If you don’t have buttermilk handy, you can make sour milk as an alternative. This is a quick and easy ingredient to make that comes in handy for a number of recipes. I will show you how to make sour milk and how you can use it in some of your cooking.
When you hear the words sour milk, you may think of milk gone bad or milk that is spoiled. However, sour milk simply means that the milk has fermented slightly. It’s the same process that is used to make buttermilk, and while it won’t taste quite the same as buttermilk, it’s a good facsimile.
What’s important to remember about sour milk is that it has a certain level of acidity. This is vital when using it as a replacement for buttermilk. It’s the acidity that makes buttermilk vital to waffles, pancakes, biscuits, and more.
Why is the acidity important? It’s the acidity in sour milk or buttermilk that cause your baked goods to rise, or in the case of pancakes and waffles, your fried foods.
Once you know how to make sour milk for a recipe, you won’t have to spend money on buttermilk anymore curious you can simply use the ingredients you already have in your kitchen, save a little money, and know how to make something that is very useful in baking.
What do you use sour milk in? You can use it in biscuits, cookies, buttermilk pancakes, waffles, and more. How to make sour milk for baking as a substitute for buttermilk? You can actually use the two ingredients interchangeably. What that means is that if your recipe calls for a cup and a half of buttermilk, you can simply substitute that with a cup and a half of sour milk. The ratio is 1:1 on these two ingredients.
How to Make Sour Milk from Milk
Let’s start with a recipe that involves turning milk into sour milk. Even if you don’t have buttermilk, you probably have some regular milk available in your fridge. Powdered milk works as well, so you use that to for this recipe, if that’s all you have or if that’s what you prefer to use.
How to make 1 cup sour milk? Just take a cup of regular milk, either raw or pasteurized, and set it in a bowl. Put that in the fridge overnight. Don’t cover it and it will turn into sour milk by morning. This takes time, of course, but it is the most effective way to make homemade sour milk from regular milk.
How to Make Sour Cream from Milk
Making sour cream at home is easy and you only need a few ingredients. I will show you how to make sour cream from milk and vinegar. Just mix together 1/4 cup of milk, two teaspoons of white vinegar, and one cup of heavy whipping cream. If you don’t have white vinegar handy, you can always use lemon juice at a ratio of 1:1.
Combine the whipping cream and vinegar together and pour that into your milk. Mix all of that together in a jar you can seal the jar tightly, and then shake vigorously to get a good mixture.
Take the lid off the jar and cover with a piece of kitchen parchment paper and secure that with a rubber band or tape. Leave your jar of milk mixture out on the counter overnight or as long as 24 hours. This allows it to ferment and turn into sour cream you can keep it in your fridge for up to two weeks.
How to Make Sour Milk with Vinegar
I want to give you another way to make sour milk. Keep in mind that this isn’t spoiled milk that has gone bad but rather milk that has been fermented through time or a combination of the right ingredients.
We are going to make one cup of sour milk, and to do that we will mix together a tablespoon of vinegar and then enough milk to make up a cup from your mixture. Stir that together and allow it to stand for five minutes.
Presto! You have sour milk in an instant. If you don’t have vinegar on hand or prefer to use something else, you can use the same amount of lemon juice.
You can use this sour milk recipe to make quite a few things, including buttermilk pancakes and buttermilk biscuits. This is also how to make sour milk for banana bread and other recipes that call for sour milk.
The homemade sour milk we’re creating here is the same as sour milk you could buy in the store and can be used the same as you use buttermilk in a recipe.
How to Make Cottage Cheese from Sour Milk
Once you have made sour milk, you can turn that into cottage cheese. Allow your milk to sit for about 24 hours, and this will turn sour and lumpy. Remember it needs to stay in the fridge for this process.
When it is ready to be turned into cottage cheese, it should be lumpy and look a lot like gelatin. If it isn’t ready, it will be very liquid, and it should be allowed to sit for up to 24 hours to become thick and lumpy.
The next step is to take a strainer and place it into a bowl. You need to have space between the dip in the strainer and the bottom of the bowl. That is where the whey will drip leaving behind milk solids for you to use.
From there, you need to skim off any extra cream from the top and use that for sour cream. Then, pour out the milk from your container of sour milk and allowed to pass through the strainer.
Cover this bowl of strain milk with a towel and allow it to sit for a few hours. All that should be left in the bowl is milk curd and whey.
Once it has set for a few hours, you can scoop the curd out using a spatula on the strainer. Try not to smear it a lot when you scoop it out. You don’t want the curds to break up.
You now have cottage cheese you made yourself, and what’s left in the bottom of the bowl can be used as whey.
How to Make Cheese from Sour Milk
Did you know that you can also make cheese from sour milk? It’s likely that you have everything necessary to make cheese at home in your kitchen already and you didn’t even know it.
I want to show you a quick and easy way how to make cheese from sour milk. This will be a simple cheese, but you can add to it and flavor it to create different kinds of cheese from the base cheese that we make.
I already showed you how to make sour milk with lemon juice or vinegar. You can use that method or use straight sour milk that sat overnight in the fridge. For this recipe, you will need a half gallon of sour milk. S
tart by pouring 1/2 gallon of sour milk into a large sauce pan. Place it on the stove and bring that to a boil.
Once that starts to boil, take a cheese cloth and line a colander place that over a large pot in in the sink. After your milk has started to boil, take the heat down to low and add three tablespoons of white vinegar to it.
Turn off the heat immediately and take the saucepan off the stove. Stir that mixture around until you see curds and whey starting to separate in the saucepan.
Next, pour out the milk into your colander and pull the sides of the cheesecloth together until they touch each other. Then, squeeze your cheesecloth together to empty out the extra liquid.
You have cheese at this point, though it is kind of crumbly yet slightly firm. It will be similar to queso fresco, which is a Latin American cheese, or Indian paneer cheese.
You can also use the same cheese in any recipe that asked for cotija or feta cheese.
