How to make butter: regular and live culture butter recipe

Organic cream was on sale, so I made two kinds of butter, regular and cultured.  They were both delicious.  What's more, they were so easy, I don't think I will ever buy the flavourless butter bricks from the shop again.

A litre of cream makes about a pound of butter.  You can use a proper butter churn if you like - it makes things much easier - or you can use a water-tight container and shake the heck out of it (enlist helpers).  Either way, it takes about half an hour to an hour..  

How to make butter at home: just churning method

Cream, whipping cream or heavy cream (not half and half or cereal cream)

salt - no-iodine (optional, but recommended)

You will also need something to agitate the cream.  This could be a churn like the one in the photo, which is basically a tall, narrow container, with a lid that has a hole in the top, and a handle with a cross on the bottom.   The handle goes up and down, and the cross agitates the cream.  

Another option is to use a water tight container and shake the heck out of it.  You will need something inside the container to agitate it.  According to my families oral tradition, a tiny particle of butter, about half a centimetre cubed will do it.  But I used a small wooden spoon.  

I tried both methods and I liked the churn better.  The problem with the shaking method is that there is a point when the cream transforms into thick whipping cream and won't slosh around on it's own.  It took a lot of force to keep agitating it at that stage, whereas the churn took very little extra effort.

Basically, the method:

• Put your cream in the vessel so that it does not fill more than half way (it needs room to slosh around).  Either shake or churn it until it becomes butter.



the yellow lumpiness is butter,
the thin white milk like liquid is the buttermilk.

• you will go through several stages from sloshy cream, to thicker cream, to whipped cream, to extra-thick whipped cream, to suddenly thick, pale yellow, clumps and white thin liquid.  That's the butter stage.
• Expect this to take more than half an hour.  
• There are some people who do this with an electric mixer.  Sure, it's a bit quicker, but it's very hard on the motor, so I don't recommend it.
• Pour off the buttermilk and keep it for baking or pancakes or whatever.  
• Put the butter in a large bowl.  Now we wash the butter.  This feels weird the first time you do it, but trust me.  Add about a cup of COLD water to the bowl with the butter.  



Washing the butter

• Take a wooden spoon and push all the butter to one side of the bowl.  Cut into the butter with the spoon and move a small amount of butter through the water and to the other side of the bowl.  Repeat till all the butter is on the other side.  Now drain the water, and add fresh Cold water to the bowl.  Cut the butter like before.  As you do this, you will notice the water turns milky.  That milkiness is the milk that was trapped inside of the butter.  Do this, changing the water frequently, until the water is clear.  Do Not Skimp on this step!  Doing this properly will make all the difference to taste and shelf life of the finished butter.  It takes at least three changes of water, sometimes up to 10.
• Now that the butter is washed, drain off any remaining liquid from the bowl.  Give the butter a squeeze (with the spoon against the side of the bowl, or with clean hands) to press out any extra liquid that got trapped in it.
• Time to salt the butter.  Salting the butter adds flavour and drastically increases shelf life.  Unsalted butter starts to go rancid in less than a week, salted butter can last in the fridge for several weeks.  I use about 3/4 tsp of sea salt per pound of butter, but you can use just a pinch, or up to two teaspoons.  Stir the salt into the butter so that it's evenly distributed throughout.
• In the days before refrigeration, they would use a lot more salt... sometimes they would take blocks of butter and coat them in salt to extend the shelf life.  But since we have a fridge, we don't need that much salt.
• The butter is ready to put in your butter dish, or if you have a mold or butter press, let's do that.

This is the one I found:

I press the butter into it, firmly, then open the mold and pop the butter out.  Sometimes the butter is soft, so I need to chill the butter before opening the mold.  The mold has gaps in it that allow any excess liquid seep out of the butter as it's compressed into the mold.

• Keep at room temp, in the fridge, or freeze.  The colder it is, the longer it will keep.

