I can't tell you how happy this makes me. I live half and half in France and Minnesota. I bring butter back to Minnesota with me every single time, but it's never enough to last... I never thought of trying to make my own European style butter, or that it would be so simple.
I don't have a stand mixer though. Do you think that a hand held mixer would work?
Just reading this as a link offered by David Lebovitz and glad I am! Will tune in further! Growing up in WWII Colorado mountains, when things like butter were rationed, we were lucky to have a ranch with dairy cows that could provide milk without rations (in bottles, with cream on the top!), and could make butter (well, my mother did). The quart jar that got shaken (the kids did get a few "turns") and then drained into old-fashioned cotton cheesecloth and kneaded was our means to fresh butter. Fast forward 65+ (!) years, getting hooked on Breton butter during extended stays in Paris and feeling its absence during the rest of the year in the US (where Kerry Gold is a godsend), I decided to try my hand at making butter myself. And wished I had seen your post prior to that. I had read quite a bit about the process before starting out, and even found (at Costco!) the high (36%) butterfat cream. I learned the hard way why to cover the mixing bowl, needing far too much time to clean up my entire kitchen coated with a generous spray of fat. A good lesson. Then, Arruda's Dairy in Tiverton RI came into my sites and the fabulous fresh cream allowed even better butter. Now I'll try adding the yogurt. Have you ever used a Vitamix for making butter? Thanks for the post!
Arruda’s Dairy! Yvonne, I haven't thought about them in ages.
I've never made it in a Vitamix. The reason is the blade design, coupled with the speed of the motor, creates massive friction. In fact, all super-powerful blenders are designed to bring liquids to a temperature of 170°F, which is why you can make hot soup with them.
My concern is it would heat the cream, preventing it from turning into butter.
Cultered or "European" butter, as it's dubbed here in western Canada, is often double the price of regular good quality butter so its nice to have this more affordable option - and it sounds easy and fun to make - Thanks!
Barbara, so easy and so fun. If you have kids or grandkids, nieces or nephews, or neighborhood urchins, get them in the kitchen. It's a great way to turn them on to cooking.
Found your piece through David Lebovitz’s newsletter. Wish I’d seen it when I had that leftover quart of heavy cream from our annual deck party (but it did end up as Saffron ice cream). Now I know why your writing speaks to me! As a Duquesne grad, working at Beacon Pharmacy across the street, married to a Boston born CMU grad, Gullifty’s was our special occasion date place.
Amy, I'll forgive you. I think saffron ice cream takes precedence over plain, old cultured butter.
Oh my, Beacon Pharmacy. I visited that place many a time. I have yet to revisit Pittsburgh ever since my ignominious retreat from the acting program at CMU. In the past several years, I've made some very good friends in New York and Connecticut, and all of them have connections to or roots in Pittsburgh. So, I think all six of us are going to return. We’ll visit CMU, the University of Pittsburgh and its Cathedral of Learning, the Andy Warhol Museum, Primanti Brothers, and Heinz Hall. I have no idea if the Grand Concourse is still in business, but if it is, I want to visit it. I worked there for about a year and a half.
Such a wonderful piece. I live in Pittsburgh and never before knew you were at CMU. My kids, when little, screamed with joy when they got to walk by the dessert case at Gullifty’s.
I lived in Berkeley from 1972-80 when it was developing into a food paradise and it ruined me for other cities until going to Paris. Pittsburgh isn’t a foodie heaven yet but the food is so vastly superior to what was here the year I moved here.
I think I’m going to make cultured butter today to go with the focaccia I am making.
I make butter by putting cream in a screw-top jar and shaking it. It goes really fast if there’s plenty of empty space in the jar, and if the cream is at room temperature rather than cold. It’s practical and a lot easier to clean than a mixer.
So in your recipe, I’m wondering what the purpose is of cooling the cream/yoghurt mixture? 🤔
Hi, Emily. The reason is churning cream/yogurt at a higher temp can cause the butter to form too quickly or inconsistently, making it difficult to achieve the right texture. Cooling the the liquid allows the fat to solidify slightly, and that helps in forming a smooth, consistent butter.
Also, it helps to make sure the butter isn't too "cultured" or tangy.
Last, cooler cream makes it easier to separate the butterfat from the buttermilk.
