Runners who churn butter on their runs
runnersworld.com139 points by randycupertino 3 days ago
139 points by randycupertino 3 days ago
This is really funny. My wife and I watched all of New Scandinavian Cooking over a few months and there was an episode where he made butter. It blew our minds at how simple it was. We had no idea!
So we bought a couple of liters of cream (35% fat), put it in the stand mixer and made butter. There's a Serious Eats page about it.
The butter we made was better than what we normally buy. We live in Switzerland so the normal grocery store butter is very good. Our butter had less water in it (you can tell in a frying pan) and more flavor. Plus we take the resulting buttermilk and make ricotta cheese and then we take the leftover whey and make Norwegian cheese (more like fudge). So we get three products from one batch of cream. The butter comes out to be about 20 cents cheaper per 250g than store bought and then the ricotta and "fudge" are free, so financially you come out ahead. The cleanup is a bit of a pain though.
We've also made cultured butter from crème fraiche. It's tasty but even when the crème fraiche is on sale it's still like 2x the cost of using cream so probably not worth it other than gifts and special occasions. We made mandarin sorbet with the sour buttermilk after the crème fraiche butter and that was excellent.
When I tell old Swiss people (people in their 70s/80s) that we make butter they think it's hilarious. They tell me about how when they were kids their parents made their own butter and also at parties/gatherings the parents would give the kids a jar of cream and it was their job to shake it and pass it around until it was butter.
If you have an hour on the weekend and if you have a stand mixer I suggest just trying it. Start with the balloon whisk and when the peaks start forming switch to the paddle watch it because when the butter forms it happens quick and you get a big clump of butter rattling around in the mixer knocking it off balance. It takes maybe 25 minutes and then you have to wash it in ice water, mold it, then clean up. About an hour.
My wife and I have occasionally made our own butter for years now... one thing people always forget to mention is that it goes bad really quickly. The trick is either to cut it up into chunks and freeze most of it and the remainder you keep in the fridge/defrost later will last about 3 days. Or you can add salt after you've done the separation but this does of course mean you now have salted butter... this will last up to two weeks usually.
Do you mold it with your hands under running water to wash away the remaining fluids? Doing that and salting it makes it last for many weeks for me. I don’t even know how long it actually lasts, I’ve always eaten it all before it’s gone bad. Making butter is a way of preserving milk, so it should last more than a couple of weeks.
Why does the homemade butter spoil so quickly?
It usually contains significant amounts of milk protein, which contribute to flavor but spoil about as quickly as milk does. Washing the butter thoroughly until well after the water is clear will improve storage time, as will salting the butter and thoroughly drying it.
Doesn't that remove the very milk protein that makes it taste better?
Yes, it's a balance between flavor and storage time. If you plan to use it immediately, unwashed butter is best.
But milk does not spoil in 3 days. Why would the butter?
Natural, organic milk does. What you are probably used to is pasteurized, and treated with short bursts of heat. Since at least 20 years, for almost anything milky which you can find in the refrigerated parts of stores. I'm not talking about the stuff which doesn't need to be cooled, until opened, that's heated even longer, and pasteurized harder.
What? Raw milk doesn't expire in 3 days either. More like 2 weeks. And butter unlike cheese has no problem being made from pastueurized milk, so I'm not sure why you'd bring that up.
I've brought that up in response to milk doesn't go bad that fast. Which is against my experience. Maybe I should have that defined more precise?
Under which storage conditions? Refrigerated? Check. Closed container? Check. Climate? Any time of the year, central Europe. Check. Any time of the year somewhere in the Rockies, on the 'Western Slope', at 2600m altitude. Check. After 3 to 4 days it begins to smell and taste different. After which I won't touch/consume it anymore.
I'd be really interested in the stuff lasting 2 weeks, and the conditions under which that's possible?
edit: Again, not that highly pasteurized, homogenized, otherwise treated stuff, but fresh from the cows udder (let's call this really raw milk, which isn't on shelves anywhere, AFAIK), or only the slightest treatmeant, like 'fully organic/bio', which nowadays has a refrigerated shelf life of something like 2 weeks, there aren't any other options anymore. It's all treated. And that stuff still goes bad after opening in a few days.
When proper raw milk starts to go bad, you can keep it at room temperature for a day or so and get something similar to yoghurt. It was done all the time when I was little. I grew up on a farm; the milk came from another farm in the village by the time I had been born.