"Go get the butter..."

This fall, some fresh butter appeared as an optional "add-on" in my farm share.

Cowbella Butter, to be exact.  Made from pastured cows in upstate New York. 

“Made with love in the heart of The Catskill Mountains”.

As much as I love butter (and food!), I never really thought there would be THAT much of a difference between whatever was on sale at the market that week and a more expensive brand.

Because I’d had butter in France.

The REAL stuff. 

The winter after my trip, I was snuggled up in a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan with my French tutor.  I remember going on and on about the butter and yogurt I’d had in France and how I’d never tasted anything like it in my life.

“What do they do to it there?”

“Well,” he leaned in and lowered his voice, “truth is---we really don’t pasteurize a lot of dairy in France.”

He said it with embarrassment.  Kind of like an “Ooops.  My bad.”

The French are VERY protective of their dairy products.  Raw milk (and products made from raw milk) are VERY common.  The idea of pasteurizing their heritage by boiling the shit out of it and ruining the distinctive flavor of that particular region of France...

Well, they get all crazy and start passing laws.  And EVERY single law seems to pass because they're fucking nuts about this stuff.  Oh!---You should just see the rules governing the making of Beaufort cheese!  PAGES of details and rules and restrictions... 

And here's the kicker---Louis Pasteur was FRENCH!!!!

Oh, they'll never live that one down. 

So as time went on, I kept hearing how butters were different, yadda yadda, yadda…..

But I’d TASTED the best stuff imaginable.  The whole pasteurization thing kind of killed any thought that I could re-live the magical moment when I pulled that butter out of the mini-fridge in my 4^th Arrondisement hotel and spread it across a fresh baguette…. 

So butter was not on my radar.

But my farm share hadn’t let me down yet, so I figured I’d give it a try and pre-ordered a small tub.

The next week when I went to pick up my farm share, the woman who runs the location started gushing the moment she saw me walk in the door, “Yes!  You ordered the butter.  I’m so happy you ordered it!  You’re going to LOVE this butter!  You HAVE to taste this butter!  We opened a container last night at the office.  Oh my god.  You can just taste the love!”

They were so excited about it.  They even put out a tub of the stuff to sample. 

With crackers.

They went out and bought a whole box of crackers. 

To sell you something you had ALREADY BOUGHT!

That’s the kind of stupid, blind love I could write a play about.

So I played along and smeared a bit of butter on a cracker….

Let’s just say that I couldn’t wait to get that baby home.

Butter IS different!

Cowbella Butter is produced from cows that live on the Danforth Jersey Farm.  The farm’s been in operation since 1817 and it’s a family business---and the cows are part of that family.

These cows actually get to lead the idealized life you THINK dairy cows live.

Oh, I looked them up online.

There are photos of the barn.  And of cows relaxing in front of a lake and watching the ducks swim by…

They use Jersey cows (because their milk has the highest butterfat content of all the breeds) and they tell you ALL about their cows.  I’ll just pull a quote from their website here:

On their first day of life, we give them their name and as they grow we form bonds with them as we work with them every day through the years.  To us, the little brown cow is perfectly suited to life on our farm.  We have acres of green grass that the cows graze all through pasture season- from May to early November, they stay out all night and we put them in during the day when they come to stand at the back door of the barn and let us know they're ready.  In nice weather they only come in the barn for milking times, and even in winter they still go outside for exercise every day.  Each cow has her own personal stall with a mattress that is bedded with chopped straw every day and with her name over it, and they look forward to coming in the barn to be milked, rest, and eat.  In addition to grass and grain, the cows’ diet is made up of a fermented type of hay called baleage, traditional dry hay, haylage and corn silage, all of which we grow ourselves on our own fields.  We use manure from the cows as fertilizer.  We never have and never will use artificial growth hormones, we never dock tails, and we use antibiotics only when the health of the animal is in danger.  If antibiotics are used on a milking cow, she is milked separately and her milk is dumped until the antibiotics are out of her system.  Our farm is the home that our animals know their entire lives- we feel a great responsibility as their caretakers to make sure that we give them the happiest and healthiest life possible.

Can Land O’ Lakes say that?  I don’t think so.

Yes, the butter is pasteurized.  Because this is America and it’s what they have to do.  But you CAN tell the difference.  You can!

My eyes have been opened to The Wonderful World of Butter!

Tonight I made butter for the very first time.

I know.  I know.  "Um...you make lard but you've never made butter?  That's like getting your pilot's licence without knowing how to drive a car."

In all fairness, this was actually said to me by a guy I used to hang with in college.  I wanted to go to Ground School.  I'd read a lot of Antoine de Saint-Exupery in high school.  I don't quite know what I was planning on doing with a pilot's license.  Maybe I wanted to fly mail across the Sahara or something.  But I thought I would be a good pilot.  A Natural.  Because I'm a conscientious person who pays attention to detail.  And they were offering classes at the local airport.  If he could just give me a ride to the airport once a week...

"But you don't know how to drive!!!!  Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?"

Frankly, I didn't.  I didn't see what the big deal was.  To this day, I like to believe he found this charming.  

But probably not.  

Oh, we've kept in touch.  He's now a philosophy professor.  I think he teaches a class in reason.  A few years ago, we got into an argument over Descartes' Discourse On Method.  

He sent me a philosophy 101 textbook to "explain" Descartes to me.  Oh, I read it. But I still have a little problem with Descartes.  And I will stand behind my feelings on this matter.  And I've read validation by OTHER philosophers who agree with me!

Ultimately, perhaps we were always like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at Cambridge with a hot poker between us.  

He's now happily married and he and his wife keep chickens.  Just for the eggs, you know.  

I guess I wasn't as charming as I thought.

But anyway----here's how you make butter.  It's pretty simple.

Heavy Whipping Cream.

Pour it into a big bowl. 

Plenty of sites will suggest you use a food processor or a stand mixer with a splatter guard----this WILL make a bit of a mess.  I used a hand mixer.  I liked it because you could see and feel the process of "churning".  

Beat the heavy cream PAST the whipping stage.  Just keep whipping and whipping and eventually the butterfat and buttermilk will separate.  

Then line a strainer with cheesecloth, separate the two, and squeeze out the excess buttermilk as much as possible.  And now----you have TWO things!  Butter AND buttermilk!  

Put your buttermilk in the fridge to use in pancakes or fried chicken and let's get back to the butter...

You've got to "wash" it.  That's the word they use, but what you're really doing is squeezing as MUCH water out of it as possible.  To do this, you put your butter in a bowl with ice water.  Seriously, ICE water!  Leave the ice cubes in there even.  You don't want to melt the butter.  You want it as cold as possible and then you just smear it around the bowl with a spatula to extract as much water as you possibly can.  Keep doing this (dumping the cloudy ice water and putting in new ice water and squeezing again) till the water runs clear.  It took me four tries.

  
After that, you just put in some kind of crock or wrap it up.  I wrapped mine up in wax paper like a Tootsie Roll and put it in the freezer. 

You can add a pinch of Kosher salt, if you like.  I kept mine unsalted.  I put it in the freezer because unsalted butter goes bad quickly.  Especially the homemade stuff.  

I am now on a journey to learn everything I can possibly learn about butter.  

So if you'll just drive me to the airport once a week, one day I'll be able to fly you anywhere you want to go!