Cultured Butter:

This is butter that is made with fermented milk.  I used a room temperature yoghurt culture called Fil Mjolk to culture the cream before churning it.  Cultured butter has a slightly sour flavour to it, but in a light and refreshing good way.  It's brimming with probiotic goodness and keeps a little longer than your regular butter.  It can be used the same way as normal butter for cooking, eating, baking, whatever.

So far as I can tell, this only works with Fil Mjolk or Piima - however, there may be other cultures that will make yummy butter.  If you find out what they are, please let me know.

Cream

Starter culture like Fil Mjolk or Piima

salt (optional, but a good idea)

• The day (or two) before you want to make butter, culture the cream as per normal.  I use the Fil Mjolk, so I'll describe my method.  When you make it, follow the instructions that come with your culture.
• Add 1 Tbs of culture per cup of cream (4 cups in a litre).  Stir it well into the cream and cover with a cloth.  Leave at room temperature for 10 to 20 hours until the cream has set into a firm yoghurt-like consistency.  
• Place the cultured cream into the fridge for at least 6 hours.
• Remove starter for your next batch, then put the rest of the cultured cream into your butter churn and follow the instructions as per making regular butter above (churn, wash, salt, press, store)

Affordable?: Very much so.  A pound of, regular, store bought butter costs about $5 in the shop, which is the same price as a litre of organic cream.  The organic cream is often on sale when it nears the expiry date, so I usually wait till it's $1 to $3 a litre (which makes a pound of butter) and buy the lot.  The butter freezes well, so I can make loads when the cream is on sale.

Healthy?:  Yep.  There is a lot of evidence that butter is one of the healthiest fats for you and your brain.  But besides that, this way you can control how much salt is in the butter, and if you buy organic and/or cream from grass fed cows, it's even healthier.  

If you make cultured butter, then there are even more health benefits.  The butter will include live bacteria very much like you find in yoghurt, only more of it.  These probiotics are a vital component for gut health - and make the butter taste better.

Transition:  The idea of transitioning from a place where we are dependent on large business to provide for us, back to a place where we have control of our own basic needs is an awesome concept.  I've had a small amount of interaction with our local Transition group, and I think this is exactly the kind of activity that "reduces our oil dependence" and helps obtain "ecological sustainability" - the catch phrases are theirs not mine, thus the quotes.  The cream I bought was produced on the same island where I live.  This method for making butter takes pure human power, and does not need petroleum based anything.  

Improvising airlocks for my Wild Fermentation.

This is the time of year when we do the most fermenting.  The pears have just been picked and juiced, the grapes are plump and bursting on the vine, and there are far too many vegetables in the garden waiting to be picked, and no where to store them all.  Parry (often called pear cider), wine, and fermented pickled veg are all on the menu for this year.  

One of the things I've learnt is most important, whether it be a batch of mead or a pot of kimchi, is to control the amount of air that the fermentation has access too.   In Sandor Katz's book Wild Fermentation there are lots of options, some include covering the salted veg with a plate, weighted down with a rock till the brine comes out, others involved airlocks... some home made, some the type you find in a home brew kit.

I found a whole box of those airlocks in a free pile at a yard sale this summer.   One can often find brewing equipment on UsedAnywhere or Craigslist, for a decent price.  However, these airlocks didn't have corks, they were just the plastic inserts - which turned out to be exactly what I needed.  Because now I can use them for more than carboys and jugs, I can use them for large mouth jars as well.  

I got the idea from the Pickl-It site, who makes these fantastic jars for small batch fermentation.  If I lived in a small house or condo, or could afford it, then I would buy a whole set of these Pickl-It jars.  Their one ltr jar would be excellent for sampling new recipes, and might even be a useful idea for first try at apple cider - though the surface area of the liquid might be a bit big for that.  They also have some nifty recipes and tips on their website that you can check out.

You will need

• a jar or bottle with it's lid.
• drill press
• airlock
• file
• beeswax candle
• Matches/lighter
• a surface that can get wax on it, like a piece of tinfoil
• a grown up or someone who is responsible arround power tools and fire.

