A common staple found at our house is banana bread. Banana bread is simple to make, tastes good, and best of all freezes well; especially when I mess up and make several loaves at once. The recipe I use comes from my Betty Crocker cookbook, and calls for buttermilk. I rarely keep buttermilk on hand since banana bread is just about the only thing I use it for. One of the tricks I’ve learned over the years is to add a little vinegar to my milk for a substitute buttermilk. I still prefer using buttermilk, but the vinegar trick has always worked in a pinch.

Several months ago I was searching the internet for the exact ratio of vinegar to milk for my buttermilk substitute and stumbled upon an article about buttermilk powder. It made perfect sense to me that buttermilk would be available in powder form since milk can be found in powdered form, I had just never thought of purchasing buttermilk this way. I really didn’t think much about the buttermilk powder until I started baking banana bread again this fall. Since buttermilk is a milk product, the price fluctuates based on the market price of milk. One week I might pay $1.19 and the next I might pay $2.19. Of course if I catch it at the supermarket and it’s about to expire I might get lucky and pay $.99.

I lucked into finding the buttermilk powder at Wal-Mart the other day. I wasn’t looking for it. In fact I rarely shop at Wal-Mart. I might step foot into a Wal-Mart about every six weeks because they are the absolute lowest on price for a few of the staples that we buy, but other than that I avoid them like the plague. I made the trip down the aisle with the buttermilk because it was the baking aisle, the aisle with all the stuff that I want in my kitchen, but can’t buy all at once.

The buttermilk I purchased is manufactured by SACO Foods. I purchased a 12oz. container for $3.12 which will produce the equivalent of about fifteen cups of buttermilk; close to one gallon of buttermilk. I don’t have to worry about the milk ruining before I use it, and will be able to store it in the refrigerator with no worries of throwing out spoiled buttermilk. The powder is simply added in with the dry ingredients of the recipe, and the water is added when the liquid ingredients are added to the recipe. This product not only tastes good, but helps me save money as well since nothing will go to waste.

Tags: Buttermilk

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 2:08 am and is filed under Baking at Home, Grocery Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.