Growing a Farmer

by Kurt Timmermeister

  Best to save up the cream until enough has been collected. Usually a gallon or two of cream makes enough butter to make churning worth the effort. Luckily, old butter churns can still be found in the odd antique store or online. New ones exist as well, but the price always seems a bit high to me. The owners of the antique shops tend to be rather relieved to sell a butter churn. Not a lot of demand for them these days.

  The basic design of the butter churn is this: a large one-gallon or two-gallon glass jar, often with an odd design to encourage the moving of the cream. The jar is threaded on the top to accept a lid mounted with a motor. The motor is used to rapidly spin a metal shaft with a blade at the end. The jar is filled three-quarters of the way full, at most, and the lid is screwed on tightly, with the metal shaft entering well into the cream.

  Many factors challenge the cream to give up its butter; temperature is big. Too cold, and the churning can take an exorbitant amount of time. Room temperature is ideal. The quality of the milk affects the resulting volume of cream as well. The purity of the cream and how much milk is pulled into the churn along with the cream also contribute to the quality of the butter.

  Over the course of the week, I skim the cream from the milk in the dairy cooler. Each day another quart of cream, a half gallon of cream on a good day, goes into the butter churn. By the end of the week, the churn is filled with rich Jersey cream.

  The churn is then left out in the morning for the cream to temper, to come up to the room temperature. Oddly, as a pastry cook, I was always taught to keep the cream as chilled as possible when whipping cream, to ice down the mixing bowl and the whisk to assure a chilled cream to whip the best cream. For butter, warmer is better.

  Once the churn filled with cream has come up to temperature, I attach the motor to the top and hook up the paddle. Using an old cook’s trick of placing the glass churn on a moistened towel keeps the churn from sliding around the counter while the motor is rapidly spinning. I have to admit that I learned this from experience; bad experience. When I first started making butter I left the churn running on the counter while I worked on other things, confident that I had a few minutes before the butter would need my attention again. A large crash as the glass churn filled with cream hit the concrete flour taught me to keep my eye on it, and to use the towel beneath. Thank God for eBay to keep us in outdated appliances not readily available at the local hardware.

  There are two basic styles of butter: sweet cream butter and cultured butter. I stick with the sweet cream style. The basic difference is the time the cream is left to settle at a temperature where the cream will begin to culture, or sour. If the cream is churned quickly after it reaches room temperature, the butter will taste “sweet” like the taste of fresh cream. If allowed to sit for hours at room temperature, it will begin to sour; the lactose (sugars) will begin to turn to lactic acid. When that cream is churned, the resulting butter will have a more cultured taste. Delicious, but with raw cream as the principle ingredient, I shy away from it. As the lactose is converting to lactic acid, bacteria also are given a chance to regenerate. Good bacteria, fine. Pathogenic bacteria, dangerous.

  Making butter is something that is done here each and every Saturday afternoon throughout the year. The butter that I make on Saturdays lasts through the week until the next batch is made. I like that this is predictable; it makes me feel old-fashioned, like my grandmother making cookies every Saturday.

  Churning cream into butter varies every week. Some weeks, the cream will quickly churn into butter in a few minutes. Other weeks, close to an hour and that churn will be still be going, the motor getting hotter and hotter. I am not really sure why there’s a variation. Possibly it is the fat content of the cream in the churn or what the cows ate that week. Maybe it is the quality of the milk or the health of the cows. But it changes every week. Keeps me on my toes. I can’t time it, can’t expect it to act a certain way.

  The cream at the beginning of the process is liquid, consistent and slightly yellow. After sitting in the cooler all week, with additions made every afternoon, the milk has fallen to the bottom. A half inch of lighter colored milk shows off the yellowness, the creaminess of the higher eight inches.

  I plug in the churn and the cream starts to move. Very little changes. It swirls and swirls and appears to do nothing. This is the part that can go on and on and on. Often I feel as though it just won’t ever come together. Can it really just keep swirling? Is there any fat in this cream? The glass jar of the butter churn is not quite filled, maybe three-quarters or two-thirds filled at most. Once the motor starts, the cream immediately fills the jar, the sides are completely splashed with cream. There is no headroom left.