Sooo funny, this had me laughing out loud, thank you! I live near Squirrel Hill and know the places you mentioned (except Gullifty’s has sadly closed and of course the apartment where you lived above your naked neighbor). I love your writing and of course your recipes, and thanks to you, I’m going to tackle butter this weekend! ❤️
Mr. Procopio, you do realize my only job on earth is to make you envious, right? Once I succeed in that, I will burst into an orb of blinding light and ascend to the Heaviside Layer.
And there you have it, grasshopper. All this time you’ve held the power to transcend. Because all along you have been flaming and light in the loafers. You have just experienced a moment of pure universal understanding. Go in peace, my son. And give Betty Buckley my regards.
Oh, David, this brings back memories! When I was a pain in the ass kid and pestered my mom to the limit (I just wanted a horse, so I kept at it!) she would give me a lidded jar of cream and say, "Go shake this until it turns to butter." Off I would go, and it took a while, but I always ended up with tasty butter so I would make some toast to enjoy it. I made lots of butter as a kid, and I finally did get a horse, too!
Lisa!!! I love that story. I'm delighted you made butter, but I'm thrilled you got your horse. I won't ask how many pounds of butter you made while waiting for your trusted steed.
I used to ride until my teacher wanted me--Dimply & Doughy David--to ride without a saddle. The more I slipped, the more I squeezed my knees, and the faster the horse ran until I was flung off and into the side of the corral. I bruised my kidney and peed pink for days. That ended my hopes for Olympic equestrian glory!
I KNEW I would love this, and I did. So happy I saved it for my Sunday afternoon lawn chair reading.
PS - I was a theatre major, too. One of my classes was at 8am, and our teacher, who had the most hypnotic voice, would have us lie on mats for magic carpet rides. I passed out every. single. time. The other thespians were smug about my lack of focus.
I hear where you're coming from! That prof was lucky you were the only one to call it nap time. But then, perhaps some of your classmates did, too, just waking up earlier than you. And then fibbing about it! 😂
Erin, our first class was voice and speech. At 8AM! We were all frog-voiced because as underclassmen, we had to work crew building the sets, making the costumes, and running the shows. We finished at 11 PM...and THEN we had to work on our scene work. Most of us got home after 2 AM. Most of us were barely alive at the end of the semester.
Here in Ireland we have amazing Butter! So much rain that our grass is so green it looks fake , so happy cows! Loads of beautiful milk. Grab yourself a block of KerryGold and thank me later. ( Now would I give up our fabulous butter for less rain and a more regular Tan? NO not even I would do that and I look fabulous with a Tan! )
It's really quite costly here in Canada 🇨🇦, compared to other butters, so I save it for my most special recipes, where butter is really the star. Like my shortbread, or butter cookies, or spritz cookies. 😁
It's sad! Rising costs are forcing many to cut way back on baking, especially if they just do it to give away to others.
A 454g package of Kerrygold is $6 CAD (Canadian dollars), which, as of 15 minutes before typing this, was equivalent to €3.99 or 3.42£. Wasn't sure which part of Ireland you're from, so supplied both € & £.
One of my favorite food bloggers, other than David is from Ireland. She got her certification (chef/baker), at Ballymaloe, if I recall correctly. About 95% of Gemma's content is baking related, but with a blog called Bigger Bolder Baking, that pretty much says it all.
She's on YouTube. Has a podcast series which recently started, and is apparently launching a 24/7 live demonstration channel.
Although she now lives in the US, her mom is part of her team, and several of the recipes are hers.
As well as an epic chef, you are also an epic *storyteller!* I truly enjoyed this one.
For the last 4 years of school, I lived on a "hobby" farm. My mom - a born & raised farm girl, convinced my dad that we should have one, due to the multitude of new neighbors encroaching on our previously somewhat isolated acreage. (Read as my bitch aunt from hell convinced my mom's brother to subdivide the just under 700 acres immediately around, and across from us, into 1-3 acres plots.)
