This blog post is coming from Drew McBath, our owner, founder, and master butter maker.
Banner’s production kitchen can be really lonely at 5:30am. But hey, preparing and culturing heavy cream for the next day’s churning and packaging session in the wee hours gives me plenty of time to think about the ingredients and steps that go into making our small-scale cultured butter, and how we’re different from the butter that floods grocery shelves today. Spoiler alert: it boils down to the cream we use and the particular way we culture and churn and work our butter.
I. Our Cream
The first fundamental difference between our small-batch butter and the big brands is that we carefully select the cream. We use cream that is at least 40% butterfat, at least 5% higher butterfat than the cream used in most of the butter that is available through grocery stores. Moreover, our cream comes from cows that graze in green pastures on small family farms we know. A healthy share of grass in the diet not only pleases the cows’ taste buds, it increases conjugated linoleic acids, vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 fatty acids in the milk they produce, thereby supporting the fitness of the oh-so-lucky consumer. Our dairy farms also never dose their cows with hormones to increase milk production; a practice that appears to cause health problems in cows. The combination of higher butterfat, grass feeding, and just better treatment of the cows imbues our butter with a richer and silkier texture and provides a better medium for the active cultures we add to ripen the cream. Which leads me to the next reason our butter is just better…
Up next: Our Culturing Process