  The cream will whisk around, with seemingly little change, until it happens. The sound of the cream hitting the sides of the churn will vary a bit. The level of the cream at the top will change just a bit. If you lift up the lid, the consistency of the cream will be slightly different; a tad thicker.

  And then a shift will occur. Quickly, the level of the cream on the side of the glass will drop, the sound will drop, the cream will begin to transform into butter. Most indicative of the change will be the consistency of the cream. While the cream is being whisked around it will coat the inside of the glass churn, rendering it opaque.

  Once the change takes place, the level will drop and the liquid whisking around will not coat the inside of the glass, it will hit the glass and fall. It is no longer thick, no longer opaque. It still won’t be butter, but it will have changed.

  Rapidly, this liquid will begin to break. The most apparent sign after the dropping of the level and the cleaning of the glass is a thin top layer of the cream will be bluish, not yellow. Just the edge, the top edge will be thin, non-cream-like; blue. Below will be yellow and creamy still.

  And then it will all happen. The blue liquid will move from the top to the entire jug; the milk will separate from the fat, from the butter. The contents of the jug will move from a swirling cream mixture to bits of fat in a thin liquid; it will move faster, swirl faster.

  And now it can all go very well, or go too far. I look for this ideal time, this ideal situation when the fat, the butter-to-be, resembles rice floating in milk. Little beads of golden butter, buoyed in the swirling milk. Too early, the beads will be too small and you won’t have butter and milk, but just fatty milk. Too much churning, and the butter will clump up, potentially churning the milk back into the butter. But neither is an unfixable disaster.

  At the rice stage, I stop the motor, open the churn and take a look. Big rice. Big golden rice. I can picture the butter on the table now, taste the hot bun broken open, the butter melting into the bread.

  I ready a colander, a tight sieve atop a large pot. I want to save the buttermilk as it drains from the butter. I quickly pour the contents of the jug into the sieve. If it has churned enough, the butter will remain in the sieve, the buttermilk draining below. If not, if it is too early, I pour it all back in and let it go some more.

  In the colander the mixture drains for a while, ridding the butter of buttermilk. What amazes me at this stage is the look of buttermilk. For most of us, buttermilk means one thing: those quart milk containers found in the store. As a baker I used quart after quart for biscuits, cakes and frostings. If you read the fine print on that carton the correct name is cultured buttermilk, or, for some reason, Hungarian buttermilk. Cultured buttermilk simply means that it has been inoculated with some culture. Similar to that used for yogurt, the culture quickly and completely regenerates throughout the buttermilk, making it thick. But the buttermilk that comes out of making butter looks nothing like the store-bought version. Homemade buttermilk will be thin, with no fat left in the milk, very little color, and unless you’re making cultured butter, it will not be very sour.

  I save the buttermilk that drains off the butter. I save it because it must be saved. The cows were well fed with beautiful alfalfa, lush pastures and sweet grains, and they produced this product. It must be save
d; it must be kept in the farm. I have tried to make ricotta out of it, but it is rather odd, I must admit. The dogs will drink a bit of it, but get bored with it quickly. The pigs will most likely get the lion’s share of it and enjoy it tremendously.

  Once the butter sitting in the colander has drained adequately, it must be washed. Butter really doesn’t go bad. I am sure that the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and every local health department would disagree with that, but I stand behind it. At the very least, butter is always eaten before it can turn. The buttermilk, however, can sour in the butter and make it go off. Removing the residual buttermilk is essential.

  If you stop the churn at the rice stage, the butter will be loose and fluffy and light. A spraying of water over the colander of butter will rinse it completely. Too much pressure, and all of the butter can go down the drain; hot water is a certain disaster. A cool stream of water will work. After rinsing, let it drain well.

