How to use clabber discard

Sharing is caring!

Keeping a clabber culture is very similar to keeping a sourdough starter, you end up with a lot of discard! In this post, I want to take you through a few of my top favourite clabber discard uses and why I think everyone should keep a clabber culture on their counter, if only to have access to all of this discard!

I have been keeping a clabber culture for over a year now and using it as a cheesemaking starter culture for all of my homemade cheeses. It really makes the best cheese and I am relentless over on instagram with my love for this amazing food.

I first read about clabber culture in the book ‘The art of natural cheesemaking’ by David Asher, quite a few years ago. At the time I didn’t really understand how to care for a clabber culture and because of this, my cheeses suffered. I made some really bad cheese! Im talking, take it to the chickens bad! It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to learn from David Asher himself, that I really started to be able to make good cheese with clabber culture.

Learn how to start a clabber culture here

It took me learning how to properly feed, discard and ferment my clabber culture each day, before I started to notice an incredible difference in the quality of cheeses I was making. Before I new it, I was making all of my cheeses with clabber as my bacterial starter culture and in order to always have culture ready to go, I was finding that I was feeding my culture every single day. If you have ever kept a sourdough starter, you know that when you feed it, you also have to discard most of the contents of the jar. The internet is filled with uses for sourdough starter discard, but what about for clabber discard?

My top uses for Clabber discard

In this post I want to take you through my top uses for Clabber discard. I am literally using it every single day in my homestead kitchen and I want to give you some ideas on how you can use it in yours!

In baking

Grandmas have been keeping sour milk on their counters for generations. Sour milk biscuits, sour milk pancakes, sour milk muffins; they all sound tasty and familiar. I have an old cookbook and I love that most of the recipes call for either sweet milk (fresh milk) or sour milk (presumably clabber). This really indicates how keeping sour milk is not a new idea, but rather a very old one.

I use Clabber discard in all of my baking. Any time a recipe calls for milk, water, yogurt, buttermilk or sour cream, I replace it 1:1 with clabber culture.

As a replacement for condensed soups

We all have some of those condensed soup casserole recipes. I grew up on them! Unfortunately when I started my from scratch cooking journey, I struggled because a lot of the recipes I grew up on, had condensed cream soups in them. At first I started out by making a thick milk based sauce using flour or corn starch but when you are a busy mama that needs convenience, this was more work and dishes than it was worth. Before I knew it, I had weaned out most of these recipes from our weekly meals simply because I didn’t want to have to deal with first making a condensed soup base.

When I started keeping a clabber culture I was able to bring these casserole type recipes back into our repetoir of weekly meals because instead of dumping a jar of condensed soup in, or dirtying another pot making my own homemade version, I simply dump a jar of clabber discard into my casseroles, soups, gravies and meat dishes.

If you leave the cover off your pot or casserole dish for cooking or baking and allow the steam to escape, your saucy dish will come out thick and delicious with amazing flavour.

Some of my favourite dishes to use with clabber discard are, scalloped potatoes, hamburger goulash, and noodle casseroles.

As a spreadable cheese

Clabber discard can be a cheese in itself. Simply strain it through a cloth lined colander or hang it in a draining bag to make a yummy quark style cream cheese.

I like to strain it for about 6 hours before kneading in salt to taste. This cheese tastes great on bagels, in cheese cake, and as a base for dips.

If you accidentally overstrain your clabber culture, you can use it as a crumbly feta style cheese or add it into a blender with a little bit of the whey and blend it back up into a spreadable consistency. Sometimes I deliberately strain it too far, and then blend it back up with heavy cream instead of whey. This makes a rich spreadable cheese.

As a base for cottage cheese

Cottage cheese has been made from clabber for thousands of years. I can’t tell you how many different versions of cottage cheese I have heard about since learning to make cheese, but its a lot! Cottage cheese is a simple cheese that farmers have made for centuries in very simple ways, with no added rennet or culture.

How to make clabber cottage cheese;

1. Place coagulated clabber into a pot.
2. Insert a whisk or cut the curds into navy bean size pieces.
3. Slowly start heating and stirring your curds until you reach a heat of about 110F and your curds have some firmness when squished between your fingers, this will take 10-20 min.
4. Turn the burner off and let your curds sit under the warm whey for 10 min.
5. Dump the whey off the top of the pot and strain your curds through a colander before tossing with salt to taste.
6. Smother your curds in heavy cream and serve with salt and pepper or fresh fruit.

As a replacement for yogurt

A well fed clabber culture that is being cared for each day will produce a clabber that is mild and tasty. We eat clabber discard as a replacement to yogurt, in fact I very rarely make yogurt anymore since keeping a clabber culture. If you like a thicker creamier product, strain it through a yogurt strainer or cloth lined colander for several hours.

One of my favourite ways to use clabber discard is a base for yogurt drinks. My kids love a yogurt based drink and I make a quart jar weekly and keep it on the bottom rack of the fridge for easy toddler access. My yogurt drinks are constantly changing depending on what I have in the fridge, most often however, they are simply a quart jar of clabber and a few tbsp of jam shaken together.

As a base for dressings

Ranch dressing used to be my number one Costco purchase. We have this funny story that my family recounts often, about how my daughter, Echo, loved ranch dressing so much when she was a toddler and ate it on everything! She called it “dip”. One time my sister served Echo lunch and as my sister put down her plate she said that she had no “dip”. Echos exact words were, “what is no dip?”.

Needless to say ranch dip has been a fixture in our diets for a long time and though the Costco version is ok, the homemade version is out of this world! I mix 1 part clabber, 1 part mayonnaise, and a few tbsp of a homemade ranch spice mix (I have to google it every time to see what I put in this spice mix, but I keep a big jar ready and waiting anytime I need to mix up ranch dip).

As a starter culture for sour cream

You haven’t had homemade sour cream until you have made clabber sour cream. I have made sour cream for a long time, but the clabber version is simple, thick and has that tang you are looking for.

I make sour cream the exact same way that I make clabber culture, but instead of feeding my clabber culture milk, I feed it heavy cream. I then leave it on the counter for about 12 hours until it is thick, but bubbles have not yet begun to form.

If you notice that bubbles are starting to form in your sour cream, move it to the fridge right away. Cream ferments a lot quicker than milk, so you may notice that if it is hot in the house, your sour cream is over fermenting a lot quicker than your clabber culture.

Additional resources

• Read this blog post on how to start a clabber culture
• Get my favourite book on natural cheesemaking, The art of natural cheesemaking by David Asher
• Learn to make your own cheeses using clabber as a culture in the Christmas cheeseboard ebook
• Watch this video on how to start a clabber culture

Sharing is caring!