Homemade Cultured Butter

Imagine Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, and Bette Midler churned into butter. Elegant, rich, and tangy. Once you taste, you'll always make haste.

AS IS ABUNDNTLY OBVIOUS to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with my medical records, I’ve never met a butter I didn’t like. Cultured or uncouth. Salted or unsalted. Cow, goat, or sheep. French, English, Italian, American. Compound or, er, singular.

However, the idea that I could whip up my own homemade butter, that I could play Dr. Frankenstein to a bunch of butterfat globules, was completely lost on me during my formative years. It wasn’t until one lazy afternoon in Pittsburgh during my sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University that I became aware of the possibility that is homemade butter.

I’d recently dropped out of the university’s acting program. Never one to ignore the writing on the wall—in this case, a report card with enough low grades to call myself “Failure in C Major”—I had quietly exited stage left before the curtain was rung down on my acting aspirations by a tyrannical acting teacher whose similarity to Miss Trunchbull, the evil headmistress in Matilda the Musical, cannot be overemphasized. My futon and I, along with my humiliation, had taken up residence in a sunny bedroom in a Squirrel Hill apartment recently vacated by a fellow “dramat” (that’s what they call drama majors at CMU) who had lost the battle with Miss Trunchbull.

Stripped of an identity that I’d clung to for years—that is, future Oscar, Tony, and Olivier Award-winning star—I became one with the couch, exhibiting signs of what I was certain was post-traumatic stress disorder or, at the very least, a debilitating fungal infection from having handled poorly wrapped cheese or wearing unsanitized bowling shoes.

The sadness was monumental and unremitting. My days were filled with soap operas (“I can act better than you frickin’ idiots!” I shouted at the TV); game shows; solitaire; laundry; and long walks during which I sat down on park benches, tragic novels in my lap, and wept Chekhovian-size tears. The books served two purposes: 1.) They made me look smarter than I was, and 2.) They acted as a cover for my hysterics. I figured any passerby would be moved by the exquisite pain I clearly felt while reading Anna Karenina or The Scarlet Letter.

My college girlfriend (yes, you read that correctly), whom I will always think of as the Original Grace (as in Grace Adler from Will & Grace), tried to get me excited about cooking as a way of giving me something to do during the day while I killed time until my night shift at Gullifty’s restaurant, where I waited tables. 

One day, while my two roommates were at school—one making believe he was a giant porpoise with an inferiority complex in improvisation class, the other deluding himself that he was Vincent van Gogh in the art studio—I felt the slightest thrum of motivation.

Although I didn’t cook at the time, I got it into my head that I wanted to make whipped cream. I don’t recall why. It could have been for dessert. It could have been simply so I could tell Original Grace that I’d accomplished something besides being the biggest armchair winner of “The $20,000 Pyramid” that day. I tramped over to the Giant Eagle on Murray Avenue and picked up a quart of heavy cream.

After rooting through the kitchen cabinets, the only whizzing implement to be found in the apartment was the blender my wannabe Van Gogh roommate had brought all the way from Georgia. A whiz is a whiz is a whiz, I thought. So I poured in the heavy cream, hit liquefy, and fetched the basket of rumpled clothes that had taken up residence in the corner of my room, where it doubled as a bureau. (Yes, I had been that depressed.)

I was in the mood for conversation, so I sat on the top step of the kitchen’s back staircase with my basket by my side and started folding. When my downstairs neighbor heard our door open, she scuffed her chair close to her back door and creaked it open, as she always did.

“YOU THERE?” she shouted up.

“I AM,” I yelled back. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“PEELING POTATOES. YOU?”

“LAUNDRY. AND MAKING WHIPPED CREAM.”

During those endless afternoons we’d often talk about cooking, although, oddly, we never got together in either of our kitchens to actually cook. I suspect it’s because one night, when I opened my closet, I saw her in the apartment below taking a shower. A pipe had burst during winter break and the water had taken down her bathroom ceiling and part of my closet wall. When she looked up, as if she’d heard something, I flicked off the light and stood in the darkness, my heart rattling my chest like a gorilla in a cage. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I’m going to get arrested, I panicked to myself. I’m a freaking Peeping Tom! All I wanted to do was hang up my shirt! 

As I sat on the step folding whites I’d dragged from the laundromat, I was reminded of my maternal grandmother, Vovó Costa. I told my neighbor how Vovó used to sit on our splintery back porch in Fall River, Massachusetts, her nylons rolled down below her swollen knees, yelling through the screened window to my godmother as she folded clothes that had dried in the backyard on the line just inches above my father’s strawberry patch. Sometimes in mid-June, I swear I could smell the sweetness of berries on my T-shirts.