The folks shopped around, until they found the perfect place. My dad, who worked outside the home, now a 30 minute commute each way, and shift work to boot, was somewhat concerned that it might be too much for mom and us kids to handle, but mom assured him "We got this!" We'd be in charge of the animals, and he'd be in charge of haying/baling animal feed. We'd done custom haying/baling on a share basis for years already. This was still when dinosaurs roamed the world - hay bales were rectangular objects that weighed 50-75# each, and were commonly stacked into a triangular shape called a stook, formed by a machine, towed behind the baling machine. The stooks were picked up with large, flat forks, similar to those of a forklift, attached to the front of a tractor. They were then driven to the bale wagon and dumped, where they would be assembled into a carefully constructed stack, for transport. I occasionally skipped school, as did many farm kids during haying season, to pick up the stooks. Ask me if I can race across a field in high gear, lower the forks, and pick up a stook, without knocking it over. Or slowing down. The answer would be yes. I guess it was fairly unusual to do that at speed - vehicles often pulled over, parked, and watched, when the field we were working in was by a major road. Huge round bales were still in the future.
Me and my tangents...🙄
The owner of the farm we purchased had a very small herd of cows, which came with a cream quota. We bought that, too, which meant that 2×/day, we had to milk said cows, carry 5 gallon pails of milk about 300', to the separator shed, and separate the milk from the cream. The cream went into metal milk cans, then into a fridge. And all that skimmed milk? We bought a few pigs to feed it to. And it turns out, our cows liked it too, as we discovered the day my brother set pails down to go do something else, enroute to slopping the pigs.
We kept whole milk for our own use, as needed, and had unlimited access to pure cream, which we stored in a 1 quart Mason jar, in the fridge. By the 2nd day, the cream was so thick a spoon would stand perfectly upright in the middle of the jar.
Another gem that we got was a 2 gallon glass, hand crank butter churn. Guess we just made "UNCULTURED" butter, as it was cream, and salt. Period.
We didn't do it often, as we had to haul x quantity to the creamery/week, in order to maintain our quota. Miss your quota too often, they'd take it away.
Because, of course, cows don't produce milk year round, this necessitated buying more cows. And boy, did we. Started out with 3, and ended up with 40, and calves of various ages. By then, we'd stopped shipping cream, had a milk quota instead, and a loafing barn for the winter, attached to the milking barn, which had a milk house now attached to the other end, which housed a stainless steel bulk milk tank, and all the accoutrements required for sanitation, etc.
4 years later, when I graduated from high
school, dad quit his job (they were on strike), they sold that farm, and bought one many times larger. And my mom ended up milking 60 cows, while dad obtained other employment, except during crop planting and harvesting.
But boy - did we have scrumptious desserts utilizing that cream, and oh...that butter, in our early farming years! 🥰
I grew up down the road from a dairy farm--Lawton's Dairy. I'm old enough to remember us having an insulated milk box on our front step. Three times a week, Mr. Lawton would come and put four glass bottles of whole milk in there. I remember spooning out the cream that had floated to the top. Boy, did that piss off my mother! And, since I was a morose and depressed preteen with not many friends, I used to play with the cows in the field. Ah, youth!
I, too, remember those glass milk bottles! No insulated box for us, though. Until I was 6 we rented an acreage, and had 1 steer that we raised for beef. He became my "pet cow". I was 4 then. One day he was loaded in the truck,and never came back. Can't remember what I was told, but do remember dad bringing home lots of pink wrapped packages that immediately got put in our deep freeze. I sorta remember asking what it was, and being told meat.I DON'T exactly recall how long it took me to tie my missing pet "cow" and packages of meat together, but I did. And cried every time one was brought up to be defrosted. And again when it hit the table. I refused to eat "my Butchie". Mom had to fake me out, by repackaging anything that was being defrosted, by repurposing trays from other meats when I wasn't around. My poor, blessed mom, and the things she did to work around the problem.
Delightful
Thank you!
I can't tell you how happy this makes me. I live half and half in France and Minnesota. I bring butter back to Minnesota with me every single time, but it's never enough to last... I never thought of trying to make my own European style butter, or that it would be so simple.
I don't have a stand mixer though. Do you think that a hand held mixer would work?
