We described the characteristics of buttermilk in our previous article. Most important is that it is more acidic than ordinary milk and that helps things like pancakes and biscuits rise nicely when they interact with baking powder and baking soda.
You can make your own buttermilk substitute by simply adding a tablespoon of white vinegar to milk to acidify it. It really works very well as you can see in the video below.
I first tasted buttermilk at my grandmother’s house in Lincoln, Nebraska. My mother and I had taken the train from Columbus out to Lincoln to visit her family there. I was probably 10 or 12 years old. I came in from playing with my cousin Steve, climbing trees and the like, to find that they were going to make pancakes with buttermilk. I tasted the buttermilk and didn’t like it much. “But,” they said, “wait till you taste the pancakes. They will be like you poured a lot of butter into them!”
And, yes, the pancakes were very good indeed.
Some years later, when I started collecting recipes, I got that buttermilk pancake recipe from my mother’s sister, Elsie, and have saved it ever since. Since it was originally my grandmother’s it is probably over a hundred years old, and was probably made from real buttermilk. Here it is:
2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
As a memory guide, Elsie pointed out that you can summarize the recipe as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2.
Mix dry ingredients and add buttermilk until you get a “thickish batter.” Cook in a large cast-iron pan or a griddle. Turn the pancakes when they start to show bubbles.
Buttermilk was originally formed by allowing the milk to stand to separate the cream allowing it to ferment a bit. Then, after churning, they let the buttermilk ferment and thicken. But once centrifugal cream separators were developed, you didn’t have to let the cream set and begin to ferment before churning the butter. So, another way to make buttermilk was developed, where they took part skim milk and added the same bacteria that were found in fermenting the original buttermilk. These were usually Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc citrovorum. This was called “cultured buttermilk” and is commonly found in the US, where there is little original buttermilk available.
I have been making excellent pancakes using Friendship Buttermilk for over 20 years. But recently, our local market dropping the Friendship buttermilk, offering only Kate’s Buttermilk. You can still buy it at ShopRite and at some Stop and Shops.
So, it seemed like a good idea to compare the two. We made up two identical batches of dry ingredients and eggs, and added buttermilk to each until we reached a “thickish batter” stage. We initially cooked 4 pancakes on each time on our Presto griddle. But recognizing that the griddle’s heating was uneven and measurement of each pancake aliquot was difficult we then simply put one carefully measured ¼ cup of batter on the griddle from each recipe, and placed them close together so they would have the same cooking temperature.
The result:
The pancake on the right, made with Friendship cultured buttermilk, clearly rose higher than the one made with Kate’s buttermilk. We would assume then that the Friendship buttermilk is slightly more acidic and reacts with the leavening more that the Kate’s recipe did.
How did they taste? We tasted a slice of each pancake without any added butter or syrup. The Friendship pancake had a rich buttery-milky flavor, but the Kate’s pancake was quite bland, with no distinct flavor at all.
So, how do the two buttermilks themselves taste? Not surprisingly, the Friendship buttermilk tasted more like buttermilk. The Kate’s just tasted sour. No real butter-milky flavor at all. So, we are sticking with the Friendship for our pancakes. An experiment with biscuits showed similar differences in rising as well.
Sorry to say, despite all the positive press Kate’s has gotten, we found it quite disappointing.
Blue cheese dressing is really easy to make, and a lot tastier than packaged dressings. It only has 3 main ingredients, and perhaps three or four possible additions. Here’s our recipe, culled from several we looked at. We adjusted the flavor a bit using the additions, and you can do the same. Just taste the dressing and decide if it needs any more enhancement.
¼ cup sour cream
¼ cup mayonnaise
2 oz blue cheese
1 Tb chopped Italian parsley or celery leaves
1 tsp white vinegar
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
¼ tsp garlic powder
(buttermilk)
Start by mixing the sour cream and mayonnaise in a small bowl and add the blue cheese. Using a wooden spoon, press some of the cheese pieces against the side of the bowl to dissolve them and give the dressing more flavor. Mix in the parsley.
