Southern cooks have a way with buttermilk. It's a brilliant "secret" ingredient in biscuits, fried chicken, salad dressings, sheet cakes, cornbread and countless other dishes. Some of my all-time favorite uses for it are among this list.

The recipes below are ones that you will want to add to your Southern cooking repertoire. Make sure the next time you're at the grocery store, you buy some buttermilk. Each of these recipes incorporates this delicious Southern staple into the dish.

1. Southern buttermilk biscuits
All Southern cooks have their own biscuit recipe often passed down through generations – and made exactly the same way today as they were 50 or 100 years ago. The recipe below is one of those examples. It’s so simple, and it produces perfect flaky biscuits every time.

2. Southern buttermilk fried chicken
Southern buttermilk fried chicken is an all-American classic, but you might not always have the time to whip up grandma’s super-secret recipe. When you need a quick pick-me-up that tastes like summers in the South, here’s a weeknight, simple but delicious, buttermilk fried chicken recipe. There is some prep work involved, but it’s so easy you can throw the brine together in the morning before you leave for work and leave the chicken to soak all day so when you get home it’s ready to go (and incredibly juicy).

3. Southern buttermilk pie
It's easy to confuse buttermilk pie with chess pie, another distinctly Southern dessert that combines milk, sugar, butter and eggs into a luscious pie filling. The difference between the two is that buttermilk pie relies on the acid in the buttermilk to thicken the filling by reacting with the egg, whereas chess pie filling uses regular milk and is thickened with cornmeal.

4. Southern buttermilk cornbread
Cornbread is one of the cornerstone foods for which the South is so famous. Every region – perhaps even every family – has its own special recipe. The recipe below gets a distinct tang and richness by incorporating buttermilk. In true southern style, there’s no sugar added to the recipe.

5. Southern buttermilk sheet cake
Southern cooks are onto something with their amazing sheet cakes. They’re so much less fussy than layer cakes — a lot easier to frost and with no persnickety assembly involved – and yet they taste every bit as delicious. The recipe below includes buttermilk, which ensures that the cake is super moist and flavorful.

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