I have pointed out that the general run of butter available to modern consumers is greatly superior to most butter made and sold before about the mid-nineteenth century. Still, I don’t want to leave the impression that that’s as good as it gets. Our mostly good and useful factory-made butter isn’t the same thing as ambrosial, ethereal, extraordinary butter, which does exist here and there—salted or unsalted, “sweet” or ripened. You are less likely to find it by sampling expensive imported or domestic brands in fancy stores than by exploring butter from small-scale producers. This is elusive, but sometimes to be encountered at local farmers’ markets. The critical factors are particularly good cream from herds managed for excellence rather than maximum volume; minute adjustment of temperature through all stages of churning and handling; and freshness so extreme that cooking with the butter seems like a desecration when you could simply sit there and eat it in its pure, virginal glory. When made with care, home-churned butter can match the flavor of this exercise in amazing grace—but I’ve never produced anything to match the beautiful nuances of the consistency.
RECIPES
HOME-CHURNED BUTTER AND BUTTERMILK: SWEET-CREAM TYPE
Despite what I consider the better texture of good commercial butter, homemade butter fresh from working and rinsing can’t be equaled for delivering the taste of cream to the nth power, cream newly translated to some rarefied spiritual afterlife. Some of this same flavor will linger in the new buttermilk, which resembles the commercial cultured product in name only.
I recommend plain sweet-cream butter for a first effort because it is the simpler of the two main types. If you tried the brief “White Magic” experiment on this page, you’ll already have grasped the general process. But for best results you need to understand a few other things.
To start with, it isn’t necessary to use only heavy cream. In many parts of the world people have always used unhomogenized milk (though usually soured), and light cream works fine as long as it isn’t ultrapasteurized. The advantage of heavy cream is that it churns faster and more completely, with more butter and less buttermilk to show for your pains. Experiment as you like with combinations of light and heavy cream. Unhomogenized cream “comes” faster than homogenized because of its larger milkfat globules.
The most important factor is temperature control. At a buttermaking demonstration, I once saw dozens of pounds of wonderful Jersey cream churned into something like a mound of yellow petroleum jelly because the ambient temperature in a sun-broiled farm shed on a hot summer day was about thirty degrees too high. The cream itself should be well chilled, which increases the proportion of crystallized fat in the complex milkfat structure (this page) and primes the original fat globules for strategic disruption. Commercial makers call the chilling stage “aging.”
Maintaining the proper temperature is many times more predictable with factory-scale machinery churning hundreds of pounds than with home equipment churning small amounts. The speediest and most practical home method for most people—the food processor—is also extremely friction-inducing. The mere action of the metal blades will raise the temperature enough during the churning process to affect the texture of the finished butter. For this reason, you must compensate or overcompensate by keeping all materials and implements as cold as possible at every stage. Old-fashioned buttermaking manuals used to suggest bringing the cream to between 55° and 65°F before starting to churn. In my experience this is a mistake for people working in modern home kitchens; the butter is likely to get well over 65°F before you finish.
Before refrigeration, farm families in my part of Pennsylvania used to store new milk and cream in springhouses built over groundwater springs that generally kept springhouse temperatures somewhere between 55° and 60°F except in extreme weather. People also churned—in the springhouse or the coolest room in the house—using wooden butter churns that provided some temperature insulation. We can’t replicate these conditions today, but we can at least seek to ensure that the kitchen is as cool as possible during churning. Never try to make butter in a hot kitchen.
Read through everything and have all equipment organized before beginning; once the butter starts to come, you’ll have to work fast.
Note: I am not giving directions for salted butter because it is very difficult for home buttermakers to work in the salt closely without grittiness.
YIELD: About ½ pound (1 cup) butter and 2 cups buttermilk (relative amounts will vary greatly with the butterfat content of the cream)
3 cups well-chilled nonultrapasteurized cream (light, heavy, or any desired mixture), preferably unhomogenized
You will need a food processor fitted with the steel blade, a wire-mesh strainer, a couple of mixing bowls, a rubber spatula, a wooden spoon or two, and a lidded storage container. Chill the processor bowl and blade in the refrigerator along with everything else. Have plenty of ice water on hand.
