Learning Objective
You will learn how to make cultured butter.
Estimated time: 15 mins.
When you start making your own bread, it changes the way you think about the world. Sometimes I think that the way the world works is designed to make people feel disempowered. The way I teach bread is different because I want to put the power right back into your hands.
I am not just going to ask you to make bread that is good for you. I am going to ask that you connect to the farmers and the people around you and make their lives better.
Making a delicious loaf of sourdough bread is about far more than just something that tastes good. It’s also a question of what we put on that bread and what it symbolises. For me, it’s not just butter. It’s delicious cultured butter that not only benefits our gut health but is made with milk from local cows, cared for by a farmer who plays cricket at the cricket club next to my parents’ farm. It’s about community, I guess.
Ingredients
- 2 litres of fresh double cream
- 4 heaped tablespoons of a really good quality milk kefir, or live yoghurt
- 8g sea salt, optional
It’s very easy to make amazingly delicious cultured butter at home. You can make it directly with fresh cream, but I prefer to culture the cream overnight. There are several ways to do this.
You may be able to find really good milk kefir at the supermarket, or you can use a great quality natural yoghurt – one with a good helping of live lactic acid bacteria. Add a large, heaped tablespoon of either kefir grains or kefir milk, or live yoghurt to the cream, stir and cover the bowl with a damp cloth. Leave the cream overnight, and in the morning you will have a beautiful culture with a light yoghurt lactic tang.
Pour the cultured cream into a bowl. You can make the butter by hand, but be prepared for a serious workout – it will take the better part of an hour to whip the cream into butter. Alternatively, make the most of modern technology, and beat the cream using a stand mixer on a slow speed. This will be quicker, so take care to watch and listen as the cream is mixed. You need to stop the mixer at the moment when the butter splits away from the buttermilk. At this point, you will have a rich, deep yellow butter wallowing in the buttermilk.
Drain the buttermilk off. I use old-fashioned milk bottles to store it and keep them in the fridge. This delicious homemade buttermilk is used here at the School in soups and in bakes such as Fermented Buttermilk & Blueberry Sourdough Cake. In the summer, I use it to make a wonderfully refreshing drink – simply whizz it up with some strawberries and serve chilled. When made from cultured cream, the buttermilk is full of lactic acid bacteria and acts as a probiotic.
Carefully rinse the drained butter under icy cold water to wash away the last of the buttermilk, then make sure it is very well drained. If you are going to use the butter for baking, and there are plenty of recipes to choose from on the Club, you need to leave it unsalted. The butter can be shaped into small blocks and kept in the fridge, or frozen for later use. In fact, it freezes beautifully so, although 800g of butter might seem like a lot to make, it will keep well and can be taken out of the freezer in smaller portions as you need it.
The butter is fabulous served with a freshly baked sourdough loaf. I tend to salt the butter that I serve at the table with 1% sea salt – that would be 8g of salt for 800g of butter. I will often serve the butter in a dish alongside bread that is still just warm from the oven. Or I put a block of butter into a jam jar and top the jar up with a little bit of the buttermilk. Then we sit around the table, chatting while we tear chunks of bread from the loaf and drag them through both the butter and the buttermilk to eat.
How can you use your butter to connect?
Well, it starts with looking for locally produced cream if you can. It might sound strange but taking a morning to go to the local market is a good place to start. Fresh air, banter and connecting to the people on the ground is good for you. I appreciate that the food is sometimes more expensive, but if you budget carefully and limit yourself to just looking for a few bits, it’s a start. It’s about ambience and being outside.
If you can’t do this then try online. There are many farmers who post things out but this can be more expensive because of the postage. Alternatively you can look for local produce in the UK close to wherever you live.
If not, don’t worry – just the fact you can’t, says so much about the food system and you have learned something valuable.
My local farm
I use the cream from my local farmer that is sold in our local greengrocers to turn into delicious homemade butter and buttermilk. I also love the fact that the dairy supplies our local shop directly, and I’ve been a customer of our local greengrocers since I was a little girl. It means that the farmer is paid a fair price for his milk. One of the things that is perhaps not well known in the UK is that over the last decade or so, milk prices have at times dropped so low that the cost of producing milk has been higher than the market was paying for it. No one wants to think about it…but whilst researching for my book ‘Food for Thought‘ in 2018 I uncovered the fact that suicide rates among dairy farmers are especially high. I found the way in which farmers are treated deeply disturbing, especially learning that large corporates literally squeeze the price so low it is not economical to produce milk with cows outside in the fresh air and farmers can no longer make a living.
Make chocolate butter or cinnamon butter…
It also makes some wonderfully flavoured butters – here are five ideas:
- Blend 200g of butter with 2 heaped tablespoons of fair trade icing sugar and 2 heaped tablespoons of cocoa powder to get chocolate butter.
- Or use a tablespoon of cinnamon in place of the cocoa powder for cinnamon butter, which is divine spread onto hot toast, especially on a winter’s day. I make a range of herb butters too, they are always useful to add to soups and pasta dishes.
- Take a small bunch of fresh herbs, maybe parsley, oregano or mint (actually, shredded mint leaves make a really good addition to the chocolate butter), chop them finely and mix into some softened butter.
- Classic garlic butter. Just add a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed with some fine sea salt, and a little finely chopped rosemary.
- At Christmas, I make a delicious orange butter, by grating in the zest of an orange and mixing with brandy and whipping it.
![](https://thesourdoughschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Vanessa-and-Katie-Shoot-102-680x850.jpg)
![](https://thesourdoughschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Vanessa-and-Katie-Shoot-85-680x850.jpg)
Learning Outcome
You will understand how to make your own butter and add more diversity with 5 delicious suggestions.