Dairy Week - Day 1: Butter

This coming week is Dairy Week.

Dairy Week was not established by Alberta Milk, or the Dairy Farmers of Canada. It was established by me, just now, and will be celebrated in my kitchen.

I have a bunch of dairy projects and recipes cluttering the back of my mind, and I've decided to perform some spring cleaning and do them all this week. I have one experiment planned for each of the next eight days. In preparation, I've stocked my fridge with cream, whole milk, and buttermilk from Dutchmen Dairy of Sicamous, BC.

So, without further ado...


Dairy Week - Day 1: Butter

I'm starting with butter because it's the most common dairy product in my house, and is dead-simple to make, requiring only cream, a container with a good seal, and a bit of salt.

I think as children most of us were taken to historical sites like Fort Edmonton to learn how the settlers made wool and horseshoes and butter. Even so, I'll start at the beginning.

You make butter by agitating cream.

It works like this. The fat in cream is in tiny globs, each covered with a membrane that prevents the fat globs from joining together. When you agitate cream, you break these coverings, releasing the fat globs, which all rush out to join their fatty brethren and form a solid mass of butter.

To commence butter-production, fill your container half way with heavy cream. Add a pinch of salt, secure the lid, and start shaking. You don't have to strain yourself, just use a gentle shake that you can sustain for maybe ten minutes. After a while the cream will thicken: the contents will be noticeably less fluid, and there will be less sloshing. At this point you've simply introduced air into the liquid and made whipped cream:



Once whipped cream has formed, it's a little more difficult to keep the cream moving in the jar. Perform a couple minutes of aggressive shaking, which will separate the butterfat and buttermilk:



While the resulting liquid is technically buttermilk, it does not have the tanginess that we usually associate with buttermilk. Unpasteurized cream has bacteria that convert lactose (the main sugar in dairy products) to lactic acid. When making butter with unpasteurized cream, the resulting buttermilk slowly develops a tangy taste as the lactic acid accumulates. Since I am using pasteurized cream, there are no active cultures, and therefore no hope for acidity. My "buttermilk" is actually just skim milk.

(As a quick interjection, these days commercial buttermilk is actually pasteurized milk that has had the above-mentioned bacterial cultures reintroduced and incubated...)

The butterfat that has clumped together must now be worked to remove small pockets of buttermilk that remain within. When making such a small amount of butter, you can just use your hands. Knead the butter. You should see droplets of buttermilk come out.

At this point the butter is usually pressed into a mold to form the familiar bricks. Or in my case, hockey pucks:



My finished product has little to distinguish itself from store-bought butter, besides a slightly richer dairy flavour. It's very good, but the benefits aren't great enough to convince me to start churning cream for my daily supply of butter. (Maybe once I have my own cow...) It's still a good experiment to try once, if only for general knowledge and appreciation of this rich but humble staple.