Set up the food processor, and add half the cream (or all of it, if you have a processor model of at least 11-cup capacity). Leave the rest in the refrigerator. Begin processing and watch closely as the cream thickens and whips. Within a few minutes or even seconds, it will start to look less white. As soon as you see signs that it is breaking into something slightly granular, stop the machine and take a look. Cautiously proceed in stops and starts until the cream is quite definitely separated into thin, cloudy whitish buttermilk and clumps of ivory or yellow (depending on the breed of cow) butter.
Set the strainer over a mixing bowl and dump in the contents of the processor, scraping out any clinging butter particles with a rubber spatula. Put the strainer and bowl in the refrigerator while you repeat the processing with the rest of the cream. Add the second batch of butter to what you have in the strainer. Pour off the buttermilk into another container.
Turn out the butter into another bowl and add roughly as much (strained) ice water as you have buttermilk. Work the butter into a mass with a stout wooden spoon or spatula. (The cheesemaker Jonathan White recommends a potato masher, which is quite efficient. In the day of home buttermaking, the usual implement was one or two wooden butter paddles.) Drain off as much liquid as you can and go on working the butter. You will see it becoming smoother and waxier under the spoon, as butterfat freed from its previous encapsulation in distinct globules comes together in a continuous mass. When no more liquid seems to be coming out, pat the butter dry with paper towels, pack it into a container, and promptly refrigerate it, tightly covered. It is more fragile than commercial butter. To taste its incomparable freshness at the full, you must use it within hours. But up to about four or five days you will still get much of that pure, delicate quality.
Taste the buttermilk, which will be a new experience to most Americans. You can drink it as is, throw it out if you dislike it, or use it for the same cooking purposes as sweet whey (this page). Store it tightly covered in the refrigerator. It will keep for four or five days.
HOME-CHURNED BUTTER AND BUTTERMILK: RIPENED-CREAM TYPE
Most butter in most parts of the world has always come from ripened cream or milk. In hot climates this is because virtually all milk is soured before use. In the colder environments of northern Europe and North America, pre-industrial buttermakers usually saved the skimmed cream from several days’ milking and added one batch to the next until they had enough to justify the effort of churning. When the housewife or dairymaid got around to the week’s or half-week’s churning, a little of this ripened flavor persisted in the butter while much more remained in the buttermilk.
Today most American consumers tend to have a marked preference for either sweet-cream or ripened-cream butter; I’m a fanatic for the latter. I urge you to try making it once you’ve had success with the sweet-cream butter recipe.
The process is really the same except that the first step is to sour the cream by bacterial “ripening” (culturing) at room temperature before it is aged in the refrigerator. Ripening not only makes the butter come more efficiently but results in the most wonderfu
l thick white buttermilk, silkier than the sweet-cream version and with a clean but complex lactic-acid flavor. (You may get an inkling of why buttermilk vendors, as described in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel Satanstoe, used to cruise the streets of colonial New York calling out, “White wine!”) The butter itself will retain a lovely, aromatic hint of fermentation.
For home cooks, the best ripening agent is commercial cultured buttermilk containing at least 1.5 percent milkfat and made without gum thickeners or salt. The true buttermilk that you end up with will far surpass this in flavor. I like to use heavy and light cream in about a 2 to 1 ratio, because I get more (and better) buttermilk than with all heavy cream.
YIELD: Roughly ½ pound (1 cup) butter and 2 cups buttermilk (relative amounts will vary with the butterfat content of the cream)
3 cups nonultrapasteurized cream (light, heavy, or any desired mixture), preferably unhomogenized
¼ cup cultured buttermilk with live cultures and 1.5 percent (or more) milkfat, as fresh as possible
Stir together the cream and buttermilk in a bowl and let stand at room temperature until it becomes thick and sour-smelling (usually 16 to 24 hours). Cover tightly and refrigerate for several hours or overnight, until thoroughly chilled.