Just reading this as a link offered by David Lebovitz and glad I am! Will tune in further! Growing up in WWII Colorado mountains, when things like butter were rationed, we were lucky to have a ranch with dairy cows that could provide milk without rations (in bottles, with cream on the top!), and could make butter (well, my mother did). The quart jar that got shaken (the kids did get a few "turns") and then drained into old-fashioned cotton cheesecloth and kneaded was our means to fresh butter. Fast forward 65+ (!) years, getting hooked on Breton butter during extended stays in Paris and feeling its absence during the rest of the year in the US (where Kerry Gold is a godsend), I decided to try my hand at making butter myself. And wished I had seen your post prior to that. I had read quite a bit about the process before starting out, and even found (at Costco!) the high (36%) butterfat cream. I learned the hard way why to cover the mixing bowl, needing far too much time to clean up my entire kitchen coated with a generous spray of fat. A good lesson. Then, Arruda's Dairy in Tiverton RI came into my sites and the fabulous fresh cream allowed even better butter. Now I'll try adding the yogurt. Have you ever used a Vitamix for making butter? Thanks for the post!
Arruda’s Dairy! Yvonne, I haven't thought about them in ages.
I've never made it in a Vitamix. The reason is the blade design, coupled with the speed of the motor, creates massive friction. In fact, all super-powerful blenders are designed to bring liquids to a temperature of 170°F, which is why you can make hot soup with them.
My concern is it would heat the cream, preventing it from turning into butter.
Cultered or "European" butter, as it's dubbed here in western Canada, is often double the price of regular good quality butter so its nice to have this more affordable option - and it sounds easy and fun to make - Thanks!
Barbara, so easy and so fun. If you have kids or grandkids, nieces or nephews, or neighborhood urchins, get them in the kitchen. It's a great way to turn them on to cooking.
Found your piece through David Lebovitz’s newsletter. Wish I’d seen it when I had that leftover quart of heavy cream from our annual deck party (but it did end up as Saffron ice cream). Now I know why your writing speaks to me! As a Duquesne grad, working at Beacon Pharmacy across the street, married to a Boston born CMU grad, Gullifty’s was our special occasion date place.
Amy, I'll forgive you. I think saffron ice cream takes precedence over plain, old cultured butter.
Oh my, Beacon Pharmacy. I visited that place many a time. I have yet to revisit Pittsburgh ever since my ignominious retreat from the acting program at CMU. In the past several years, I've made some very good friends in New York and Connecticut, and all of them have connections to or roots in Pittsburgh. So, I think all six of us are going to return. We’ll visit CMU, the University of Pittsburgh and its Cathedral of Learning, the Andy Warhol Museum, Primanti Brothers, and Heinz Hall. I have no idea if the Grand Concourse is still in business, but if it is, I want to visit it. I worked there for about a year and a half.
Such a wonderful piece. I live in Pittsburgh and never before knew you were at CMU. My kids, when little, screamed with joy when they got to walk by the dessert case at Gullifty’s.
I lived in Berkeley from 1972-80 when it was developing into a food paradise and it ruined me for other cities until going to Paris. Pittsburgh isn’t a foodie heaven yet but the food is so vastly superior to what was here the year I moved here.
I think I’m going to make cultured butter today to go with the focaccia I am making.
Thank you thank you thank you!
Sarah, you are more than welcome. And, oh, that dessert case in Gullifty’s. It was a marvel.
I make butter by putting cream in a screw-top jar and shaking it. It goes really fast if there’s plenty of empty space in the jar, and if the cream is at room temperature rather than cold. It’s practical and a lot easier to clean than a mixer.
So in your recipe, I’m wondering what the purpose is of cooling the cream/yoghurt mixture? 🤔
Hi, Emily. The reason is churning cream/yogurt at a higher temp can cause the butter to form too quickly or inconsistently, making it difficult to achieve the right texture. Cooling the the liquid allows the fat to solidify slightly, and that helps in forming a smooth, consistent butter.
Also, it helps to make sure the butter isn't too "cultured" or tangy.
Last, cooler cream makes it easier to separate the butterfat from the buttermilk.
Sooo funny, this had me laughing out loud, thank you! I live near Squirrel Hill and know the places you mentioned (except Gullifty’s has sadly closed and of course the apartment where you lived above your naked neighbor). I love your writing and of course your recipes, and thanks to you, I’m going to tackle butter this weekend! ❤️
Hello, fellow Pittsburgher! I’m so glad you enjoyed the essay. And do let me know how the butter turns out.
"{M]y creamy newborn" is a phrase that will forever haunt me.
You bastard.
Mr. Procopio, you do realize my only job on earth is to make you envious, right? Once I succeed in that, I will burst into an orb of blinding light and ascend to the Heaviside Layer.
