Curd and fermented milk
Buttermilk
The thin, sour liquid left after butter is churned from ripened cream, drunk on farms and used in soda bread and biscuits.
Buttermilk was once simply what was left in the churn after the butter came: a thin, slightly sour liquid flecked with butter. Today most buttermilk is low-fat milk cultured to give a similar taste. It was a farm drink across northern Europe, and in Ireland and the American South it remains a key baking ingredient, reacting with baking soda to raise bread and biscuits.
What goes in
- Ripened cream1077%, Churned for butter.
- Lactic cultures18%, Sour the cream or the milk.
- Time in the churn215%, Until the butter breaks.
Rough parts by weight. The ring shows each input's share of the product.
Made step by step
Each drawing shows the operation for that step. Quantities and timings differ from house to house and herd to herd; this is one traditional way, in outline.
Step 1: Ferment Let cream ripen and sour with lactic cultures. Step 2: Churn Churn the cream until butter grains separate. Step 3: Strain Drain off the buttermilk from the butter. Step 4: Serve Drink it cold or use it to bake soda bread. Finished Buttermilk, by share.
Farm drink
In Irish, Scottish, Dutch and Scandinavian farmhouses, buttermilk was drunk with meals and given to labourers at harvest. In the Netherlands karnemelk is still drunk by the glass and made into a porridge. Because it kept well and cost nothing extra, it was the drink of people who sold their butter.
Soda bread and biscuits
Irish soda bread is flour, salt, baking soda and buttermilk, mixed quickly and baked, often marked with a cross. The acid in buttermilk releases gas from the soda. In the southern United States, buttermilk biscuits, pancakes and cornbread follow the same principle, and buttermilk is used to soak chicken before frying.
Where it is used
The breeds behind it
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Sources and further reading
Original text and drawings by the EveryCow desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. The shares are a rough, illustrative ratio, not a recipe: every family and dairy makes it differently. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Irish Moiled: No machine-readable author provided. Malcolm Morley~commonswiki assume, Public domain, source
- Kerry: Pedroserafin, CC BY 2.5, source
- Dexter: Hayden Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, source
- Holstein Friesian: Vista Alegre baserria, CC BY-SA 3.0, source