The Essential Book of Fermentation (29 page)

Cultured butter, also called European-style butter, is simply butter made from fermented rather than fresh cream. The fermenting agents are our familiar friends, the bacilli that transmute lactose into lactic acid—precisely,
Lactobacillus delbrueckii
subsp.
bulgaricus, Streptococcus salivarius
subsp.
bulgaricus, Lactobacillus acidophilus,
and strains of bifidobacteria. You’ll find this mix of bacteria in a typical yogurt culture, available online or simply at the market in yogurt, crème fraîche, or buttermilk. Check the labels of these products carefully to make sure there are no gums, stabilizers, preservatives, or other processing chemicals. Choosing organic versions will avoid those problems. The increase in lactic acid gives the butter, and the whey and milk solids that are left, a pleasant tanginess that fine chefs treasure. The butter also lasts longer because of its lower pH.

Just as great wine comes from great grapes, great cultured butter comes from the best cream you can find, with the highest butterfat content. If you’re buying packaged cream, the butterfat content should be listed somewhere on the label. If you’re buying from a farm, determine which breed(s) of cow are in the herd. Look for a dairy that is milking Jerseys for the highest fat content. Here’s a rundown:

Percentage by weight of butterfat in the milk of the most common breeds of dairy cows

Ayrshire 3.9

Brown Swiss 4.0

Guernsey 4.5

Holstein 2.5 to 3.6

Jersey 4.9

Milking Shorthorn 3.8

The ideal heavy cream for making cultured butter would be raw, organic, and from pasture-fed Jersey cows. Pasteurized cream will work, but it should be organic, as conventional dairies often use antibiotics routinely, which can affect the action of the bacteria on the cream.

I like sweet (unsalted) butter, but you can add sea salt to taste. Note that this recipe is a two-day process. You’ll need a food thermometer to check temperatures.

Makes about 1 pound of butter

6 cups heavy cream

¹
⁄
₃
cup yogurt, crème fraîche, or buttermilk

Sea salt to taste (optional)

1.
Place the cream in a clean glass or ceramic container or bowl. Add the
¹
⁄
₃
cup of whichever starter you choose and stir to incorporate. Cover the bowl with a clean dish towel and place it where the temperature will be steady and between 70 and 80ºF.

2.
Check the cream after 18 hours. It should be noticeably thicker and taste slightly tangy. If not, allow it to stand for about another 4 hours, when it should have thickened. If you don’t want to make butter right then, place the bowl in the fridge for up to 24 hours.

3.
The cream needs to be about 60ºF to separate properly. Set the cream bowl in a bath of ice water that reaches halfway up the outside of the cream bowl. Check the temperature until it hits 60ºF, then remove the cream bowl but reserve the bowl with water and ice. You’ll need it later.

4.
You’ll now need to beat the thickened cream. Use a handheld electric mixer, a mixer on a stand, or even a hand whisk. Beat the cream like you are making whipped cream. After the cream forms stiff peaks, keep beating and it will soon turn grainy in appearance, and then “break,” as butter makers call the moment when the butterfat precipitates out of the buttermilk. You’ll recognize it by the globules of yellowish butter fat that form. Reduce the speed of your mixer so you aren’t throwing buttermilk all over the place, then stop beating and pour the buttermilk off the butter, reserving it. It’s real buttermilk—great for pancakes and biscuits, so store it covered in the fridge after you’ve finished making the butter.

Roll your butter in wax paper and twist the ends shut.

5.
The next step is to rinse all the buttermilk out of the butter. If any is left in, the butter will spoil prematurely. Pour some of the ice water (important that it’s ice water, as you don’t want the butter to melt) over the butter and mash and stir the butter with a fork. Pour off the whitish water and repeat the rinsing as many times as necessary until the water is perfectly clear. Then press the butter to remove as much water as possible. If you want salted butter, add the salt now and work it into the butter thoroughly. You can now pack your butter into small ramekins, roll it in wax paper and twist the ends shut, or put it in any container of your choice as long as the butter is covered, as it absorbs refrigerator odors. If you have more butter than you can use right away, excess butter will store perfectly and almost indefinitely in the freezer.

Crème Fraîche

In the organic orchard, if you want to grow Braeburn apples, you have to start with Braeburn apples. That’s because all Braeburn trees in the world—or all Honeycrisp, or Golden Delicious, or any other named variety—are pieces of the same tree that was the original of that variety. Apples don’t come true from seed—so if you plant the seeds from a Braeburn apple, you don’t get Braeburn trees, you get a pull of the genetic slot machine lever and an unpredictable genetic mix as a result.

