HOMEMADE BUTTER (AND BUTTERMILK)

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Fat I Love

My love affair with dairy fat has been going on for at least three decades behind metals beaters pirouetted in pillows of cream and slippery pieces of butter-stained paper.

As it turns out, my earliest memory in the kitchen is of the most famed dairy fat of all—butter.  I am standing at my grandmother’s refrigerator, its long, almond-colored right door pushed back entirely, reaching on my tiptoes for a stick of butter.  Curling my little fingers over the smooth, vellum-like wrapping, I persevere until I nudge it off the shelf and onto the floor.   I rescue the austere little package from the linoleum and pull back paper slowly, expectantly, and hold the slick sheet in one hand and the pale yellow brick in the other.  One of the bar’s perfect corners beckons, and, naturally, I bite off a generous, creamy knob.  Then I wrap the stick back up with the precision of a four-year-old and go about my morning.  As for why I elected to eat butter straight up, I have no recollection whatsoever.  But I do recall that bite sending me into a state of genuine satisfaction.  Oh, was I pleased with myself.

Several years later, my learning how to make creme Chantilly, or whipped cream, as we called it, was motivated solely by the desire to stake my claim to the empty carton of heavy cream.  Thankfully, whipping cream is an easily acquired skill, meaning that I could set out to execute my master plan after only a lesson or two.  Once I had poured the cream into the mixing bowl and had sent the mixer’s beaters off to perform, I would tip my head back and open my mouth.  On my tongue I would rest the soft tip of the inverted carton, sometimes mangled in my impetuous efforts to open it, and I would wait, while breathing in its essence of wet paper and cream, for the streamlets of cream to slide down the waxed walls and drip heavily and lazily onto my tongue.  Bliss.  Drop by drop.  Which was eventually interrupted by the beaters peppering the sides of the metal bowl—round and round and round they would go—until the cream had inflated into cumulus billows.  The puffed cream, slightly sweetened and flecked with vanilla, would go out to the table, and I would stay in the kitchen licking my prize.  Mission accomplished.

Over time, I met other manipulations of cream—viscous clotted cream, tart Mexican crema and French crème fraîche, half-and-half (an imposter)—and I fell for them all.  Before my more cynical years, if you were a food developer and used “cream” in the product name, I would buy it.  Cream soda (actually just vanilla soda intended to accompany ice cream), creamer (the mystery powder made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, corn syrup solids, and other septisyllabic wonders of food scientists), caramel-cream candies (creamer with wheat flour spun into small tan pucks with white bulls-eye centers).   These were mere infatuations.  They had to be because they were not real cream.  Science cannot synthesize cream’s singular mouthfeel (thus, the word “creamy,” not “creamery”), its milky perfume, and its unchanging ability to satiate.  And so I have been faithful to cream all along, even for those years when butter was out of vogue.

Even so, every now and then, I would see butter on the side.  For weekend breakfasts, I would tuck pats of it in between warm pancakes and would spread it furtively on bread when eating out.  I would hide it in chocolate-chip cookies and scones and omelets.  Butter, my mistress.

Recently, while attending a talk with Amanda Hesser, the New York Times food editor, and Daniel Patterson, the two-star Michelin chef, I heard something that I had vaguely suspected for several years.  Cream and butter are one in the same; only several minutes with the mixer (or a good deal longer if using the shaking or churning methods) separate them.  This revelation was a bit similar to finding out that your second lover is really your first in drag—shocking, but something you can come to accept over time.

And so I set out on the path to acceptance almost immediately.  I bought three pints of heavy cream (I am a raw-dairy girl, but any heavy cream, pasteurized or not, should work) and put them out to warm to room temperature.  After dusting off my rarely used stand mixer, I poured the cream into the bowl and put on the whisk attachment.  To prevent spraying my kitchen with buttermilk late in the process, I topped the bowl with the clear plastic cover that my mixer came with; alternatively, I could have engirdled plastic wrap around the opening.