Taste the dressing. It would probably benefit from the tartness of white vinegar, Add the vinegar, and taste again.
If you think it needs a bit more edge, add the Worcestershire sauce.
Taste again. If it still seems a bit bland add half the garlic powder, and the rest after tasting again.
Feel free to experiment to get the taste you prefer. The proportions above lead to a nice, tangy sauce. If you like it a little thinner, stir in some buttermilk. We liked it the way it was.
You can get a more full-bodied flavor by using Gorgonzola over plain blue cheese. But in any case, you have made up your blue cheese dressing in about a minute. Enjoy it.
We have written several times about making a chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot. Briefly, you steam the chicken under high pressure for 15 minutes, and then cut the meat off the main pieces and refrigerate it and toss the bones back into the pot with the backs and wings, add 4 cups or so of water, a leek, carrots and celery and pressure cook for 30-40 minutes more to make the chicken stock.
Then making the stew itself amounts to cooking some carrots and celery pieces in butter for 10 or so minutes until soft, sauteing a few mushrooms in butter in a large pot, adding veggies and making a flour-butter roux and slowly adding broth from the pot until you have a nice thick gravy. Then add a little cream for richness and throw in the chicken meat. Then you bake it to make a pie.
If you make biscuits and put them on top of the chicken stew, it’s a pie or chicken ‘n’ biscuits. If you make biscuits and serve the stew over the biscuits, it’s chicken a’la King. And if you put the stew into little casseroles and top with a puff pastry crust, it’s a chicken pot pie for sure!
But what if you want a pie with a nice flakey, buttery crust? Well, this doesn’t take a lot of time except that you really must chill the pie dough for an hour to keep the butter from melting prematurely. The rest is easy.
You can find a bunch of buttery piecrust recipes by a simple search, and they all more or less require 2 sticks of butter, salt and 2-1/2 cups of flour and some ice water. But there are some differences. The important advance in ideas about butter crust came from a relatively recent article by Kenji Lopez-Alt in Serious Eats. In it, he theorizes that the flakiness of piecrusts come from fat coating the flour, rather than the other way around. And, that you should coat the flour with fat and then add the rest of the flour to interleave flour and butter in the crust. This works really well. One writer, writing for Inspired Taste, explained this recipe quite clearly.
Making the piecrust
½ lb (2 sticks) very cold unsalted butter, cut into little cubes
2-1/2 “scant” cups of flour (see below)
1 tsp Kosher salt
6-12 Tb ice water
(for dessert pies add 1 Tb sugar)
The real trick here are those scant cups of flour. One way to achieve it, is to spoon the flour into a measuring cup and then level off the cup with a table knife. That means you have to repeat this 3 times: 2 for the cups and one for the half cup.
A better way is to just weigh the flour out, and forget all that spooning. If you just scoop flour out into your measuring cup, the flour will weigh just about 5 oz or 142 g. If you sift the flour, 1 cup will weigh about 120g. But if you use that spooning technique, you will have only about 112 grams in a cup. This is about 4 oz instead of 5. So, it really is a scant cup.
But instead, why not just weigh it to start with? Let me note that I use King Arthur flour which may be more or less dense than some other flour, But the weight will still be what you use.
Use a food processor
The easiest way to make this crust is in a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can use a pastry blender for about a minute instead. I did it both ways. They both work fine.
Add 168 g (1-1/2 scant cups) of flour to the food processor (or bowl).
Add the salt (and sugar if a dessert) and pulse or stir briefly to mix.
Lay the cubes of very cold butter on top of the flour and mix it in by running the food processor for around 15 seconds. You now have the fat coated flour. You should be able to pinch some together and have it hold its shape. Lacking a food processor, just work the butter into the flour with a pastry blender.
Add 112 g more flour (another scant cup) and pulse for a few seconds to mix the buttery flour with the new flour. (Or mix with a fork or pastry blender.)
Turn the flour mixture into a bowl and sprinkle ice water over it, starting with about 6 Tb of water. Mix together with a fork or rubber spatula.
