SACO's real Buttermilk adds a "tender touch" with convenience and economy
When your great-grandmother prepared her special baked goods with buttermilk, she knew they would be light and tender every time. From experience she had learned that the golden flaked, tart liquid leftover from butter churning made a definite difference in the texture and volume of her finished products.

Most of the buttermilk-based recipes you find today were originally formulated around real buttermilk, not the cultured skim milk product available in the dairy case today. Fluid "Cultured Buttermilk" is not really buttermilk! It is a cultured skim milk that does not have the same properties as real churned buttermilk.

SACO Foods, Inc., a Wisconsin-based dairy product firm, developed a Cultured Buttermilk Blend for consumer use made from real sweet cream churned buttermilk -- the by-product of Wisconsin butter making. It was, and still is, the first real buttermilk available to the consumer in nearly 50 years.

Buttermilk... a long-time favorite food
Although history does not record when buttermilk was first used as a food, it does show that butter was eaten as long as 5,000 years ago. It was such a treasured commodity that Ancient Hindus based the market value of their cows on the amount of butter churned from the milk. Some early civilizations actually used butter as money.

Because our ancestors wasted nothing, it's a safe bet that buttermilk was also used in many wonderful ways. We do know that early American settlers found many ways to use the butter flecked liquid leftover from their home churned butter. Hundreds of recipes for breads, cakes, pancakes and pies were specially planned to include this treasured liquid.

Those early cooks probably were not sure why, but they did know from experience that buttermilk gave their baked goods a lighter, fluffier texture which they could not achieve from any other liquid they tried in the same recipe.

Butter churning was a tedious job
Butter churning was a long, arm-aching process which produced two delicious and valuable products from one container of cream. It all started with cool cream (sometimes sweet, but often slightly sour) which was swished around many times in a deep wooden tub or crockery churn with a long-handled dasher.

When the butter was separated from the cream, the buttermilk was drained off and reserved as a nourishing drink or as a cooking ingredient. Because it was often impossible to keep it cool, the buttermilk soon became thick and tart... a consistency and flavor that was savored by pioneer families.

The changing marketplace
Butter was a farm-made product until the 1920s. As the dairy industry modernized, the butter-making task was shifted to rural creameries where butter was mass produced and the buttermilk, once treasured in country kitchens, was often discarded or used for animal feed.

It wasn't until the 1940s that creameries began to dry the churned buttermilk for more efficient use in baked goods, ice cream mixes, candy and other dried mixes. However, it was not sold on the consumer market.

Today's fluid "Cultured Buttermilk"
To meet consumer demand for this tangy beverage, milk processors began to produce an artificial "Cultured Buttermilk". However, the butter makers and cooks of earlier times would have many questions about the "Cultured Buttermilk" today's consumer purchases from the dairy case.

The product sold today in the dairy case is labeled "cultured" because a specially prepared culture of beneficial bacteria, developed under laboratory conditions, is added to skim milk to produce the acidity, body, flavor, and aroma so characteristic of old fashioned "soured" buttermilk. When added to skim milk, these bacteria multiply and convert some of the milk sugar (lactose) to lactic acid. The lactic acid gives the cultured milk its tart flavor. The thickness is the result of the bacterial action of the milk protein.

Although fluid "Cultured Buttermilk" is an excellent beverage, providing many nutritional benefits, it does not have the same chemical properties as real churned buttermilk.

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