The Science of Cultured Butter

 Coming in to class this week having written my pre-investigation on the scientific process of making butter, I was eager to hear what others had written, and to get the hands-on experience of making butter with my classmates. Beginning class in our usual manner, we broke into groups to discuss our pre-investigations. This week, I found one paper to be particularly interesting and relatively similar to mine. Tori O’Neill wrote her pre-investigation on cultured butter and how it is made, similar to my pre-investigation on sweet cream butter and how it is made. While discussing Tori’s paper, I learned that cultured butter is made in a seemingly similar fashion to regular butter. The cream is pasteurized and cooled, but before it heads to the churning process, a cultured additive, such as kefir, is stirred into the cream. The cream and culture mix is then left to =ferment for two days. The result is a tangy and creamy butter much different from sweet cream butter. As The London Evening Standard refers to it, “Unlike entry-level butter that you buy in supermarkets, this better [cultured] butter is made with a specific lactic bacteria strain that gives a complex deep flavour...” (2016, p. 1).

  After discussing our pre-investigations, it was time to roll up our sleeves and learn how to make cultured butter ourselves! To begin our very first hands-on cooking project in this class, we sanitized our hands, mason jars, cheese cloth, and rims. This was a vitally important step because if any pathogens were to be sealed inside our fermenting butter containers, the butter could potentially cause foodborne illness. After sanitizing, we poured heavy whipping cream and a small amount of kefir into our jars. Multiple different cultures can be used to make cultured butter, but we chose to use kefir. We then covered our jars with cheese cloth, so as to allow the fermenting cultures to ventilate through the cloth, and to avoid the jar becoming too pressurized due to the growing cultures. We secured the cloth with a rim, and placed the jars in a cool, dry area to ferment. When we return to class on Tuesday, our cultured cream will be ready to be churned into butter!

References

Churn baby churn; Trends A London buttersmith is bringing cultured dairy to the masses.

   Susannah Butter melts at the thought. (2016). The London Evening Standard (London,

   England). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost

   .com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgov&AN=edsgcl.444858008&site=eds-live