Susan Handley, age l0, of sarasota, Fla., for her question:
How do they make buttermilk?
The calendar says that summer is just around the corner. The sultry days ahead will call for cool salads and cold drinks. We can choose from dozens of different summer drinks, but old Andy thinks that not one of them compares with a glass of coal, refreshing buttermilk.
No one would mistake buttermilk for butter or whole milk, but you cannot make it without also making butter and both butter and buttermilk must be made from milk. Bath are made from the rich butterfat that We call cream. This butterfat is suspended in fresh milk as tiny globules that measure from 3,000 to 20,000 to an inch. The globules of cream are too small for our eyes to see and they are lighter than the rest of the milk. .If fresh milk is allowed to stand a while, they rise to the top in a layer of rich cream.
Our ancestors let their milk stand in wide crocks and skimmed off the cream as it floated to the top. A modern dairy whizzes the fresh milk through separators that separate the cream from the milk. The cream must be pasteurized to destroy its unfriendly bacteria, but dairymaids of olden times did not know of this process. Modern dairies heat the cream to perhaps l60 degrees Fahrenheit and then cool it fast to about 40 degrees. The purified cream is left to settle at this cool temperature.
The next job is churning. The cream is a rich mixture of fatty globules in a milky liquid. The churning separates the butterfat from the liquid. The cream must stay cool and dairymaids usually chose a cool morning to do their churning. They used a deep wooden tub and a sturdy dasher stick to dash and bash the creamy mixture to and fro, to and fro and the arm aching jab took a long time.
Modern dairies aggitate or bash the cream around in stainless steel drums. Inside the drums there are ledges called baffles that plop plop the cream up and down, up and down. After about 45 minutes, the cream breaks up and the butterfat separates from the milky liquid is l00se globs. Now is the time to drain off the liquid and the liquid is buttermilk. The wads of butterfat are left in the churn and bashed into butter.
Some of the tasty buttermilk will be fed to calves and other farm animals. some of it will be put into bottles and cartons and sent to market. Buttermilk has little or none of the creamy fats found in fresh milk. But it contains all of the bone building tooth building energy ingredients of whole milk. It is a nourishing drink for every day of the year. But on a sultry summer day, a glass of cool buttermilk is just the treat to quench your thirst and give you some peppy energy.