So being both flaming and light in the loafers is end game? Perfect.
And there you have it, grasshopper. All this time you’ve held the power to transcend. Because all along you have been flaming and light in the loafers. You have just experienced a moment of pure universal understanding. Go in peace, my son. And give Betty Buckley my regards.
I never forgave her for replacing that dead woman on Eight is Enough.
I’m sure she deeply regrets it, knowing that you were offended.
Oh, David, this brings back memories! When I was a pain in the ass kid and pestered my mom to the limit (I just wanted a horse, so I kept at it!) she would give me a lidded jar of cream and say, "Go shake this until it turns to butter." Off I would go, and it took a while, but I always ended up with tasty butter so I would make some toast to enjoy it. I made lots of butter as a kid, and I finally did get a horse, too!
Lisa!!! I love that story. I'm delighted you made butter, but I'm thrilled you got your horse. I won't ask how many pounds of butter you made while waiting for your trusted steed.
His name was Lucky Me, and I sure was. He taught me many important lessons, and saved me from a few bad choices! Horses truly are the best of friends.
I used to ride until my teacher wanted me--Dimply & Doughy David--to ride without a saddle. The more I slipped, the more I squeezed my knees, and the faster the horse ran until I was flung off and into the side of the corral. I bruised my kidney and peed pink for days. That ended my hopes for Olympic equestrian glory!
I KNEW I would love this, and I did. So happy I saved it for my Sunday afternoon lawn chair reading.
PS - I was a theatre major, too. One of my classes was at 8am, and our teacher, who had the most hypnotic voice, would have us lie on mats for magic carpet rides. I passed out every. single. time. The other thespians were smug about my lack of focus.
I hear where you're coming from! That prof was lucky you were the only one to call it nap time. But then, perhaps some of your classmates did, too, just waking up earlier than you. And then fibbing about it! 😂
Could have been!
Erin, our first class was voice and speech. At 8AM! We were all frog-voiced because as underclassmen, we had to work crew building the sets, making the costumes, and running the shows. We finished at 11 PM...and THEN we had to work on our scene work. Most of us got home after 2 AM. Most of us were barely alive at the end of the semester.
Art is hell.
Ain't it, though? 👹
Here in Ireland we have amazing Butter! So much rain that our grass is so green it looks fake , so happy cows! Loads of beautiful milk. Grab yourself a block of KerryGold and thank me later. ( Now would I give up our fabulous butter for less rain and a more regular Tan? NO not even I would do that and I look fabulous with a Tan! )
Larissa, I use Kerry Gold all the time! It's a wonderful butter.
Oh fabulous!
It's really quite costly here in Canada 🇨🇦, compared to other butters, so I save it for my most special recipes, where butter is really the star. Like my shortbread, or butter cookies, or spritz cookies. 😁
Oh that’s fantastic! Everything here in Ireland is super costly too!
It's sad! Rising costs are forcing many to cut way back on baking, especially if they just do it to give away to others.
A 454g package of Kerrygold is $6 CAD (Canadian dollars), which, as of 15 minutes before typing this, was equivalent to €3.99 or 3.42£. Wasn't sure which part of Ireland you're from, so supplied both € & £.
One of my favorite food bloggers, other than David is from Ireland. She got her certification (chef/baker), at Ballymaloe, if I recall correctly. About 95% of Gemma's content is baking related, but with a blog called Bigger Bolder Baking, that pretty much says it all.
She's on YouTube. Has a podcast series which recently started, and is apparently launching a 24/7 live demonstration channel.
Although she now lives in the US, her mom is part of her team, and several of the recipes are hers.
Here's me...blathering on again!
Have a blessed week!
Thanks, Terry!
But such a lovely place. I’ve still yet to visit.
Oh do definitely!
Brilliant. 🧈
Danke!!
Have I told you recently how much I love you? You knocked it out of the park with this one, my good Sir Beurre.
Darling, no, but I'll take it now. Thank you! And just subscribed to your Substack! So HIGH-larry-is!
As well as an epic chef, you are also an epic *storyteller!* I truly enjoyed this one.
