Beat the Heat With a Buttermilk Treat - Melkmoes

Like much of the western part of the continent, we are experiencing a bit of a heatwave here in Edmonton and will be for about a week. Suddenly all the baking we've learned or mastered during the pandemic doesn't seem nearly as applicable. Any day where the oven is not used is a victory and even depressing the handle on the toaster brings unease and self-doubt, if not actual scorn and recrimination.

Grilling is the second-most preferable way to prepare meat after Skip the Dishes, and salads of all types have gone from side dishes to meal foundations without skipping a beat. I am grateful that in addition to these strategies, Audrey has another hot weather dish up her sleeve: a Dutch dish called melkmoes (pronounced MELK-moose).

Now, on the face of it, a cold buttermilk soup made with barley does not sound appealing in the least, but hear me out! It is actually quite good, and brilliantly refreshing on hot days such as these. In fact, calling it a soup is not wholly accurate; porridge might be more on the mark.

The base of the dish is cooked barley which can be made the day before and stored in the fridge. Excess barley can even be frozen for use in soups or in future batches of melkmoes (as Audrey did this time around).

The raisins are boiled (usually with the barley) in order to plump them up, and finely chopped green onions are added for flavour.

Once mixed in with the cooked and cooled barley, you add buttermilk (ignore the 1% on the recipe card; that's a typo) to the desired consistency and then chill it for two hours in a covered bowl in the fridge before eating. Audrey and her mum prefer the Beatrice brand of buttermilk and I have to admit that the Lucerne variety does seem to taste a tiny bit saltier, but your mileage may vary.

There are a number of variations in how to prepare and season melkmoes, but I am using Audrey's mum's recipe because it is dead simple. You can find other versions online (sometimes called kruudmoes).that include different seasonings such as turmeric. 

These dishes are typically sweetened to taste by the individual, either with sugar (our go-to), molasses or a Dutch syrup called stroop (like in stroopwafels). 

The sweetness of the sugar cuts out a lot of the intrinsic bitterness of the buttermilk but leaves enough to keep it refreshing on the palate, like the hops in an India Pale Ale. The creamy richness comes through but is not oppressively thick as one might expect. The barley keeps it hearty, the raisins add a little variation to the texture, and there's lunch in a bowl for you.

We typically end up with enough for a day or two of leftovers, although the expanding barley makes keeping back a bit of extra buttermilk a good idea. 

Most importantly, knowing that a light, cool and refreshing lunch is only a ladle away is a true blessing on days when the mercury gets to the far side of 30.