're among the only books I actually buy anymore.  The library is my best friend, and I get almost all my reading materials from there.  But cookbooks are different...sometimes there's nothing better than paging through them idly, or furiously ripping through them when you know you need to cook something or take something somewhere, but you don't have the faintest idea what to make.  A couple of years ago, while paging through a Gooseberry Patch cookbook, I saw a tip in the margins about making your own buttermilk.  It said to add 1 tablespoon on vinegar to 1 cup of milk, let it sit for 5-10 minutes and, voila, you have buttermilk.  Skeptical, I turned to (where else?) google and did a search for homemade buttermilk.  Sure enough, there were listings upon listings for adding a tablespoon of vinegar to regular milk in order to create buttermilk!

The rest, as they say, is history.  I've been making buttermilk in my own kitchen ever since! No more buying massive quantities of it when I only need 1 or 2 cups.  This makes me want to cook with buttermilk even more frequently, because it is less of a production to do so!  I simply add my vinegar to the milk and let it sit while I get to work preparing the other ingredients.

So, for this installment of Random Recipe, I thought I'd include 3 recipes in one! The first is the actual buttermilk recipe, as detailed above, and the other are for my 2 favorite buttermilk recipes...one main dish, and one dessert!

The first recipe is for Buttermilk Roast Chicken, courtesy of Nigella Lawson, who happens to be my favorite TV chef and cookbook author of all time!  I first came upon this recipe in her cookbook, Nigella Express, but it's also available on Food Networks's website right here.  This recipe is amazing...the chicken comes out unbelievably moist and flavorful after soaking in the buttermilk marinade overnight!  It's also very inexpensive to make, and it feeds a lot of people.  What's better than that? (as a side note, don't let the small amount of maple syrup in the marinade scare you....I was weary at first, but it really adds a great taste to the chicken!)

The other buttermilk recipe comes from a favorite blog of mine and Megan's....Smitten Kitchen.  I can kill an embarrassing amount of time on this blog, but it's all worth it! I've come away with several amazing recipes from it, and each one I've tried has been fabulous! I first came across Smitten Kitchen while doing a search for, of all things, Irish Car Bombs.  (brief background information so I don't appear psychotic: Carl turned 30 in the spring and he always enjoys drinking Irish Car Bombs with friends for celebratory events. In a moment of boredom, I did a google for them, since they are pretty crazy.  You have to consume them in one huge chug because the shot of Bailey's dropped into the Guinness, combined with the whiskey, makes the whole concoction foam up and overflow.  Weird, huh?  Anyway, a listing popped up for Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes.  Get this: you bake chocolate guinness cake as the base, insert a chocolate whiskey ganace into the cake, and frost the whole thing with Bailey's cream cheese frosting.  Yumm!!! Smitten Kitchen has this recipe, and I emailed it to Meg in the hopes that one day this fall she'd make them with me.  We both got hooked on the blog!)  Anyway, here is the Raspberry Buttermilk Cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen.  This cake requires few ingredients, is incredibly easy, and tastes so fresh and lovely.  I've also made it with strawberries and blueberries in place of the raspberries.  It's a wonderful cake for a light dessert or to eat with a cup of tea or coffee. Not fancy at all, but perfect in its simplicity.

And don't forget, to make your buttermilk for these recipes, just add 1 tablespoon of vinegar (officially my all-time favorite household substance!) to 1 cup of regular milk.  Now, get cooking!!