Now proceed exactly as for the preceding butter and buttermilk made by the sweet-cream method, chilling the equipment and taking the same precautions to keep things cold.
CLARIFIED BUTTERS: A REVISIONIST VIEW
Ninety percent of the time, my general take on clarifying butter in the classic European style is “DON’T.” This kind of clarifying—melting butter to separate the clear butterfat and discarding all traces of other milk residue—removes the whole poetry of butter and irrevocably alters the intricate original profile of different fatty acids with their many different melting points. In short, it converts butter into the one form of rendered grease that can legitimately claim to taste somewhat—certainly not completely—like real butter.
True, there is the other ten percent. I grant that clarified butter has advantages for pan-frying meat, chicken, or fish at a brisk temperature without leaving smeary black speckles on the food. But it has no special point in baking, and in emulsions like hollandaise sauce contributes less body and flavor than good butter added as is. Its main virtue is the negative one of not burning when it gets above about 250°F.
The only forms of clarified butter that have positive culinary interest are non-European, and involve their own special approaches. Let’s start by explaining what happens in clarifying. With the European method, you melt the butter very briefly and gently until its finely dissolved droplets of original true buttermilk release their contents: dissolved minerals, water-soluble proteins, and tiny particles of solid casein. Some rise to the top while others sink to the bottom. Once you have skimmed the top froth and carefully poured off the butterfat from the bottom residue, you have a cooking fat less temperamental than unclarified butter. It also lasts months longer because the most perishable parts have been removed.
The process of making Indian ghee or spice-infused clarified butters is not at all the same. Instead of pouring off the butter as soon as possible, you let it cook long enough to develop a whole different complex of flavors. At the end you have not a cooking fat partly robbed of its original identity but something ready to make its own unique and decisive contribution to anything cooked in it or served with it. Ghee simmers slowly until the water gradually evaporates and the milk solids start to brown, while the composition of the fat alters far more drastically than with orthodox clarified butter. The result, when strained, is a wonderfully rich and nutty-flavored sublimation of butter. The same is true of the Ethiopian nit’r kibeh, but it also contains a marvelous bouquet of aromatics melded with the simmered-butter flavor. I suggest that you experiment with either of these in savory dishes where a recipe calls for regular clarified butter.
EUROPEAN-STYLE CLARIFIED BUTTER
My idea of what to cook in simple clarified butter would be Wienerschnitzel or a large mess of pan-fried trout—large enough that nonclarified butter might be starting to burn by the time you’d finished.
Making up a batch is an education in the vagaries of butter. Starting with a pound of butter, you may end up with more than 14 ounces or as little as 12 ounces of clarified butter, depending on the amount of water and milk solids that were in the butter before clarifying. High-fat, low-moisture butter (83 percent or higher butterfat content, by weight) will give a higher yield than the more usual 80 to 81 percent American butter.
Be sure not to discard the buttermilk residue left from the process! It is quite perishable but absolutely delicious (particularly that from cultured butter), and can be saved in small amounts in the freezer until you have enough to use as a seasoning on vegetables, add to sauces as a flavor enhancer, or put into a batch of bread dough. (Madeleine Kamman’s When French Women Cook has a wonderful walnut-oil bread using the buttermilk residue from clarified butter—gape or gappe, as churned buttermilk is known in the Auvergne.)
YIELD: Highly variable, but generally about 14 to 15 ounces (slightly less than 2 cups) per original pound
Use only unsalted butter. A pound or half a pound is the most convenient-sized batch to experiment with, but you can use any preferred amount. If you are starting with a pound or less, use a 2- to 3-quart saucepan. Pouring off the clear butterfat will be easier if it is narrow rather than wide. The bottom must be heavy enough to diffuse heat well without scorching.