Anyway, here is how I attach an airlock to a regular jar lid.  Please note, that a lot of fermentations will degrade metal over time, so it's important not to let the fermentation touch the metal, and to dispose of the lid part after each fermentation, to prevent metal particles leaching into your food.    

First I wash and dry a jar and lid.  I take the stem of the airlock and measure it, choose a drill bit that will make a snug hole for the airlock.  In my case, 1/2 inch bit did the job.  

The next step is the difficult one.  It's best done with a drill press and someone who knows what they are doing.  The drill can easily rip the lid, especially the smaller lids, out of your hand and go to work on your flesh instead.  Take appropriate safety steps when drilling the hole, go slow and steady.   

Once the hole is drilled, take a file and carefully remove any rough edges, being careful not to disturb the rubber seal on the inside of the jar lid.  Also, use a magnet to remove any metal filings, don't blow on it or you may get metal slivers in the eye.  

Wash the lid and dry it well.  Fit the airlock into the hole.  You will probably notice that no matter how tight you press it into the hole, there will still be small gaps between the lid and the airlock.  We will fix that in a moment.  You don't really need to press it in that far, just far enough to sit in there stably.  Push it in too far and the bottom of the airlock will be in your ferment - not desirable.

A couple of mead bottles with improvized airlock lids.
 - more on that later.

Lay out a piece of tinfoil or use a level, fire resistance surface that you don't mind getting wax on.  Get your beeswax candle read and a place where you can put it down quickly and it won't topple over.  I suppose you could use any unscented wax, but I feel beeswax is more natural and like to use it for food stuff better than petrol based wax.

With the lid (airlock inserted) in one hand and the lit candle in the other, carefully drip a few drops of wax on the place where the airlock meets the lid (on the top of the lid, not the inside).  Turn the lid a bit, dripp a few more drops of wax, repeat until all the gaps between the lid and the airlock are filled in.

It's best not to hold the candle too close to the lid, as the wax will be a bit cooler and run less when it hits the lid, also flame plus plastic...

I did this with a few larger mouth jars for long term fermentation storage like shredded beats for borscht and swiss chard ribs after I discovered the 'float oil on top' doesn't work all that well for me.

Vintage orange juicer

Actually, what more can I say?  It's a circa 1950s orange juicing device.  

It's also the most efficient orange juice I've ever used - and I've used a few in my day.  Very easy to squeeze and more importantly, it's super fast to clean.

first we slice the orange into quarters

place each quarter in the juicer and sqeeze

the juice is collected in a reservoir, as you can see when I remove the strainer

and there we go, one orange worth of juice.
Not much, I know, but it was really the wrong kind of orange for this.

Sausage making marathon

 I just spent the last two days learning to make sausages.  Well, I say learning when in fact it's more like floundering.  But we did it.  One small 25lb leg of pork is now sausages.

I'm exhausted.

And elated.

But in the end I learned a lot about meat, equipment, sausage making and myself.  I also learned that no matter how sexual or sensual food is, there is nothing quite so pornographic as stuffing your own sausage. And because I want this to be an all ages friendly blog, I'm not describing that part any further.  *shudders*.

One thing I learned about myself is that I don't enjoy a meaty sausage (stop snickering, I'm serious).  I like there to be a little bit of filler (okay, I'll join you in a snicker) in the sausage, like bread crumbs.  So I experimented with 5lb batches until I got something that I really enjoyed.  I also played around with what order we add the spices, how much liquid, what ingredients that sort of thing.

Being a pork leg, it was rather lean, so I ran out of fat really quickly.  But I had some beef suet in the freezer that I made do.

I also learned that the hand grinder and sausage stuffer I picked up at (brace yourself) Walmart completely sucks!  It is not properly cast, the threading on the ring is a different TPI than the body of the machine.... and well, I wrote rather a scathing review over on their site, so I'm not going to complain too much here.

