News article on buttermilk.
It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't recall it. When something should be there and it isn't, it nags me. And it is not just a word I might be looking for, but physical things, like the other half of a pair of socks or swimming caps. They cannot walk but they certainly vanish.
Yet there are missing items that you'd never miss, because you did not know they existed in the first place. Like buttermilk.
Buttermilk is the by-product of butter churning, an acidic liquid, thicker than milk, which was once considered valuable. It was used in bread making, taken as a refreshing drink and even sloshed over faces to treat teenage spots. It is low in fat and nourishing.
Shops are full of butter and
some even sell a form of "buttermilk" – but it is not the real thing left over from the manufacture of butter. The creamy coloured stuff in the cartons, though perfectly nice, is a pastiche, made by adding lactic cultures (bacteria) to ordinary milk. It is commonly known as 'cultured buttermilk'.
Concerned, I call Dairy Crest. One of the largest dairy consortiums in Britain, the company makes a lot of butter. Where is the buttermilk? I ask. And why is it not sold next to the butter in supermarket chiller cabinets? Well, a lot of it goes into the making of spreads, they say.
"Dairy Crest uses buttermilk from the buttermaking, so it is either fresh or dried in the manufacture of Clover [which is 29 per cent fresh buttermilk], Utterly Butterly and Willow. It is also used as an ingredient in the fresh flavoured milk drink, Frijj," says Lyndsey Anderson of Dairy Crest.
Once you have got past the rural euphemisms, we are not talking about much more than thickened vegetable oil in all these products (which can mean a range of oils including rapeseed). The ingredients for Utterly Butterly, for example, are as follows: vegetable oil (meaning rapeseed or other seed oil), water, reconstituted buttermilk (only nine per cent), salt, soya lecithin emulsifier, potassium sorbate preservative, lactic acid, flavourings, colourings and added vitamins. Yum. Even the added buttermilk is not fresh. It is about as butterly as WD40 and less effective, I find, for silencing the squeak on my kitchen door.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/7566654/What-happened-to-all-the-buttermilk.html
