Buttermilk

No, I am not kidding. This post is about buttermilk.

The living things in buttermilk do good things to flour, and good things to meat. Here is how to make it.

1 cup of cultured buttermilk from any old store.
The culturing is the thing that matters. When you buy the buttermilk in the store, you are buying the cultures of bugs that live in it. "Gourmet" buttermilk is milk with butter, guar gum, and flavoring added. It's thick, but it ain't buttermilk. It's just thick, dead milk with flavoring.

3 cups of raw milk.
Yeah, raw. It's hard to find. Unpasteurized and unhomogenized. People have been drinking it for 6000 years. It really won't kill you.

Mix them in a quart jar, and let it sit on your counter for a day or two. Shake it morning and evening. After a day or two, the bubbles won't rise to the top like they used to, because the buttermilk is getting too thick. This is the first stage of clabbering. The cultures from the buttermilk have taken hold in the whole container, and you are good to go. You now have live buttermilk to be used in making scones.

Why go to all this bother?

Because if you leave store-bought buttermilk out on your counter for 3 days, it is just plain nasty. If you leave live buttermilk out on your counter for 3 days, it is just more buttermilky. I don't like my buttermilk straight, but I know the difference between nasty and buttermilky.

Try it some day. Live milk is better. It tastes better, and does not go bad the same way the "safe" store-bought milk does.