Keep adding tablespoons of ice water and mixing until you can press the dough together in the bowl with your spatula and it will hold its shape. Depending on the flour and the humidity, this may take 12 or more tablespoons of water. In a warm kitchen in warm weather, you may have to refrigerate the dough during the ice water mixing process.
Take the flour out of the bowl and mound it into a ball. If it crumbles, put it back in the bowl and work in a little more icewater.
Cut the ball in two, press each one into a thick pancake, wrap with plastic wrap (or use a zipper bag) and refrigerate for at least an hour. The dough will keep for several days, and you can freeze if you want to.
When you are ready to make the pie, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm for a few minutes. Preheat the over to 375˚ F (206˚ C).
Then place it on a floured surface or pastry marble and press it slowly across the dough with a rolling pin until it begins to give. Then start rolling it out until the dough is wider than your pie pan. Fix any cracks by pinching them together.
Then fold the dough into quarters and lift it into the pie pan and arrange it with the extra dough hanging outside the pan. Don’t cut it off yet.
Pour the chicken stew into the pie pan, roll out the top crust and lay it on top of the pie. You may not need all the stew. Freeze the rest for another pie later.
Fold any extra dough from both crusts under the top crust and then go around and pinch the border to look a little decorative.
Cut a couple of long slits in the pie and put it in the oven.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the pie filling is bubbling. Serve hot.
You will have made a delicious, flakey, buttery piecrust that your diners will love. Serves 3-4 people.
You can make your own breakfast sausage in just a few minutes and get just the flavor you want. In our version, we leave out the common onion, garlic and hot peppers, which are great in dinner sausages but overpower eggs or pancakes. Instead we add a bit of apple to the sausage, which adds moistness and an interesting accompanying flavor.
We mix the spaced together in a mortar and pestle that we liberated from our chem lab decades ago, but you can easily buy them online. Lacking one, you can chop the spices together with a knife on a cutting board, or use a blender.
1 Tb dried sage
1 Tb dried thyme
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp brown sugar
1 ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
1 lb ground pork
1 tart apple, peeled and cored
Mix the dry ingredients together in a mortar and crush them with the pestle, until the spice blend is uniform.
Using your hands and/or a wooden spoon mix the spices into the ground pork in a medium bowl.
Mince the apple pieces by hand or using a food processor and mix the apple into the pork mixture. You may not need all of it.
Use a ¼ cup measure to scoop out the amount of meat for each sausage.
Cook the sausages on a 375˚ F griddle for 4 minutes per side. Press them down so they are flat. You might want to set a timer to keep from over cooking them and drying them out. The sausages are done when the internal temperature is around 145˚ F.
Keep the sausages warm while you prepare the pancakes or eggs to go with them.
This doesn’t take much longer than cooking frozen sausages, and the flavor is really terrific! Form all the remaining sausages into patties and freeze them in layers, separated by wax paper in a plastic freezer container. Makes about 1 dozen good-sized sausages.
Nerano is a charming Italian fishing village south of Naples on the tip of the Sorrento peninsula, just across from Capri. It is here the Spaghetti alla Nerano was invented in the 1950s. Stanley Tucci introduced flocks of American fans to this classic dish in the first episode of his “Searching for Italy” series, And recently the New Yorker published a definitive recipe for this fabulous dish. We tried it a couple of times and have some suggestions to make it work a little better.
While the ingredients are just spaghetti, zucchini, cheese and maybe a pat of butter, there are some details in the recipe that make it work so well. First of all, the zucchini slices are deep fried, not pan fried, and you want them to get quite brown, nearly burnt to develop the flavor in an otherwise pretty tasteless vegetable.
Confronted with the need to thinly slice three or four zucchini, we resorted to our Cuisinart food processor, using the 2mm slicing disk.
Probably the most important thing about this dish is assembling while everything is still hot, so the cheese will melt. In professional kitchens. Two people assemble this dish. We’ll tell you how we did it with only two hands below.
