Cultured Butter
Here's a recipe for making cultured butter at home. Once you've tried cultured butter, you'll wonder why you've been eating the flavourless stuff for so long. This recipe is a little time consuming but worth it. Just a disclaimer, always be really careful when fermenting anything at home. Make sure your equipment is clean and sanitized and if anything smells or looks at all off, toss it and start over. Don't take any risks, be clean, and be safe.
Ingredients
- 150 g yogurt
- 1 L double cream
- 1.7 % salt
Instructions
- In a clean, sanitized container, combine 1 litre of double cream and 150 g yogurt with active probiotic culture in it. Live culture yogurt is really easy to find at the store so don’t skip this step as the butter needs these active cultures from the yogurt to properly develop.
- Mix this all together then cover with a towel. Try to use a towel that’s really clean.Set this aside at room temperature for between 24- 48 hours to ferment. This will depend heavily on how warm it is where you live, I live in Scotland and it’s cooler here so I can leave mine for a bit longer.
- You’ll want to check on this periodically and smell it to see how it’s doing, we want it to smell tangy, sweet and really intensely buttery. Once it’s at this point, pop the cream into the fridge to chill for an hour. Then transfer it to a mixing bowl and whisk until the butter fat granules start to form and separate from the buttermilk.
- Place a strainer over a bowl and line with cheese cloth or a large coffee filter and pour the mixture in to strain. Squeeze out any excess moisture and then you’ll be left with golden butter curds and fresh buttermilk. Keep the buttermilk in the fridge for other recipes. Now, we are going to do a process called washing the butter. In ice cold water we are essentially were are forming all those curd together into one cohesive mass and squeezing out any remaining buttermilk.
- We want to keep kneading the butter in cold water either with very clean hands or a spatula until the water is clear. So you can use two bowls switching back and forth, discarding the milky water each time you switch and replacing it with fresh water. Or the easiest way, after you’ve formed the butter into one cohesive mass is to just set the bowl under really cold running water and knead until the water runs clear.
- After I’ve dumped off all the water, I’m going to salt my butter. For a nicely salted butter you want to aim for a 1.7 percent selenity. So to know how much salt to add, weigh out your butter, mine here is 445 grams. And take that number, multiply it by .017 and you’ll get the amount of salt by weight in grams to add. So according to my calculation I’ll add in 7.5 grams of salt.
- I’m using some of this flakey salt from the isle of Skye sea salt company. Stir this up, I’m just mixing mine in my stand mixer with the paddle attachment for a minute or two and your butter is done. You can serve the butter as is or if you want to store it lay out some cling film and gently form a little roll of butter twisting the ends like so to tighten the roll. Place that in the fridge to firm up. Once it’s chilled, unwrap it, slice it into rounds and serve.
Video
Notes
Calculation: weight of butter in grams x .017= amount in grams of salt to add