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Old Dec 07, 2013, 02:43 PM
The_little_didgee The_little_didgee is offline
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Member Since: Apr 2013
Location: Ontario Land
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Quote:
Originally Posted by costello View Post
That was pretty much how I'd imagined it. Then I started wondering if an argument could be made that wet feed vs dry feed would make the difference. So I thought, ok, add water to the non-buttermilk group's feed. Then I wondered about calories. But I guess you could give them as much food as they wanted.

Maybe I was overthinking it.
You could control calories. I am sure there is a way to calculate how many a growing chick requires based on their weight. But... metabolism can potentially interfere with your results, since it would be different for every chick.

You could use a control group, which would be plain feed with your two treatment groups: feed with buttermilk and feed with water.

Identifying extraneous variables is hard. There are so many possibilities. Differences in metabolism, size, and activity level can definitely impact your study results if they are not controlled. This involves a lot thinking.

Quote:
Originally Posted by costello View Post
The term buttermilk used to refer to three different things: milk that had become soured; the milk left over from making butter with sweet cream/milk; the milk left over from making butter with sour cream/milk.

The buttermilk we buy at the store is cultured. It has added bacteria to simulate the traditional soured buttermilk.

I made some butter yesterday just so I could see the traditional buttermilk. It's pretty easy. Put some cream in a small jar with a lid and shake it until the fat separates into little butter clumps, then drain off the buttermilk.

I gave the butter to my coworker since I'm currently dairy-free, so I don't know how good it was. I sipped the buttermilk, and it just tasted like skim milk to me. That makes sense, since the alternative to buttermilk suggested by the authors of the 1925 article was dry skim milk.
So old fashioned buttermilk wasn't bitter?

My mother used to make homemade yogurt. It was a bit sour but a lot tastier than the stuff sold in stores. She used to sweeten it with berries and honey. Have you ever tried making this?

Quote:
Originally Posted by costello View Post
Btw, I learned that you can actually overchurn butter. If you keep shaking the jar past the time that the butter and milk separate, they'll go back together and not separate again. I got some bad advice from two friends who'd helped make butter as children. They remembered having to shake the cream for a loooonnnngggg time. So they thought I hadn't worked at it long enough and told me to keep shaking. Maybe to a child it seems long, but it only took about 10 or 15 minutes.
Wouldn't this be called homogenization?
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Thanks for this!
costello