Have ready a heatproof storage container for the clarified butter, a smaller one for the buttermilk residue, and a small spoon for skimming. Cut the butter into chunks of 1 tablespoon or less and place it in the saucepan over medium-low heat. Watch as it melts. It must not reach a sizzle; reduce the heat if necessary. Do not shake or stir it. As it fully melts, some crinkly-looking foam (mostly water-soluble whey proteins) may swim to the top. Carefully skim this off into your smaller container, trying to disturb the butter as little as possible. Remove the pan from the heat and let it stand a few minutes, to allow the buttermilk residue to separate from the lighter butterfat by gravity.
Slowly pour the clear golden butterfat into the larger container, being sure to stop before any of the cloudy white liquid at the bottom gets into it. Spoon off as much more of the clear fat as you can. Obsessive types can salvage the last smidgin of clarified butter by pouring what’s left into a small cup, refrigerating it until it solidifies into a cake, and scraping the buttermilk residue off the bottom with a knife.
The clarified butter should be stored, tightly covered, in a cool place or the refrigerator. It keeps for months. Add all remaining buttermilk leavings to the container with the skimmed foam and freeze, tightly covered.
Some people clarify butter in the oven. To do this, put the butter in a heatproof glass measuring cup and place it in a preheated 225°F oven until melted. Continue as directed above.
GHEE
(INDIAN CLARIFIED BUTTER)
This is the usli ghee (Hindi for “pure ghee”) long held holy in Hindu thought, as opposed to the partially hydrogenated vegetable-oil substitute called vanaspati ghee (“plant ghee”) that is now overtaking it in sales as attachment to former dietary observance weakens in much of India. The special status of real ghee reflected the belief that it had undergone two kinds of refining or subliming process. The cow herself performed the first by distilling milk for butter out of the grasses of the earth; people completed the second by subjecting churned butter to the purifying medium of fire.
In contrast to simple clarified butter, ghee is simmered for a long time to bring out complex flavors that never develop in the briefly melted kind. Once you become familiar with its heavenly toasted aroma and flavor, you may fall in love with it much as many American cooks have fallen in love with things like Vietnamese fish sauce, smoked Spanish paprika, and toasted sesame oil.
Before you begin, please remember that different kinds of butter vary greatly in water content. This makes it di
fficult to predict the total cooking time for ghee. I’ve seen recipes blithely estimating less than fifteen minutes; all I can say is that it usually takes me between forty minutes and an hour. The exact yield also will vary. To partly duplicate some of the lactic-acid flavor that churned sour milk imparts to Indian ghee, try to use butter from cultured cream. It’s best to start with at least a pound of butter—unsalted only.
YIELD: About 12 to 14 ounces (slightly more than 1⅞ cups) per original pound
Have ready a heatproof storage container for the clarified ghee, a smaller one for the buttermilk residue, a small spoon for skimming, and a small strainer lined with several layers of tight-woven cheesecloth or a clean cotton handkerchief, set over a small heatproof bowl.
Cut the butter into chunks of about a tablespoon each, and melt it in a heavy-bottomed 2- or 3-quart saucepan over low heat. It must melt evenly so that part isn’t sizzling while the rest is still solid; shake the pan to even things out if necessary. When it is fully melted, you can increase the heat slightly, but it should never be higher than medium-low. The butter will crackle and sputter as the watery part starts to evaporate. Carefully skim off as much of the rising foam as you can into the smaller container, and push the rest to one side so that you can see the color of the butter.
The pan can now mind its own business for between 30 minutes and an hour (depending on the amount of water to be driven off), but you must keep checking it at frequent intervals. Gradually the butterfat will become clearer as the water evaporates and the temperature rises; the bubbling and hissing will subside, and you will see the milky residue forming into clumps on the bottom. This must not be allowed to burn; if it becomes darker than golden brown, the ghee will taste scorched. If you see it darkening too fast, briefly remove the pan from the burner and lower the heat before resuming. Eventually the butterfat will be deep golden and have a ripe, walnutlike smell. Set it aside to cool slightly before proceeding.
Milk Page 31