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| Better Butter So the only way to have butter is to make it yourself. Where I work, we make about seven pounds of butter every day from fresh cream, two gallons of it, which we buy from a dairy in Delaware. Every morning, the first cook to arrive, as soon as she's got her apron on, puts two aprons over the Hobart mixer as a shroud to protect the rest of the kitchen from the showers of buttermilk which she is about to unleash. She then loads the two gallons into the mixing bowl. Set to medium, the mixer churns the cream first to fluffy peaks suitable for chocolate cake, and then, after just a few more minutes, to a chunky mix of butter and butter milk. It is crucial that the cook know the different sounds of these processes, so she can finish other chores while the churning proceeds. She would waste twenty minutes if she stood by the mixer and watched; by listening attentively, she can crumb all the breads from the day before and set out new loaves to rise before her cream has buttered. Despite its vivid visuals, modern butter making is largely an aural process. With stand-up mixers, especially older, more beat-up models whose parts whine from extended use, you can hear the motors grow louder as the cream stiffens. Then you hear a sloshing as the fully whipped cream gets battered around the bowl by the whisk. Finally, when the butterfat starts to coalesce, you hear a much more vivid kerchunking sound as the butter and whisk almost start to fight each other for control of the mixer, sending the looser buttermilk up against the walls. Hence the shroud. When the cook hears the final kerchunk kerchunk, she can get back to the Hobart before too much buttermilk has escaped. But she'll want to let the fight continue as long as possible, so the mixer can squeeze out as much buttermilk as it can, saving her work later. What is this butterfat and buttermilk? When butter is formed, the churning action of the mixer allows the milk fat to break through the cells in the cream to coalesce into butter, while the remaining cell contents -- the water, proteins and so forth -- form a liquid called buttermilk. The exact nature of this breaking out and coalescing is a mystery to food scientists, but a familiar disaster to whipped-cream lovers everywhere. I have turned whipped cream into ugly chunks of unwanted disappointment many times. Especially with those handy-dandy stand-up Kitchenaid mixers, the ones you can walk away from while they do their whipping, "walking away" often means "forgetting about." Making butter, you can't go wrong. You can walk away and do other things, and the flying buttermilk will remind you to come back and tend to your new creation. Unlike with other kitchen work, where you must always fret a bit as to whether your ingredients are of the same mind as you, willing to do what you wish of them, butter cooperates magnificently. Provided you find yourself some good cream with plenty of fat, there is no way you can go wrong. Cream just loves to form itself into butter. And once it's done that, it's just a few happy moments of running it through your fingers before you've got it -- pun intended -- whipped into shape. At your fingertips, at your service. In the last millennium churning was sometimes accomplished by setting pouches of cream on the backs of galloping horses. The age of industry brought mechanical butter churns. For the age of information, we have electric mixers. But the Hobart only brings us half way. Once the Hobart's work is done, the cook now takes over to separate the butter from the buttermilk by hand. She wants to make sure her butter is as milk-free as possible, so that she can later use it with confidence in pastry recipes that require a precise ratio of liquid ingredients to dry. If she leaves too much buttermilk within her butter, the excess liquid may surprise her later, making her pie crust too mushy, or her puff pastry too dense. So to begin the cleaning of the butter, she sets out two or three towels on a surface that does not mind getting wet. On the same table top she also rests a large colander atop a slightly larger bowl. She dumps out the mixer contents so that the golden butter rests in the colander, while the white buttermilk passes through into the bowl. With her freshly washed hands she squeezes hunks of the butter together, forcing out buttermilk. Then she gives the lumps a few more squeezes in the towels, folding the towels over them to push out the last milky drops. All this playing with one's food is more fun than mud pies, and with a material much more beautiful to see and hold. And butter in the hands is a perfect (and free!) moisturizer for the fingers. After she's worked out the last of the buttermilk, the cook weighs the butter into one-pound clumps, and forms them into shapes suitable for refrigerating (she could create four-leafed clovers, but rectilinear forms stack more easily). It's fun to practice eyeing the butter to guess how much will make exactly a pound. After just a bit of practice, one hardly needs a scale at all. Not so long ago, before Hobarts and kitchen scales, many Americans knew the joys of making butter by hand. In her book Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder described how her husband, Almanzo Wilder, when he was young, would sometimes help his mother with the churning:
On lucky days a modern-day cook can even
enjoy a little of her own buttermilk with a dessert left over from
the night before. Apple pie goes particularly well. Almanzo's mother salted her butter to preserve it; the added salt helped prevent bacteria from taking hold, and slowed the oxidation process. Today butter is salted only for added flavor; the refrigerator most often takes care of the rest. The best solution to preserving butter is not to preserve it at all, however, but to use it quickly. When fat is left exposed to air, oxygen draws away fatty acids; disassociated fatty acids are an anti-social lot. They provide the butter with nasty odors. And fat itself loves to take on whatever odors and tastes are closest to it. If you are making a roast, you'll find the fatty bits hold the strongest, best taste of the browned meat and pan juices surrounding it. But if you taste store-bought butter that has been in your fridge for weeks, you'll find it shares the aromas of the inside of your refrigerator. If you must keep your butter for a time, best to keep the fatty acids as closely attached to the fat as possible by keeping the butter as cold as possible in the freezer, and shielded from the air by several layers of saran wrap. In my restaurant, the seven pounds of butter that two gallons of cream provide are easily used up after two days. This seems an astonishing amount, but at our most indulgent, we will use perhaps 10 pounds to feed 60 people; 160 ounces divided by 60 comes to only 2.7 ounces a person. Just a little over a pat a head. Unlike its fatty counterpart, the remaining buttermilk benefits from exposure to air. Unless the kitchen is of a temperature considerably above 68 degrees, in which case more dangerous fermentation may occur, it's perfectly safe and good to leave it out, so that whatever leuconostoc citrovorum bacteria in the air can come and culture it, converting its citric acid into diacetyl, a volatile molecule characteristic of a butter flavor. This action makes the liquid thicker and tangier. As any person might benefit from a little culture, so too the buttermilk becomes denser and more complex, more engaging. Buttermilk is a richer substitute for plain milk in any dough recipe, from cookies to pancakes to muffins to bread. It makes the doughs more eventful, more interesting to taste. Buttermilk does not keep forever, but thrives in the refrigerator for at least a week. According to her daughter-in-law, Almanzo Wilder's mother made some of the best butter in New York State. This might be family hagiography, but any butter maker could sympathize with the urge to exaggerate one's success at this skill. Especially if you have to do it every day, it makes it more fun to imagine that your handiwork is about to be judged by a state fair authority, or, as Mother Wilder's was by the butter buyer from New York City. What a wonderful job to have! Traveling upstate, in search of the best local butters to feed Manhattan. If only there were still local butter-makers to come inspect our wares. Wilder includes a story of one of the buyer's visits to her husband's home. The happiness the purchaser must have felt at his lucky occupation spread off on his clients:
Perhaps the closest thing we have to a butter-buyer these days are the friends one can surprise with their handiwork. Perhaps my favorite moment comes when familiar visitors come to the restaurant and when I come to say hello, I sometimes point out that I made the butter earlier that morning. Friends who had been gingerly dabbling a few half-pats of the stuff onto their bread now carve out great hunks and slab it on delightedly, and discover how it tastes miles better than the average grocery store variety. They devour it. All those unfriendly warnings about the risks of butter go -- where they belong -- out the window, and happily astonished faces take their place. For not only are they now happy to be guiltlessly enjoying a delicious thing, they are pleased to be reintroduced to a delicacy they've taken too much for granted. Why has the art of homemade butter making so completely died off? Why do we settle for Land O' Lakes, when few of us have any idea where this land of lakes is, let alone where the butter itself was made, nor how long it has been waiting for us to buy it? One does not need a several-gallon Hobart, nor a rocking barrel churn, to make it at home; it takes only a cup of good cream, a mixer, and a little patience with flying buttermilk. Though it is considered a so-called basic ingredient, a foundation stone in the mansion of kitchen work, its importance is mistakenly masked by the fancier ingredients that lend flourish and filigree to the house. In fact, the quality of the butter is like the quality of a house's foundation -- though usually out of sight and therefore out of mind, it will essential to your every activity. If it is well made it lend your days greater ease and comfort. Well-made butter likewise makes life richer: it is good, and good for you to make. |
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© 2001 - 2008 Emily Kaiser |
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