About: Cultured Butter

Cultured butter is butter made from (slightly) fermented cream. It’s sometimes called “European-style” butter. It has more flavor and character then sweet cream butter, which is the kind commonly sold here in the US.

Cultured butter is easy (and kind of fun) to make. All you need is heavy cream and plain, active-culture yogurt. .Cultured butter is not at all sour, but has a more complex buttery flavor. You want to make sure the cream and yogurt don’t contain any added stabilizers or preservatives. I like to buy organic

A nice by-product of making your own cultured butter is the milky liquid that separates out from the butter. That milky liquid is buttermilk. It is delicious! Use it to make salad dressing or pancakes or heck, I usually just drink it.

How to:

1. In a quart size jar or other nonmetallic container, whisk 1/3 cup yogurt into 1 pint of cream. Let sit at room temperature for about 8-hours or overnight. After which, if you give the container a shake, the cream should be visible thickened. Also, it will have a slightly yellow tinge to it. You now have cultures cream, which will yield about a cup (or more) of butter. To be honest, my yield has varied. The last time I made butter, I let it sit more like 18-hours. That batch made more and tastier butter.

2. Now it’s time to start churning! You have a couple options here.

• Churn Method One: If you’ve used a bowl, transfer the cream to a quart size jar with a tight-fitting lid. Close it up tight and start shaking. This is a great thing for kids to do. Even toddlers can roll the jar around on the floor for a while. Lacking children at my house, my partner and I take turns shaking the jar. Just when you start to get bored with it the cream miraculously breaks into globs of creamy butter splashing around in a tangy buttermilk. It’s a simple thing, but truly amazing. Strain off the liquid and transfer the butter to a bowl. Use a wooden spoon to gather the butter against one side of the bowl and keep pressing and patting it to squeeze out the extra buttermilk.

• Churn Method Two: Use a hand-mixer on low speed. Start mixing like you would for whipped cream. After about 10-minutes or so the cream will break and butter milk will start flying all over the place. At this point use a wooden spoon to gather the butter against one side of the bowl and keep pressing it to squeeze out the extra buttermilk.

That’s it, you’ve made butter! At this point you can opt to add salt. It’s up to you. A half teaspoon is more than enough. Being a salt fiend, I like to add a little more though.

Store it in the refrigerator and it will keep for weeks.