Strawberries.

Strawberries and whipped cream.

WHIPPED CREAM?!!

Suddenly I remembered what had gotten me into the kitchen in the first place.

“I’LL TALK TO YOU LATER!” I shouted down the stairs and staggered back into the kitchen as I heard my neighbor’s door close.

I hovered like an expectant father over my creamy newborn. In the blender, though, was an inelegant glump–a giant, deformed blob–floating in a pool of murky liquid. I was appalled. Well, look at that, I thought. The damn store sold cream that was past its time. I picked through the trash bin for the receipt so I could get my money back. When I came up empty-handed, I dumped the contents of the blender into the garbage and stomped off to my room, feeling like the failure I knew I was.

“Oh, silly!” said Original Grace later that night, chucking me on the chin. (She was a big chucker.) “That was butter you made.”

I knew she was trying to do the glass-is-half-full thing, but I was miserable and felt entitled to remain so. I’d figured that, much like a milkshake, whipped cream would keep whipping until I spooned its plush, ivory-colored pillows out of the blender. How was I to know? It’s not like the Internet was invented yet.

Over the years, I’d forgotten all about that incident (the overbeating of the cream, not the accidental peeping–I’ll never be able to un-etch that from my neural pathways) until one summer when I was spending an inordinate amount of time defending the glories of Connecticut country living to The One, for whom the center of the universe is NYC. I knew I’d better put my DIY money where my mouth was and make as many things as I could myself–everything from mustard and mayonnaise to nonstick cooking spray and butter–to prove my point.

The problem is if you have homemade mustard, mayo, and butter lying around, you have to make homemade sourdough for sandwiches on which to slather your mayo, mustard, and butter. Then, well, you simply must whip up potato salad using your mayo so your sandwiches won’t be only children. Naturally, you are then ethically required to bake pies with layers of buttery, flaky crusts to go with the potato salad that accompanies the sandwiches. And then comes the cholesterol meds and Zepbound…

Chow,

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Homemade Cultured Butter

Makes about 3/4 lb | Prep 15 min | Rest 18 hrs | Total 18 hrs, 15 min

Equipment

• Stand mixer

• Sieve

• Cheesecloth, not required but makes life so much easier

Ingredients 

• 1 quart heavy cream, preferably not ultra-pasteurized (945 ml / 240g)

• 1/4 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (60 ml / 62g)

• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, or to taste (3g)

Instructions 

1. Mix the cream and yogurt in a medium bowl and cover with a clean kitchen towel. Let sit on the counter at room temperature (70° to 75°F / 21° to 24°C) for 18 to 24 hours. You’re looking for a thick, tangy-tasting cream.¹

2. Slide the bowl into the fridge until the cream cools between 50°F to 60°F / 10° to 16°C.

3. Fill a large bowl with ice and water. Fit the sieve over a medium bowl, and line the sieve with a double layer of cheesecloth, if using.

4. Pour the cream mixture into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Beginning on the lowest setting, gently whisk the cream.²

5. Gradually bump up the speed as the cream starts to billow. Eventually, you'll have soft peaks, them firmer peaks, then–that's it!–you're past the point of no return when you see little grains in the cream. That's the butter forming. Now, cover the mixer with a dish towel.³

6. Let the cream rip on like this until a, um, butter-yellow clump clings to the whisk. Continue on, for a minute or two, to release as much of the buttermilk as you can.

7. Pour the butter clump and the liquid (that’s buttermilk, baby!) and its attendant buttermilk into the cloth-lined sieve. Let the butter drain for several minutes. (If using cheesecloth, twist it until as much liquid as possible squeezes from the butter ball.)

8. Dunk the ball into the water, and save that luscious buttermilk for another use.

9. Squeeze and massage the butter with your hands under the ice water to release the last little bits of buttermilk. If you’re fanatical, you can dump the now-cloudy water, replenish, and repeat.⁴

10. Remove the butter from the water and pat it dry with paper towels. If you’d like salted butter, sprinkle the butter with the salt, and knead it thoroughly.

11. Press the butter into a crock or small bowl, cover well with plastic wrap, and refrigerate.

☞ Funny Footnotes

1. I know, I know. It goes against everything you’ve learned about food safety. By setting out the cream-yogurt mixture, it develops the delicious tang, which lends the cultured butter an oh-so-marvelous flavor.

2. There's no lost-to-the-ages secret in starting low. You simply sidestep getting bathed in cream until it thickens. (Don't ask me how I know.)

3. Trust me. Again, you don't want to bathe in buttermilk.

4. About this time, you’ll lose most of the feeling in your fingers due to early-stage hypothermia. Kidding, but it is bitchin’ cold.