The Ask Master

How can you tell when buttermilk has gone bad?

Cookbert

Well, if it starts hanging out with questionable companions, or maybe knocks over a liquor store—oh, never mind; not even I’m willing to go there. Here’s a simple and easy way to tell if buttermilk has gone bad. Take the carton out of the refrigerator. Look at the carton. If it says “buttermilk” on it, throw it out.

It was once believed by country folk that buttermilk was a sort of tonic and that downing a tall glass of it every morning would Build Strong Bodies Twelve Ways, turning the faithful buttermilk consumer into a better, sturdier fellow. Of course, these are the same country folk who got up every day at 4 a.m., milked 300 head of cattle, loaded 4 tons of hay onto a wagon, and then walked 12 miles through a blizzard to the cow pasture to get gored by a bull just for the character-building nature of the experience.

In short, they were complete masochists, which is doubtless why they liked buttermilk, arguably the foulest thing ever to come out of a cow. (OK, OK, there is a fouler one—but at least that’s good for fertilizing the south 40.)

Like yogurt, kefir, and sour cream, buttermilk has already gone bad before you buy it, and having done so, it’s very difficult for it to get any worse. That is, in fact, the idea—we ferment dairy products so we can keep them around longer. Acknowledging with an irritable shrug that milk is going to go bad no matter what we do, we try to con it into going bad in a way that’s not too disgusting. (Arguably, in the case of buttermilk, we failed.)

We do this by intentionally introducing a specific bacteria that will rot the stuff in a predictable way, rather than crossing our fingers and hoping that the Thing in the Back of the Refrigerator will somehow magically transform itself into a tasty wheel of triple-cream Brie by spring. It’s a bit like deliberately inducing an infestation of morning glory in your backyard in hopes of keeping out the kudzu.

Here’s how it works: Casein, the main protein in milk, is water soluble at neutral pH. However, as any child who ever thought he could make a Dreamsicle by mixing milk with orange juice can tell you (in fact, he’s telling you now), casein does not play well with acids. Once the solution becomes acidic, the casein clumps up and precipitates out in little, unappetizing-looking curds, the appearance of which moves sensitive junior scientists to tears.

All fermented dairy products are based on this principle. For example, if instead of dumping orange juice in it, you introduce into your milk the game little bacillus Streptococcus lactis, which devours lactose and excretes lactic acid, the casein will coagulate, thickening the whole mess into the distasteful yellowish slop we know and revile as buttermilk. (A note to the lactose-intolerant: Since the lactose in buttermilk has already been broken down, you can drink it without exacerbating your condition. Of course, you could also eat a tire.)

Having already been acidified, the buttermilk is much less attractive to other bacteria (not to mention humans) and will keep in your refrigerator for weeks. Eventually it may become so old that even buttermilk fanciers will regard it with suspicion, but really about the only thing it can do to make itself any more unappealing than it ever was is to grow a coat of mold.

Who officially created ranch dressing? And what is it? And why is it called ranch anyway? This must be cleared up before I dip my fries in it again.

Befuddled

The ranch dressing in which Befuddled “dips his fries” (presumably in the hopes that white-trash girls will come along and lick it off) is just mayonnaise, garlic, chives, a few other spices at the chef’s whim, and yes, buttermilk. (These questions came from two completely separate sources within an hour of each other—it must just be the time of year when a young person’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of thick, putatively edible, whitish substances.)

It’s called ranch because it was originally popularized by the Hidden Valley Ranch company, which sold its buttermilk dressing as a powdered mix beginning in the 1970s. Their official story is that there really was a Hidden Valley Ranch, a resort where the house dressing proved so wildly popular that the owners took it upon themselves to market it nationwide. My personal theory is that it was actually a by-product of some clandestine government chemical-weapons experiment, but I can’t prove it.

Unfortunately for the Hidden Valley Ranch company, it didn’t take long for enterprising imitators to reverse engineer their own versions of the stuff. While the “Hidden Valley” portion of the name was copyrighted, the word “ranch” was securely in the public domain, where it has now become the generic term for the ubiquitous dip.


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