In Part II, our owner, Drew, talked about our culturing process. If you missed it, you can read more here.
III. Our Churning and Working Process
Both big brand sweet cream and cultured butters typically use large continuous churns that suck in cream at one end and push out agitated, vacuumed (to remove “excess” oxygen) butter at the other end within minutes. These monsters can produce more than 20,000 pounds of butter per hour! Contrast that to our traditional batch churn where we agitate and work each batch of cream individually until it reaches the perfect texture and taste – this process can take hours.
Alas, the speed, efficiency, and marketing advantage of the huge continuous churn comes at a cost. Butter loses the deepness of flavor, texture and cooking properties that a traditionally-cultured batch churned product, like Banner, maintains. I’ll cover these benefits in a future post.
Because we’re small, simple, and slow, we can produce butter the old fashioned way: superior cream from small, close by dairy farms, slow culturing in a vat to gently ripen the cream, slow churning and working in a small-batch churn for optimal consistency – all to produce a taste velvety texture impossible with mass production methods.
Of course you don’t really need to know anything about continuous or batch churns, starter distillates or the ph of the butter. Simply taste the difference. I recommend a nice rip of baguette and a pat or two of unsalted, Banner Butter.
photo: Whitney Ott