  Now the fun begins. I have never been a big proponent of latex gloves. Health departments the nation over find them to be a great hope of cleanliness in commercial kitchens. My opinion lies in the idea that messy habits don’t change simply because they are wrapped in plastic. The latex glove can contaminate food just as easily as the bare hand. Wash your hands, and the food should be fine. In this case, however, gloves work well; I embrace them.

  I like to salt the butter. Salt is always a good thing. Brings flavor. Unsalted butter is a sign of sophistication, I suppose, but I find it dull and drab. Add some salt. Originally salt was added to assist in preservation, but flavor is a better reason. A couple of tablespoons per pound of butter seems about right. More can always be added.

  Flip the butter out of the colander into a bowl ample enough to hold the butter and then some. With your gloved hands, begin to squeeze the butter. Begin to pull the butter together into a ball. Immediately liquid—half buttermilk, half water—will emerge from the butter, filling the bottom of the bowl. Pull the butter to one side of the bowl and tip the bowl to its side, eliminating the liquid. Continue balling up the butter and pouring out the liquid until no more liquid percolates out from the butter. Then the butter can be formed. Squeeze the butter with your fingers. It will move from bits of fat to a large, golden, dry mass. I like this part. It is food, good food, and it is in your hands, made by your hands.

  Suddenly the early winter mornings with the cows in the rain and mud seem long forgotten; now there is butter. Butter for warm bread, for pastries, for sautéed carrots. Nothing better.

  I will stick with that. There is nothing better than great butter, but there are a few close runner-ups. Yogurt, ricotta, cajeta. All great. All better when made by hand than when store-bought. I am of the belief that because of the nature of dairies and the potential health risk of milk, dairies have been industrialized more than any other part of the food industry. You can grow your own carrots, buy them at the farmers’ market from a small local farmer, or even from a grocery store that ships them in from out of state or out of the country. A Mexican-grown carrot is still essentially the same as the carrot you pull out of your garden in the backyard. Your own carrot is better, no question, but the process of growing each is essentially the same.

  Dairy products just aren’t like that. Cheese made by Kraft Foods is a completely different product than cheese from a small artisan cheese maker. Ricotta, yogurt, butter, all are really very different. Pick up the product in the supermarket and read the ingredients list. I have no idea what those chemicals are. I am confident that I do not have them in my larder. I am certain that I don’t need them. My favorite is supermarket cream cheese; what is that big white block shrink-wrapped in plastic? No relation to actual cream cheese. It is some kind of milk product suspended in guar gum.

  I have found it difficult to find descriptions of original processes for dairy products. Yogurt recipes certainly exist, but finding a really good recipe for butter is extremely difficult. Recipes for cheese making exist, but not as many as one would think. We have collectively lost the ability to process foods in a nonindustrial manner.

  As we lose this ability, we also lose part of our culture. For hundreds of years we have processed milk to preserve it, to enjoy it. In the last fifty years we have given the role of producing food to large corporations; we have lost our culture. Culture is now Philadelphia cream cheese, Kraft singles, and Yoplait, not farmstead butter and cheese.

  Yogurt is a simple craft: turning milk into a cultured product by inoculating it with live cultures. Understanding how cultures work helps greatly in creating a high-quality yogurt.

  The cultures that the milk is inoculated with vary, but are all variations of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. The easiest way to find these cultures is in supermarket yogurt. They are often listed on the container. The smallest producer is generally the best, although, surprisingly, not all are the same. As yogurt is a rather basic product, I expected all commercial yogurts to resemble one another. I look for small regional Greek yogurts. I get the best results with those. The flavor and texture of the eventual yogurt depends on the specific cultures. The large national yogurts have so much going on in them that they scare me. Try a few different ones; it is surprising which you will enjoy and which you will eventually avoid.

  I studied very little biology in school. It really didn’t interest me. Since my entrée into the dairy world I have had to pick up a basic working knowledge of biology. I realize that I have absorbed quite a bit since that first day Dinah came off the truck and I started milking her.

