Wisconsin Buttermilk Powder

Buttermilk, or cultured skim milk, is indispensable to the baker.  It is used to give added tang to baked goods and as a leavening agent to make products rise more.  Buttermilk is acidic and it reacts with baking soda, an alkaline, to create carbon dioxide bubbles in the batter and hence makes the batter lighter.

Try this in your bread, scone, or muffin recipes.  Use it as you would dry milk or mix with water--about 1/3 cup powder to make one cup liquid.  This is a wonderful product for making your own buttermilk pancake mix and the same buttermilk that we use in our mixes.  We have included the directions for this make-your-own pancake mix with each buttermilk package. 

If you are not going to use it within a year, we recommend that you store it in mylar or freeze it.  Making Your Own Buttermilk Pancake Mix You can make a better buttermilk pancake mix than you can buy.  We'll tell you how to make the mix and how to use it. See how to make your own pancake mix here.  Using Dry Buttermilk in Recipes Everyone likes the tangy taste of buttermilk.  But the alkaline in baking soda neutralizes the acid and buttermilk and eliminates the tangy flavor.   That's why you can't taste buttermilk in many recipes.  But you can add more buttermilk than the soda can neutralize to deliver a buttermilk flavor.  If you do it with liquid buttermilk, you have too much liquid in your recipe.  In most r ecipes, you can add more dry buttermilk powder to your recipe without upsetting the balance. Both dry buttermilk and liquid buttermilk are acidic.  You can substitute reconstituted buttermilk from dry powder for the buttermilk you buy in the stores. We usually don't bother to reconstitute buttermilk powder for baking.  We simply add the water and the powder separately and continue with the recipe. For the buttermilk powder that we use, we mix 1/3 cup powder to one cup water.  Our economy package of buttermilk powder makes over 25 cups of reconstituted buttermilk.  Estimated Shelf Life We contacted several manufacturers and asked about shelf life.  Heat is always a consideration.  When stored in a cool place, we were told that the product had a very long shelf life--from three years to indefinitely.  Based on what we were told, we believe that pancake mixes made with buttermilk powder, when stored in a cool basement, will last five years or more.  

Ingredients: Cultured skim milk. This product may contain traces of soy, eggs, wheat or nuts.