Powdered Buttermilk

products tested (listed alphabetically)

• SACO Buttermilk Blend

Powdered buttermilk is a staple of commercial baking, but what's out there for consumers? What we found is a product called Buttermilk Blend, manufactured by Saco Foods. We decided to consider what is the closest thing to "real" buttermilk these days.

The buttermilk found in the dairy case today is not your grandmother's buttermilk, a tangy, watery substance left over once cream had been churned into butter. The liquid buttermilk available today is made more after the fashion of yogurt, in which harmless bacteria are added to milk to break down the milk sugar (lactose) and in the process create lactic acid, which thickens the milk and helps to produce a tangy flavor. According to information on Saco's Web site (www.sacofoods.com), its powdered buttermilk is made from the byproduct of butter-making at nearby dairies—basically, your grandmother's buttermilk minus the water. Eager to see if we preferred one of these products over the other—and how the usual stand-in for buttermilk, soured milk, would fare—we baked up three batches of biscuits and three chocolate cakes and held a blind tasting.

Tasters generally found the powdered-buttermilk and soured-milk biscuits to be lighter and fluffier than the liquid buttermilk biscuits, and several tasters preferred the flavor of the biscuits made with soured milk (soured by adding 1 tablespoon white vinegar to 1 cup whole milk), describing them as "more buttery." Nonetheless, each batch of biscuits was palatable. All three batches had a pleasingly tender texture, and they all browned and rose nicely.

When it came to chocolate cake, tasters found the powdered-buttermilk cake to have the fluffiest, most even texture and the most mellow flavor. Tasters detected a slightly sour tang in the cake made with liquid buttermilk, and they actually preferred this fuller flavor. The soured-milk cake was liked least of all, with several tasters finding it flat-tasting and overly moist. Still, these differences were small in scale. As one taster said of the three cakes, "I wouldn't refuse any of them."

All in all, do we recommend Saco's Buttermilk Blend as a replacement for liquid cultured buttermilk in baking? Yes. It's easy to use (the powder is added to the recipe along with the dry ingredients, and water is added when the liquid buttermilk is called for). It has a longer shelf life than liquid buttermilk (one year refrigerated after opening, as opposed to about one month). And it's also cheaper when purchased in a 16-ounce container (which gives you the equivalent of 5 quarts of liquid buttermilk for $3.29; the product is also available in 3.2-ounce boxes of four packets, the equivalent of a liquid quart, for $1.29, about the same price as a quart of buttermilk from the dairy case). Then again, in a pinch, a cup of milk and a tablespoon of vinegar don't do such a bad job either.