Amish cooks often have a lot of buttermilk on hand, either from milk that has gone sour or from the leftovers after churning.
Either way, the flavorful milk adds wonderful taste to almost anything it touches from cakes, cookies, pies, and even chicken. Below are some favorite Amish buttermilk recipes. Even if your pantry is pretty bare of ingredients, if you have buttermilk on hand, you can do some amazing things! Buttermilk is, for Amish cooks, often that "secret ingredient" that makes a good dessert or a good dinner great.
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I remember a scene from the Charlotte's Web movie when I was a child, the powers of Wilbur had just given him a refreshing "buttermilk bath." Wilbur was sparkling, so I'm guess buttermilk also have some therapeutic skin properties.
❓ Buttermilk FAQ
Some of the best cookies I've ever had were some buttermilk cookies that I bought at a bakery in the 1990s in northern Indiana. The cookies were soft, fragrant, and perfectly frosted. Buttermilk can be added into cookies, coffeecakes, and breads to infuse freshness, flavor, and texture. Meat, especially chicken and turkey, can be fried in buttermilk for a meat that is soaked in flavor.
Amish cooks use it because they often have buttermilk on hand from milk that has fermented (many Amish have at least one or two cows at home for milk). It'd be a shame to waste such a great baking and cooking companion! Here is a link to another website that talks about proportions and substitutions when using buttermilk.
Buttermilk can be used to enhance the flavor of breads, brownies, muffins, cookies, waffles, cakes, and even used for frying chicken! And who doesn't like buttermilk pancakes? Buttermilk-ranch dressing tastes great on a salad also!
🥣 Buttermilk Basics
For the chicken below, talk about flavor! And keep in mind, you don't have live on an Amish farm to use buttermilk, you can pick up a carton of buttermilk at the supermarket. The mass-produced buttermilk is never as good as the small batch kind found on a farm but will do well in a pinch. Amish buttermilk recipes are super with the homemade or the store-bought buttermilk.
I am not a huge fan of buttermilk in chocolate recipes, I just don't personally think it is a great combination. Buttermilk in cornbread? Heaven! You can also church buttermilk into homemade vanilla ice cream for a rich flavor. Really, even just a tablespoon of buttermilk enhances the flavor of any batter or frostings! (buttermilk cream cheese frosting is a favorite!). There is a sweetness that buttermilk infuses in some dishes, a tang in others, it is interesting to sample its flavor versatility.
Amish Buttermilk biscuits are good with whatever jellies or jams are your favorite. Or you can serve this with your favorite easy recipe chicken dish like chicken ala king! After seeing these recipes you'll always want to keep some buttermilk in the fridge! (adding buttermilk does pack on a few more calories into a dish, but no sodium to worry about!). So let's get to some Amish buttermilk recipes!
🥛 5 Amish Recipes Using Buttermilk
Perfect Buttermilk Fried Chicken
Best Buttermilk Pie
delicious Amish recipe
Refreshing Iced Buttermilk Cookies
Buttermilk Lemon Blueberry Muffins
We've had some readers asking for blueberry recipes lately. This is the season of bursting-with-flavor blueberries, lush u-pick patches, and baked goods infused with the taste of these wonderful berries.
Amish Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes
A delicious twist on tradition!
Mari Orton
Kevin...Just finished Abraham's Redemption. It was a good read and I enjoyed it. At the end you have recipes and in the directions for Salome's raspberry pudding pie it mentions lemon, but there is no mention of lemon in the list of ingredients. How much lemon (I assume it is lemon juice)?
Kevin
Yikes, sorry, Mari...it is just 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Thanks for catching that. You also commented about the wide "white spaces" in the book...I apologize for that, that definitely wasn't purposeful. I will check that out on a revised printing, if I could shave some pages off the page count, that'd make the book cheaper to produce which would be great, so thanks for telling me!