Turning the mixer on to medium-high speed, I inhaled the clean sweetness of pure, naked cream.  A few minutes later, my cream had reached the whipped-cream stage and soon, after the mixer had beaten much of the air out of it,  quickly turned into concentric circles of dense ribbons.  Longer yet and the cream started to take on the palest shade of yellow as it morphed once again into something resembling dry scrambled eggs, the kind you would only consider eating if heavy with melted Gruyere.  I was starting to think that my cream would live in a state of eggy purgatory forever, when tiny drops of milk—yes, friends, my first glimpse of buttermilk—started to seep forth.

Things progressed fast and frenetically from here.  More and more buttermilk emerged, and a dense mass begin to grow on the whisk with its every turn.  Thud, thud, thud.  And, suddenly, there were two distinct materials in the bowl: butter and buttermilk, with the mixer throwing the former angrily against the smooth metal walls, thereby creating a violent tsunami of white gouache liquid.  But for the plastic cover, I would have been drenched.  And then, as I turned off the mixer, silence.  I poured off the milk and stripped the butter from the whisk.  After kneading the mass for a few minutes on a cutting board, no more milk crept out.  And there it was.  My butter.

That night, I mashed in some gray sea salt to it, and we spread thick slabs onto crusty bread.  I generally avoid bread because it makes me feel dreadful, and I endeavor to use foods when they are the height of their season.  In this case, I had taken cream from cows eating dried alfalfa and oats and buds, not the vital, fast-growing grass of the spring and early fall.  But some things must be done in the name of love.  And this is one.  The result, homemade butter, was far more satisfying than butter I’ve ever bought, even that made from the same cream I used.  Yet I cannot exactly articulate the difference.  Perhaps its flavor was more fully developed and its texture softer.  Everyone eating with us that night agreed that it was better in some noticeable way.  And I smiled, knowing that two of my great fat-loves and I were together at last.

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Homemade Butter
Inspired by Daniel Patterson’s “Curd Mentality”

Pour six cups of heavy cream into the bowl of a stand mixer with the whisk attached.  Cover the opening of the bowl tightly with plastic wrap to prevent liquid from splashing out near the end of the process.  Turn the mixer to a medium-high setting and wait between eight and 15 minutes, while the cream passes from whipped cream to over-whipped cream to scrambled-egg fluff to butter and copious amounts of buttermilk.  Set aside the buttermilk.  On a cutting board, knead the butter, soaking up the resulting liquid with a towel, until no liquid seeps out.  Store in the refrigerator.

Makes about 2 cups butter and about 3 cups of buttermilk.

R E F I G U R E .

• Sweet, sticky apricot butter. Pour some boiling water to cover one cup of dried apricots.  Cover and leave until plump, about 10 minutes.  Drain the water.  Mince or puree half the apricots; chop the other half.  Blend the apricots into one cup of butter.  Honey is optional.  Slather on warm muffins or scones, freshly baked bread or popovers, pancakes, or porridge.  Adapted from of Skye Gyngell.
• Herby butter. Finely mince any herbs and add in a one-to-one ratio to butter; stir in a few pinches of unrefined sea salt.  Add to anything and everything.  For example, melt a pat on top of a steak, spread on bread, soften over soft scrambled eggs, rub over a whole chicken before roasting, pan-fry a fillet of fish in.  The fat acts a preservative, keeping the herbs’ flavors bright and lively.  Also try freezing little cubes of the butter in the late summer for use in the dark heart of winter.
• Hot, hot, hot chili butter. Blister a fresh red chili pepper over an open flame or under the broiler; cool it.  In the meantime, soak one dried chili in hot water until softened.  Peel the skin from the blackened chili and mince both chilies finely.  Mash the chiles, one tablespoon of sweet paprika and a large pinch of rock salt into a cup of butter.  Ms. Gyngell, apparently a butter lover like me, recommends this butter on cornbread and to fry eggs in.

L I T T L E  E A T S .

Some sort of fat accompanies all of Elinor’s fruits and vegetables because it helps her body absorb the nutrients.  Butter and plums elicit “mmmm” sounds, and she has never refused baby carrots roasted in the good stuff.

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Text and photo © Blue Egg Kitchen 2010

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