# Clabbering milk for buttermilk culture



## feistymomma

I am trying to clabber milk to make a buttermilk culture. I set a cup of raw milk, covered on the counter to clabber. I checked it everyday. Yesterday was day 3 (the other days I didn't think that it had clabbered) Yesterday when I checked it, it looked like it had clabbered so I was going to move on to the next step of adding 1/4 of the clabbered milk to a cup of "fresh" milk for the buttermilk culture. However the "clabbered" milk smelled yeasty so I decided to not proceed. My question (because I have never clabbered milk before) what is suppose to smell/look like once it is clabbered. The top of the milk was pretty thick, but underneath was still very watery.Any advice would be wonderful! Thanks


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## linuxboy

It is supposed to smell and taste like a sour buttermilk or cultured milk. Yeasty or off-smelling milk will not work. It's somewhat hit and miss with clabbered milk. Usually works best in the summer or late spring because there are more lactic bacteria around.


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## feistymomma

ah I see! Yes, after a couple of days it did smell yeasty, so I figured that wasn't right! It smelled fine for the first two day but I didn't think that the consistancy was there so I left it go, but then by day 3 it smelled like yeast bread. Will have to give it another go!


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## fmg

Yikes, I don't know if I would trust milk to culture properly without innoculating it. Just my paranoia I guess, but would it not be better to put something in it to ensure that you are culturing it with the bacteria you want, and decrease the chances of pathogens taking over?


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## feistymomma

I was following the instructions per Frankhouser (http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/BUTTERMILK.HTM) for culturing buttermilk from stratch. I believe I am just going to purchase cultured buttermilk to start this now though. I just can't seem to get it to clabber correctly, and it could be due to weather and such.


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## LLB101

I accidentally got some of the ProBios from the kids' bottles in another jar of milk I was leaving out for me to take on as I was dashing out... it sat around room temp for awhile before I got back to it and it was the most wonderful buttermilky smell and taste! 

I'm certainly NOT saying to newbies that this is safe or recommended.

But I'm going to look in to and experiment a bit more, it was yummy!

I saved some of that accidental experiment to start more and compare to ProBios and see if it had something more in the accident, and some more to see what kind of cheese it might make.

Pav, what kind of yeasts are those yeasty smells often coming from? Sometimes they are good smell for short time then smell "off"... we've talked a bunch about how I want the good sourdough taste/aroma that I grew up with.


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## linuxboy

> I'm certainly NOT saying to newbies that this is safe or recommended.


This should work really well. Recommend using second-gen batch... that filler/binder oil doesn't taste that great (I mean, a "friend" told me it doesn't taste great).



> and some more to see what kind of cheese it might make.


A theoretically tasty one in the higher-temp cooked family (alpkase, for example)



> Pav, what kind of yeasts are those yeasty smells often coming from?


sometimes straight saccharomyces. Also pichia, rhodotolura, debromyces, kluyveromyces, sometimes yarrowia and candida. Sometimes can be enterococcus.


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## LLB101

Oh well, that clears it up nicely :biggrin


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