The basic ingredients are:
3 medium zucchini
8 oz spaghetti
Deep frying oil: sunflower or canola
2-4 oz grated cheese (Parmegiano Reggiano or Provolone del Monaco or Caciovavallo)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 bunch basil leaves, cut up
Pat of butter
Grate the cheese in a food processor, and remove to a bowl
Slice the zucchini into thin, uniform slices. We used a 2mm slicing disk.
Deep fry the zucchini slices, until quite brown. For 3 zucchini, we divided them into 4 batches for frying.
Put the zucchini on paper towel on a plate to let them drain.
Bring a couple of quarts of salted water to a boil and add the spaghetti all at once, stirring with a pasta fork to make sure it submerges.
Heat the zucchini and garlic in a skillet.
If your spaghetti requires, say, 4 minutes to cook, scoop out a cup of pasta water around the 2 minute mark.
Put about 10% of the zucchini in the bottom of a medium bowl, stir in a handful cheese and add hot water to help melt the cheese into a creamy sauce.
As soon as spaghetti is about done, lift a little out of the boiling water and mix it into the bowl. Do not drain the spaghetti: it will cool too quickly, just lift it right out of the hot water.
Then in several layers, add zucchini, hot spaghetti and cheese and stir, adding more hot pasta water when you need it. The zucchini and cheese tend to clump together, so this layered mixing helps distribute it throughout the pasta. You may not need all the spaghetti. But when you have mixed all the zucchini and cheese with some of the spaghetti, stop and arrange the mixture on a serving plate.
Top with a pat of butter and the basil leaves and serve right away.
You can serve this as a main dish or as a side dish. Here we illustrate a side dish serving with a few meatballs to make the meal. You will be amazed at how good this simple meal can be!
I came across this really simple recipe for a savory tomato pie, published in Sarah Leah Chase’s newspaper column in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. Chase and others trace the recipe back to Ruth Reichl, but I haven’t found anything with Beard’s imprimatur. However, a lot of Beard’s writing was collections of other people’s recipes, so we may never know who first made this really simple and delicious pie, which amounts to a biscuit dough crust and about 4 other ingredients. All I can tell you is that it was a hit at a group picnic/party I took it to recently, and so I’ll pass it on to you.
Basically, you make a batch of buttermilk biscuit dough and press it into a pie pan as the crust, fill it with a layer or two of sliced tomatoes, and top with a mixture of mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and bake it.
This recipe works fine with ordinary hothouse tomatoes, but it will probably excel with fresh garden tomatoes as well. We’ll soon find out!
First make the biscuit dough
2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 Tb cold unsalted butter (3/4 stick, or 3 oz.)
1 cup plus 2 Tb buttermilk
Chopped parsley
Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Then cut up the butter into little cubes by slicing the stick of butter lengthwise along two long axes and then cutting it into slices along the short axis, which will each fall into four pieces. Then blend the butter into the flour with a pastry blender and toss in a small handful of chopped parsley, and mix in the buttermilk. No need to roll the dough out: just press the whole ball into a 9-inch pie pan and spread it to fill the pan and up the sides.
Then make the tomato pie
4-6 ripe tomatoes, in thick slices
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 ½ cups mayonnaise
Fresh basil leaves, chopped
Salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 375˚ F.
Spread the tomato slices on top of the biscuit dough, filling the pan, and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and sprinkle the chopped basil on top.
Mix the mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and spread over the top of the tomatoes.
Spread some more chopped basil leaves on top.
Bake about 35 minutes.
Let it rest for 10-15 minutes and serve warm, or chill it and serve it cold. Cold, it is a great addition to a picnic or party.
Even though popovers are really easy to make, they have the reputation of being difficult and in the domain of expert chefs instead of a simple dinner roll anyone can turn out in very short order.
For some years, we have been using this somewhat elaborate recipe by Marlene Sorosky Gray first published in Hearst papers some 10 years ago. It even requires overnight refrigeration, but makes great popovers. However, Gray’s text suggest that almost any of a dozen common variations work just as well, so we set out to find the easiest one.