  The Lactobacillus is a bacterium. Bacillus refers to the shape of the bacterium; it is always described as rod shaped. With the bacterium Streptococcus, coccus refers to its spherical shape. These bacteria, being fragile as most are, have a specific range of temperatures at which they’re comfortable. For Lactobacillus and Streptococcus, that range is between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Too hot, and the bacteria will simply die; too cold, and they may still grow, but too slowly to be effective.

  The milk could simply be heated to 110 degrees and the culture added, but thanks to Harold McGee and his book On Food and Cooking, I have learned that heating the milk before adding the cultures to 185 degrees Fahrenheit alters the casein proteins in the milk to create longer proteins. The result is a more custardlike, thick yogurt. Sadly, I should have listened more in biology class and could explain why this happens. Take it as fact that it works; I do.

  The procedure is to heat the milk to 185 degrees Fahrenheit and then allow it to cool to between 100 and 110 degrees. In the process of making yogurt the cultures eat the food in the milk and expel their waste. In this case, the bacteria eat the lactose—the sugars in milk—and create lactic acid. The result is a sour, thick milk product: yogurt. By way of comparison, when yeast is added to bread dough, the yeasts eat the sugars in the flour and expel gas, which causes the bread to rise; when making wine the yeasts added to grape juice eat the sugars of the sweet grapes and expel alcohol and carbon dioxide.

  Once the culture has fully consumed all of the sugars available it will die, having no more food. The yogurt will be finished. Depending on the temperature, this could take a few hours; keeping it warm overnight is always a good idea. Once it is complete, the yogurt is chilled, further firming it and creating a finished custardlike sour product. For an extra touch, draining the yogurt at this stage in cheesecloth, allowing any moisture to drip out, gives it a more refined texture. It will be drier, thicker and will not resemble custard but rather a moist cheese.

  The volume of milk produced by a cow fluctuates during her lactation. When she first calves, it is not at its highest point. A few weeks later the cow will come into her full production and then slowly the volume will decrease until she has dried up.

  In an ideal setup, each cow is in milk for ten months of the year and dry for the remaining two months while she waits to calve again, giving her a chance to revitalize he
r body after being taxed by heavy, constant milk production. Cows also respond with increased milk production to large volumes of high-quality grass. When the pastures are at their best, the volume of milk is highest. The result of this variable milk supply is that there are times of year when there is way too much milk and times when there is way too little.

  A normal quantity of milk produced by a Jersey is five gallons per day; a Holstein, potentially ten gallons. When the milk is being used daily at about the same rate, all seems just fine. The cow is milked, the milk is cooled, then stored, then sent out as milk or butter or cheese, and the process keeps a nice equilibrium.

  When the balance is off—and it doesn’t have to be off a lot, but just by a small amount—everything backs up. Five gallons of milk is a fair amount of volume. By dimension, approximately twelve inches by twelve inches by twenty. By weight, also substantial: more than forty pounds. When the milk leaving the dairy drops below the amount of milk coming in, the cooler starts filling up with milk. Quickly. If I can’t get around to making cheese for a couple of days during a period when there is a large volume of milk being produced, suddenly the coolers are full. Full of ten, twenty, thirty, forty gallons of milk. It is very difficult to quickly get rid of thirty gallons of milk, especially if you take time to deal with the problem. Every twelve hours, more milk is produced, chilled and needs a place to go. Sounds like a good problem to have, but when it happens, it can be overwhelming.

  By contrast, if the cows simply aren’t producing an adequate amount of milk to fulfill your milk needs, then the milk supply diminishes very rapidly. Simply put, a balance between supply and demand is quite important, and difficult. The result is the co-op system.

  Generally, throughout the United States, dairies are each a part of a specific co-op. The dairies raise the cows, milk them, chill and hold the milk in a large bulk tank and then sell the milk in bulk. Every day, or every few days, depending on the volume of the dairy and the size of the bulk tank, a large milk tanker shows up at the dairy and removes the milk. The tanker continues on its way from dairy to dairy, eventually returning to the milk bottling plant to pasteurize the milk, bottle it and distribute it.