Whey/Butter Showdown

For a Blanch & Shock event two weeks ago, I made a batch of butter to be served infused with fried mushrooms and seaweed, to make an umami spread served with butter - a distant relative of dripping served with bread.

I inoculated 500 grams of Helsett Farm cream with 200 grams of their live crème fraîche, and left it to colonise the cream for three days and nights, at room temperature (around 21C during the day, dropping to 19C at night.
I recently bought an incredibly cheap plate warming blanket thing from Lidl, which heats up fast, but lacks a variable control and claims to hit 70C, which would destroy the bacteria ripening the cream. Until I have put together a PID controller to regulate it, the temperature of my kitchen will have to suffice.

I whipped the butter after chilling it briefly, draining the first and second waves of buttermilk that broke (to be used in an unrelated sauce) and then whipping the mass, with some of the buttermilk and 0.5% salt. The smell was extremely buttery, rich in what I have learned to recognise as diacetyl, an aromatic compound in butter. The taste was rich without being especially grassy or herbaceous like it might be in summer. I packed it and cooled it before it was later infused with powdered dulse and fried girolle and chestnut mushrooms.

Two days later, and left with a decent amount of the butter, I added three large scoops to a container of live yoghurt whey to try and instigate a kind of bacterial showdown. It had four days in the fridge and then three days at room temperature

The whey treatment has added a satisfactorily identifiable extra note, at once related and foreign to the butter, and an umami flavours have developed.

The butter has no significant role to play at the moment, it having been an experiment, but will inspire me to look at the interaction of yoghurt and cream and whether they can collaborate. For now, it has been steadily disappearing, mainly spread onto bread from Brickhouse Bakery in Peckham. The final spoonful is around sixteen days old now, and, as has been the case with most of the butters I have subjected to such tests, it has started to drift towards being like a cheese.

I will most probably end up in a bowl of scrambled eggs.

Aged butter

From a batch of raw (unpasteurised) double cream from Helsett Farm in Cornwall. I allowed the cream to ferment for 6 days in the fridge at around 3℃, and then at room temperature (20℃) for another 6 days. I whipped it, strained the buttermilk, and served the first serving. Then I used the butter at various intervals over the next four days, before wrapping it and storing it the fridge for some long ageing. Two weeks have passed, and the butter has a deep savoury smell and taste.

The milk was given by Ayreshire cows to an automatic ‘self-milking’ machine on May 16th, 29 days ago. Eighty litres of milk were skimmed to produce six litres of double cream. I don’t know the fat content, but it was definitely not low. I have stopped serving the butter to the public, and will continue to monitor and eat it until it tells me not to.

I recently bought the bowl in the picture from a local potter and gardener called Jan Pateman, who has a stall in Herne Hill Farmer’s Market.

A project to use up trimmings of beeswax and other parts of a beehive frame sent to Nordic Food Lab by a Spanish beekeper. He removed it from the hive as part of a strategy in apiculture that can mitigate the impact of the Varroa mite, which some believe contributes to Colony Collapse Disorder. The butter is sweet from the honey, both bitter and sour from the fermented pollen, and has the aroma of beeswax, made unmistakeable by a month of eating food infused with it. I seasoned it with about 0.5% salt. I made two batches, of which the other I brought to London from Copenhagen and have frozen. Based on this one, and the extra ageing, I can’t imagine what the new one will taste like, but will almost certainly be trying it on some pancakes.

An experimental butter. Crème fraîche and double cream from Helsett Farm in Cornwall, mixed in equal parts and left to ripen at room temperature for 2 days. I added about 90 grams of clear live yoghurt whey, mixed it gently, and will leave it another day to see what happens. I hope the whey will act as a lactic starter, and together with the other live cultures that colonise the creams will give an acidic edge to the butter. Whether or not the mixture will eventually whip and split into butter and buttermilk, I don’t know.

If so, the butter will be the first butter served during our residency at House of Wolf starting November 6th (blanchandshock.com) and the buttermilk will be an ingredient in the bread we are testing this week.

'Bog Butter', made by Ben Reade of the Nordic Food Lab (@NordicFoodLab) and Patrik Johansson (@Butterviking). The butter is matured in birch bark in a hole in the ground for periods between months and years, and it acquires a mossy, earthy aroma and a rich  umami taste laced with traces of vegetal putrefaction. I tried the ‘young’ butter, at 3 months old.

At Nordic Food Lab during MAD Symposium 2012, Copenhagen

Seeded sourdough with 10 day cultured butter by @blanchandshock