We started with this really simple King Arthur Baking recipe, since their bakers have a way of simplifying things for the average user. And we must say that recipe is a winner too, and terribly easy to follow. There are only 5 ingredients in their popovers (and ours) and the recipe is so simple, you’ll have it learned in no time.
4 eggs
1-1/2 cups milk
1-1/2 cups flour
3 Tb melted unsalted butter.
1 tsp salt
There are three tricks we use to make these popovers work.
Start with warm ingredients, no cold milk or eggs.
Use non-stick spray on the popover or muffin pan.
Cook at 450˚ F and finish at 350˚ F.
Making Popovers in a Popover Pan
Preheat the oven to 450˚ F. Place an empty cookie sheet on the very top shelf to keep the tops of the popovers from burning.
Place the 4 eggs in a bowl of hot tap water for 10 minutes, to bring them to room temperature.
Heat the 1-1/2 cups of milk in the microwave for 75 seconds to make sure it is warm.
Melt the 3 Tb butter in the microwave for 1 minute at 50% power.
Empty water from the bowl, dry it slightly and reuse it to mix the batter.
Break the eggs into the bowl, and beat them with a whisk, and then add the milk and beat briefly to mix the eggs and milk together.
Add the flour and salt and mix with a whisk until uniform. Small lumps are OK, but beat the mixture for a minute or so until the batter is somewhat foamy.
Mix in the melted butter.
Spray the popover pan cups with non-stick spray and then fill each cup about ¾ full.
Bake at 450˚ F for 20 minutes, without opening the oven.
Reduce the heat to 350˚ F and bake for 20 minutes more, without opening the oven. If you bake them at 350˚ F for only 15 minutes, you will get fluffy popovers that deflate a bit as they cool, but are very tender. At 20 minutes, you get a firm shell that will hold its shape.
Take the popover pan out of the oven and serve the popovers hot, right away, with butter or butter and honey.
If you must let them sit and cool, you can reheat them in the microwave for 1 minute (this keeps them soft) or in the oven for 5 minutes (this hardens the crust somewhat.)
Some people serve popovers with things like chicken salad and scoop the salad into the popover shell. We think that’s nuts. Serve the hot popovers alongside the cold salad, so they stay hot to spread with butter (and honey).
Leftover popovers, still make a nice shell for breakfast and lunch dishes. We reheated a popover, split it open and filled it with scrambled eggs.
We also make a nice cold meatloaf sandwich with a cold popover. You could even use them as hamburger rolls! They are also great snacks with jam or with peanut butter!
Cooking time in various pans
We baked popovers countless times in various pans to give you the details. We used three different sized pans.
The standard popover pan holds 5 oz. of batter and makes six towering popovers. Just follow the recipe above.
The large muffin pan holds 2.5 fluid oz. of batter and makes a dozen moderate sized popovers.
The small muffin pan has 2 oz. cups and makes a dozen modest popovers.
Large Muffin Pan
Making popovers in a muffin pan with only 2.5 oz. of batter is much the same as using the big popover pan: you just get smaller popovers. Be sure to spray the pan well with nonstick spray as the nonstick coating is probably not as effective as the popover pan’s is.
350 for 10 minutes
350 for 15 minute
350 for 20 minutes
We found that you need to reduce the cooking time at high temperature (450˚ F) from 20 minutes to 15. We tried several different times at 350˚ F: 10 or 15 minutes gave you light puffy popovers that sagged a bit as they cooled. But at 20 minutes, we got a firmer shell that is probably better for serving a group, or for filling the inside.
Smaller Muffin Pan
2 oz muffin pan for 15 minutes at 350
2 oz muffin pan for 20 minutes at 350
In the small 2.0 oz. muffin pan, you have a lot less leeway, since the muffins are smaller. As before we found that 15 min at 450˚ F worked well, and 15 minutes at 350 ˚F gave you nice puffy popovers that deflated a bit when cooled. But if you went to 20 minutes, the popovers were quite dark and firm although not quite burned. Stick with 15/15 for this size pan, although you could try 15/17 if you wanted to experiment. Of course, ovens vary and these times may be different in your oven.