For the last 4 years of school, I lived on a "hobby" farm. My mom - a born & raised farm girl, convinced my dad that we should have one, due to the multitude of new neighbors encroaching on our previously somewhat isolated acreage. (Read as my bitch aunt from hell convinced my mom's brother to subdivide the just under 700 acres immediately around, and across from us, into 1-3 acres plots.)
The folks shopped around, until they found the perfect place. My dad, who worked outside the home, now a 30 minute commute each way, and shift work to boot, was somewhat concerned that it might be too much for mom and us kids to handle, but mom assured him "We got this!" We'd be in charge of the animals, and he'd be in charge of haying/baling animal feed. We'd done custom haying/baling on a share basis for years already. This was still when dinosaurs roamed the world - hay bales were rectangular objects that weighed 50-75# each, and were commonly stacked into a triangular shape called a stook, formed by a machine, towed behind the baling machine. The stooks were picked up with large, flat forks, similar to those of a forklift, attached to the front of a tractor. They were then driven to the bale wagon and dumped, where they would be assembled into a carefully constructed stack, for transport. I occasionally skipped school, as did many farm kids during haying season, to pick up the stooks. Ask me if I can race across a field in high gear, lower the forks, and pick up a stook, without knocking it over. Or slowing down. The answer would be yes. I guess it was fairly unusual to do that at speed - vehicles often pulled over, parked, and watched, when the field we were working in was by a major road. Huge round bales were still in the future.
Me and my tangents...🙄
The owner of the farm we purchased had a very small herd of cows, which came with a cream quota. We bought that, too, which meant that 2×/day, we had to milk said cows, carry 5 gallon pails of milk about 300', to the separator shed, and separate the milk from the cream. The cream went into metal milk cans, then into a fridge. And all that skimmed milk? We bought a few pigs to feed it to. And it turns out, our cows liked it too, as we discovered the day my brother set pails down to go do something else, enroute to slopping the pigs.
We kept whole milk for our own use, as needed, and had unlimited access to pure cream, which we stored in a 1 quart Mason jar, in the fridge. By the 2nd day, the cream was so thick a spoon would stand perfectly upright in the middle of the jar.
Another gem that we got was a 2 gallon glass, hand crank butter churn. Guess we just made "UNCULTURED" butter, as it was cream, and salt. Period.
We didn't do it often, as we had to haul x quantity to the creamery/week, in order to maintain our quota. Miss your quota too often, they'd take it away.
Because, of course, cows don't produce milk year round, this necessitated buying more cows. And boy, did we. Started out with 3, and ended up with 40, and calves of various ages. By then, we'd stopped shipping cream, had a milk quota instead, and a loafing barn for the winter, attached to the milking barn, which had a milk house now attached to the other end, which housed a stainless steel bulk milk tank, and all the accoutrements required for sanitation, etc.
4 years later, when I graduated from high
school, dad quit his job (they were on strike), they sold that farm, and bought one many times larger. And my mom ended up milking 60 cows, while dad obtained other employment, except during crop planting and harvesting.
But boy - did we have scrumptious desserts utilizing that cream, and oh...that butter, in our early farming years! 🥰
Utterly fascinating, Terry!
I grew up down the road from a dairy farm--Lawton's Dairy. I'm old enough to remember us having an insulated milk box on our front step. Three times a week, Mr. Lawton would come and put four glass bottles of whole milk in there. I remember spooning out the cream that had floated to the top. Boy, did that piss off my mother! And, since I was a morose and depressed preteen with not many friends, I used to play with the cows in the field. Ah, youth!
I, too, remember those glass milk bottles! No insulated box for us, though. Until I was 6 we rented an acreage, and had 1 steer that we raised for beef. He became my "pet cow". I was 4 then. One day he was loaded in the truck,and never came back. Can't remember what I was told, but do remember dad bringing home lots of pink wrapped packages that immediately got put in our deep freeze. I sorta remember asking what it was, and being told meat.I DON'T exactly recall how long it took me to tie my missing pet "cow" and packages of meat together, but I did. And cried every time one was brought up to be defrosted. And again when it hit the table. I refused to eat "my Butchie". Mom had to fake me out, by repackaging anything that was being defrosted, by repurposing trays from other meats when I wasn't around. My poor, blessed mom, and the things she did to work around the problem.
Oh...to be so young and innocent!
I was right there with you! Love this! Love you!
Merci, mon ami français. Love you, too!