In Part I, our owner, Drew, talked about the carefully selected cream that then becomes our butter. If you missed it, you can read more here.
II. Our Culturing Process
99.9% of the butter you can buy in the store today in North America is made from sweet cream. That wasn’t always the case. From butter’s inception (perhaps as far back as 4,000 years) butter was made from cream that was purposefully soured over time to enhance its taste. In 1906, J.D. LeClair, the Superintendent of St. Hyacinth Dairy School in Quebec, Canada first suggested the churning of sweet cream to butter. A few years later, the Land O’Lakes cooperative came up with genius bit of marketing and began to churn sweet cream butter, deftly marketing it as “fresh” (i.e., better than butter made from “old” cream). This served them in two ways: first, it allowed them to differentiate their butter. Second, it vastly simplified and economized their butter making. The process of souring pasteurized cream is time consuming and difficult to manage at large scale. The problem was, and this was a big one: that unsalted sweet cream butter doesn’t taste like anything. The beautiful butter flavor everybody loves comes from compounds created by live bacteria in the souring process.
But big butter had a solution for that as well – that solution is on the ingredient list of almost every package of unsalted, sweet cream butter you can buy in the store today: “natural flavors.” Natural flavors include some of the same chemical compounds produced by the cultures that sour milk in a traditional culturing process and are added in powder or liquid form to finished product. Unfortunately these natural flavorings create a brassy and one dimensional taste far removed from butter made using slow-churned, cultured cream.
Even big-brand “cultured” butter is a radical departure from the traditional culturing techniques. Many of these butters use a weird method called “Indirect Bacterial Acidification” to produce their version of cultured butter. This technique was patented in the 1980s and involves bathing already churned sweet cream butter in “starter distillates” that contain both active cultures and some of the compounds that are produced from souring cream in the traditional way (starter distillates are also used to “aromatize” plain unsalted butter sans the active cultures).
This process gets the big cultured butter producers what they want: fast, uncomplicated production, super long shelf life (this involves several different techniques but primarily high temperature pasteurization of the cream which I would contend imparts an undesirable cooked taste into the cream), and the added marketing bonus of not having to add “natural flavorings” to the label.
Up Next: Our Churning and Working Process