It’s the same when you’re making crème fraîche. You have to start with crème fraîche. So buy the best and freshest that you can find. Here in Northern California, that would be Cowgirl Creamery or Bellwether Farms. There are excellent purveyors of crème fraîche throughout America. Use up all the crème fraîche except for two tablespoons, which will become the starter for your own batch. It’s easy. When you get down to two tablespoons left of your own batch, start another batch.

Use as you would sour cream: with blintzes, on scrambled eggs, in pancake batter, in frittatas, on tacos, with potatoes, on fruit, and in stews and dishes like beef stroganoff.

Makes 1 pint

2 tablespoons crème fraîche

1 pint heavy cream, at room temperature

1.
Place the crème fraîche in a quart-size canning jar, then pour in the heavy cream.

2.
Cover the jar with a piece of paper towel and screw on the band that holds the jar’s metal lid, but don’t use the lid. This is to keep insects, dust, and foreign microbes out of the jar.

3.
Let the jar sit for 48 to 72 hours, until it thickens (the speed of thickening depends on temperature). Remove the band and paper towel, put on the lid, screw it down with the band, and refrigerate.

Yogurt

Supermarkets devote whole aisles of cold cases to yogurt these days, but it wasn’t always thus. It was really only in the 1960s that yogurt began to be popularized, and then it was sold mostly in health food stores. Today, of course, it’s not only in every market in the nation, found as plain yogurt and every flavor and fruit imaginable, but we have those chains of self-serve frozen yogurt dispensaries, with the product usually flavored artificially and containing who-knows-what-all.

Back in the day, forty years ago, a lot of folks made their own yogurt using one of those “European” yogurt makers—basically an electric warming tray containing several small receptacles for holding the milk. They’re still sold, but they’re expensive, and you may have everything you need to make yogurt already at home.

Some interesting new science shows that rather than seeding a healthy intestinal ecosystem with new bacteria, yogurt culture actually enhances the ability of already established microbes to break down complex carbohydrates found in fruits and vegetables into nutrients capable of being absorbed by the intestines. In other words, you get more nutrients from the food you eat without having to eat more food because the yogurt enhances your intestinal flora’s power to deconstruct the tissues of fruits and vegetables. The yogurt culture works hand in hand to boost the power of the ecosystem that’s there, and then passes fairly quickly out of the body. The study was done by a team at Washington University in St. Louis led by Jeffrey I. Gordon and reported in
Science Translational Medicine
.

Yogurt culture is the same mix of microbes used to make cultured butter, namely
Lactobacillus delbrueckii
subsp.
bulgaricus, Streptococcus salivarius
subsp.
bulgaricus, Lactobacillus acidophilus,
and strains of bifidobacteria. You can buy these live cultures at www.culturesforhealth.com or at just about any market’s yogurt department by buying a half pint of plain yogurt. Look at the ingredients. It should contain no coloring, texturizing, or thickening agents, just the milk and microbial culture. If it’s organic, that’s best, because then you’re sure that there’s no bovine growth hormone, antibiotics, or agricultural chemicals used in its production, and that the cows aren’t fed GMO feed.

For equipment, you’ll need a large stockpot and a smaller 4-or 5-quart stainless-steel pot with a lid. This smaller pot should be able to fit all the way into the larger pot. You’ll also need a food thermometer with a clip so you can attach it to the side of the smaller pot, and a heating pad. Half-pint canning jars with lids and bands are perfect for the actual fermentation of the milk into yogurt.

Because you want the yogurt culture to do the fermenting, and not airborne lactobacilli and other free-floating microbes (if you want real yogurt instead of curdled milk), the milk will have to be heated to 185ºF. This will kill any bacteria that may already be in the milk and clear the way for the yogurt culture—hence the need for the thermometer. It’s also best to sterilize your pots by boiling water in them. Add the small pot’s lid, the thermometer, a large metal spoon, a jar holder or tongs, and the half-pint canning jars, lids, and bands to the boiling water in the large pot. Ten minutes will kill any bacteria on the surface of the equipment. Again, we want just the yogurt culture to ferment the milk, not interlopers from the air. Remove the equipment from the boiling water, dry it quickly with paper towels, and cover it with a clean dish towel.

I like yogurt made with whole milk, but reduced-fat and fat-free milk will also make yogurt. It may not have the creamy smooth texture of yogurt made with whole milk, however.

Makes 8 half-pints

2 quarts whole milk, preferably organic