The recipes I’ve shared for homemade yogurt, buttermilk and sour cream have uses from breakfast to dinner and sweet to savory. Serve yogurt on its own or sweetened with honey or jam. Use it or sour cream as a cooling garnish on spicy beans and hot soups. I mostly mix buttermilk into other recipes, but it makes smoothies tangy and some people drink it straight up.
Oftentimes, any of these homemade dairy products can be swapped for the others with similar results. Spoonfuls of sour cream and yogurt differ in taste, but that usually becomes unnoticeable when heated with other ingredients. When a recipe calls for buttermilk, I often strain homemade yogurt and use that whey instead. It has a buttermilk-like density, and the remaining yogurt becomes thicker and creamier.
I make muffins with all three of these homemade dairy products and substitute them freely. All work particularly well with tangy spring fruit, like rhubarb, and sweet summer ones, like huckleberries.
Oats and whole-wheat flour give these rhubarb muffins a fairly dense texture. Use old-fashioned rolled oats; thick rolled oats remain quite chewy, and quick-cooking and instant ones make muffins gummy. I typically mix in Wheat Montana’s Prairie Gold whole-wheat flour, which has a fairly fine grind, or an even more delicate whole-wheat pastry flour.
In baking, applesauce imparts some effects of sugar and butter, so I partly replace these whenever the apple flavor enhances a recipe. I usually make muffins with home-canned smooth-style applesauce, which has a density similar to store-bought applesauce, but thawed Frozen Chunky Applesauce adds texture.
Fresh or frozen rhubarb works equally well in these muffins, but I recommend thawing frozen rhubarb in a colander and let it drain gently. If stirred in still frozen, the extra liquid makes the muffin batter denser and slower to bake through.
Tangy Rhubarb Muffins
Makes 12 muffins
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 cup whole-wheat flour
1 cup rolled oats
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/3 cup cultured buttermilk, sour cream or yogurt whey
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup applesauce
1-1/2 cups finely chopped rhubarb
In a large bowl, combine the all-purpose and whole-wheat flours, rolled oats and brown sugar. Mix in the baking powder and soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg.
In a large measuring cup, beat together the egg and buttermilk, and then mix in the melted butter and vanilla. Stir the buttermilk mixture into the dry ingredients in batches, alternating with the applesauce; scrape flour from the bowl’s bottom until just combined. Gently fold in the rhubarb. Divide the batter among 12 buttered muffin cups.
Bake at 400°F for 20 to 25 minutes, until cooked through and lightly brown on top. Pull the muffins from the oven and let them rest for five minutes before removing them from the pan.
Julie Laing is a Bigfork-based cookbook author and food blogger at TwiceAsTasty.com.