Earl Cruze Wants You To Drink Your Buttermilk: "It's Better Than Viagra"

To its fans, buttermilk is magic. In recipes, the tangy leftovers from the butter-churning process can act as a leavener for a perfectly flaky biscuit, be the tenderizer for the ultimate Southern fried chicken brine or add tartness to buttery mashed potatoes.

The bravest of aficionados drink it straight because of claims that it can cure whatever ails you. Earl Cruze, the paterfamilias of the Cruze Farm dairy outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, and a fourth-generation dairy farmer, drinks about a quart a day of his products. "Buttermilk may not solve the world's problems, but it can help. It's better than Viagra," he boasts.

Colleen Cruze Bhatti is Earl's daughter and the current farm operator and face of the business, along with her husband, Manjit, whom she met while making deliveries to the restaurant where he was cooking. She believes that people who claim they don't like buttermilk just haven't been drinking the right stuff: "Most people who make buttermilk don't really like it or drink it. At Cruze, we really love it!"

The main reason many people don't agree with Bhatti's opinion is that most commercially available buttermilk isn't really legit. Instead, it is skim milk that has been soured by the addition of cultures and enzymes to raise the acid level and then thickened with artificial ingredients so that the texture mimics that of legitimate buttermilk. Traditional buttermilk, on the other hand, is the by-product of churning cream into butter. Big dairies assume nobody is actually drinking their buttermilk, so sometimes they even use expiring whole milk as the base since it's going to be soured anyway.

Colleen explains the difference between Cruze Farm's buttermilk and commodity buttermilk: "Ours is cultured like everyone else's, but we also churn it. We're not in any hurry, so we can let ours culture in the tank for three days." Part of the reason there is no rush is the size of the herd at Cruze, which is only about 85 Jersey cows. "You have to decide how big you want to be," says Colleen. "I like where we are and the fact that we can still maintain our level of quality."

Coleen and Manjit moved into the family farmhouse after they got married, but her parents still live across the street while Earl continues to operate a small "cow share" program for area residents seeking raw milk. It's all on the honor system with customers traveling to the farm to pick up gallons of chemical-free, hormone-free and antibiotic-free milk from grass-fed cows. Earl leaves the milk in a cooler for pickup, but customers must have signed a cow-share agreement in advance to comply with state regulations.

In addition to his small raw-milk business, Earl is still around to share his decades of dairy knowledge with his family. "You have to love this business," Colleen explains. "My dad worked all the time for his entire life, and he probably thinks we've hired too many people to run the business. But he still teaches us. The information just pours out of him...usually when something breaks."

For such a small farm, the demand for Cruze products is enormous. John Fleer, the chef-owner of Rhubarb in Asheville, North Carolina, and one of the primary forces behind the resurgence of Appalachian cuisine, is a huge fan of Cruze buttermilk, although even he wasn't accustomed to drinking it straight. In a piece he wrote for Oxford American titled "Ode to Buttermilk," Fleer shares that "only grandmothers and dogs trying to get rid of gas drink that stuff." (A phrase that seems to have been in desperate need of a little reordering to offer Grandma a little dignity.)

Fleer has since been converted. "When I was cooking at Blackberry Farm and in search of great local products, I found Cruze. At the time, they were the only farm anywhere that was doing a real churned buttermilk. Not only was it an authentic regional product, but the quality and flavor was amazing. There are other farms doing something similar things these days, especially in terms of using high-quality milk to make buttermilk, but my relationship with the Cruze family is now two decades long, and they still stand out in terms of quality and flavor."

Colleen realizes that the way to make new fans is to get people to taste Cruze's products, and she has established a stable of what she calls Cruze Farm Girls, a multicultural collection of winsome young ladies who travel to events wearing the farm's uniform of gingham head scarfs and aprons. The Farm Girls work at farmers' markets and food festivals evangelizing about Cruze products and offering shots of creamy, fatty milk to attendees.

"Fat on the top of milk is good," exclaims Colleen, "and people are starting to recognize that again. Buttermilk has been around forever, and drinkable yogurt is just its cousin." Cruze primarily ships within about a hundred-mile radius of the farm, and even though those cows are already getting a workout, Colleen is constantly seeking out new customers and new products to sell.

A recent entry into the ice cream business is actually a return to the days when the family sold home-churned ice cream in their own little shop and at local markets. When Earl accepted a large offer from a developer to build a big-box store on top of the shop, the family certainly benefited financially, but they were effectively out of the soft-serve game.

Colleen never forgot her love of churning, and she took a class in ice-cream making in Pennsylvania in addition to her agricultural studies at the nearby University of Tennessee. Once she entered the family dairy business full time, she encouraged her parents to let her start cranking again. Using a base of just five ingredients: farm egg yolks, cream, milk, sugar and salt, Cruze Farm combines its ice cream base with seasonal flavors to create a constantly changing roster of flavors. Colleen writes each flavor's name in her delicate script on the individual pints that the company sells in selected markets.

Cruze also releases flavored versions of its milks when supplies allow, including traditional chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. The farm has also experimented with coffee milk and chai milk to great success. Unfortunately, like the ice cream, these products have to remain secondary in importance to the main moneymakers. Colleen explains, "We have to provide whole milk first, then buttermilk. We love to sell the ice creams and the flavored milks, but we have to balance the demands of chefs, retail and market sales."

Chef Fleer is going to keep doing his part to maintain the demand on his end. "I appreciate the quality of the product and the fact that they are trying to do the right thing — sustainable production, authentic flavors, a sense of history blended with a look toward the future. Why would I not work with them?"