Minimuffin pan
Our minimuffin pan holds 24 small muffins, with each cup containing only 1.5 oz. So after a couple of tries, we found that you get perfect mini-popovers by baking for 15 minutes at 450˚ F and for 10 minutes at 350˚ F. They are puffy but fairly firm and would be great for a party.
So, you can see that it’s easy to make popovers in any kind of pan and the baking is little more than half an hour. Have fun impressing your friends!
Croque Monsieur is just a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with a little extra love. It’s quick enough for a weeknight dinner and way better than your boring ham and cheese sandwich. You make it using white bread: either a crusty French-style loaf or good old Pepperidge Farm hearty white. You want to stay away from whole wheat and sourdough, since the bread flavor will cover the delicate flavor of the sandwich itself. Using good French bread will result in crusty sandwiches, with a bit of crunch: that is what croque means!
The whole secret of this sandwich is the simple bechamel sauce you spread on the bread. It is particularly helpful if you are making these sandwiches from left-over baked ham, which may have dried out a bit. The bechamel brings it back to life!
You can make these sandwiches in a sandwich grill, a griddle, or a cast iron frying pan: use whatever works best for you.
1 Tb unsalted butter
1 Tb flour
¾ cup milk
Sea salt
Freshly grated nutmeg
4 slices country white bread
4 thin slices of ham
2 thin slices Gruyere cheese
4 Tb melted unsalted butter
The bechamel sauce
Melt the 1 Tb of butter in a saucepan until it’s bubbling but not browing.
Stir in the 1 Tb flour and cook for a minute.
Add the milk and stir with a wire whisk.
Cook it down until the bechamel thickens.
Add a dash of sea salt and a pinch of fresh nutmeg.
The sandwiches
Spread two slices of the bread with the bechamel.
Add two slices of ham to each slice of bread.
Add cheese to cover the ham.
Top the sandwich with the other slices of bread.
Melt the 4 Tb of butter in a microwave at 50% power for about 1 minute.
Brush the ham sides with the melted butter and put the buttered side down on the grill or griddle. Brush butter on the top sides, as well, and close the sandwich grill, or cook on the griddle and flip the cook the second side.
Cook until the cheese is melted and serve at once.
Variation
Some people like to spread the bechamel on the top of the sandwich, and sprinkle it with grated Swiss or Parmesan cheese, and brown the sandwich under a broiler. This is delicious as well, and since the sauce and cheese are browned, it is not particularly messy to eat. Make me another one, please!
With the great success of the Pressburger chain, where they cook the burgers on both sides at once, in a big press, we wondered if we could do something like that at home.
Well, we have a sandwich grill where both sides are heated, so we tried to cook our burgers on it. Our grill is a Cuisinart Griddler, but any sandwich grill will do.
We set the grill to 375˚ F, and let it heat up. Then we buttered a couple of hamburger buns and toasted their insides on the griddle, and then set them aside to keep warm.
Then we weighed out two burgers. We like our burgers at a little more than ¼ pound, so we weighed two lumps of meat to about 4.25 oz. Then we seasoned them with salt and pepper and put a little pat of butter on each one.
Then we flipped the two of them onto the griddle and closed the lid, pressing down on the meat to form it into patties. We set a timer for 1 minute and opened the grill. If you like them a little darker, 90 seconds is plenty.
We checked the interior temperature with an instant-read thermometer, finding it already about 152˚F. We put a slice of cheese on one and let it cook another 15 seconds or so and then put them both on buns.
The burgers were tender and juicy, and delicious. By cooking both sides at once, you loose less moisture and get a moister burger!
They were so good, we’ll probably continue to cook them this way.
But what if you have a crowd? We’d suggest toasting all your buns ahead of time and keeping them warm, while you cook the burgers 2 or 3 at a time. Since they take only a minute, you can have them all on the table before the first one comes off the gas grill!
Of course, if we’re in a hurry, we’ll still go to Pressburger!
Food Science Institute 