What I did ending up doing was using my Universal Food Chopper (which according to most people cannot handle raw meat at all, never, ever, ever!

oh, yah, you can see how much trouble it's having.
I said that last bit sarcastically by the way

This is on the coarse setting for the first pass

My favourite way to make sausage was to chop the fat up by hand, fairly fine (1/2 inch pieces) add to the meat (roughly 2" pieces), mix with the spices, herbs and whatnots.  Freeze for half an hour, chop (technically this machine isn't grinding) on coarse  mix in the bread crumbs, freeze another half an hour, chop on fine, and then mix in the wine.  Freeze 30 min and then stuff away.  It's a lot of work, but the end result this way is in my opinion the most tasty.

sausage resting, waiting to be made into links
looks pretty discussing at this stage.

Still getting the hang of stuffing the sausage and making links, but I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this:

They actually look like sausages when you fry them up.  Isn't that nice?

A bit of mustard, a crust of sourdough and some home made sauerkraut and I'm happy as Larry at Lunchtime. 

I'll post my variation on a garlic sausage recipe later, I want to have a few more taste tests to make sure I got it right before I commit anything to the internet.  

Affordable Cooking: Oh yes!  Pork was 98 cent a pound, bread crumbs were made with dried bits crust that would have otherwise gone to the chickens or compost.  Spices (most of which were already in the garden) were next to nothing.  The only real cost would be the 1.5 cups of Plonk (red wine) I used in the garlic sausage.  But if you live outside of Canada or make your own, red wine for cooking is far more affordable.  Casings can be bought at Stuffers and are good quality and affordable.  If you are a home sausage maker like me, go for the discount scrag ends casings.

I'm going to say it cost me $1.25 per pound of finished sausage.  I don't remember how much sausages cost in the shops, but chances are they aren't made to your specific dietary needs and desires.  

Cooking with Allergies:  A major yes for this one.  Sausages are infinitely variable.  you can even go the vegan rout and get artificial casings and fill them with spiced up lentil mush.  

By making my own sausage I can eat sausages for the first time in my life without getting a stomach ache. 

Healthy? Mostly yes since you are choosing your own ingredients and salt content.  Sausages need quite a bit of fat (20 to 40%) to have the right texture, so this may pose a problem for some people.  However, I don't eat many sausages (one a meal is plenty for me) and always match it with something like sauerkraut to aid in digestion. 

With my basic understanding of healthy eating, I would say yes, these sausages are good for you when taken internally and in moderation.

Making Hummus Manually - introducting the universal food chopper

  

Hummus is one of my favourite feel good foods.  It's simple yet flavourful.  It's spicy yet somehow also soothingly mild.

Hummus gets along well with everyone, be it cheese or crackers, carrots, or apples.  It's the perfect food for dipping, or just dipping one's fingers in and licking them sensually.

Hummus is perhaps the second most sensual food, after chocolate of course.  If you make your own, you can make it crunchy or silky.  Piquant or soothing.  It stimulates the senses and the appetite.

As some of you may have figured out by now, my blitzer and I do not get on well.   An, my blender... well... we don't talk any more.  But I did happen to get my hands on rather a nifty gadget at a junk shop the other day.  It's called a universal food chopper and according to the ephemera of it's time (circa 1890s through 1960s) it can handle anything.  But can it handle hummus?

Yes.  It can.



Using my standard hummus recipe, and the nut butter attachment, I pealed and used the food chopper to mush up the garlic, then went to work on the well drained chickpeas.

The chickpeas come out looking rather flaky, but they are soft as butter.

I mixed in the usual and massaged it with my hands for about 10 seconds to blend well.  I suppose I could use a spoon (and would do if I was cooking for someone else) but hey, it's an excuse to get my hands dirty.

Time-wise, including cleaning, it took the same amount of time as using a blitzer.  It did take more concentrated effort on my part, but that might be part of the learning curve.  I now know I can make hummus if the power goes out, which is a good skill to be able to have during storm season or zombie apocalypse.

The lost 50 years of kitchen history, where did it all go?

There seems to be this huge gap of available knowledgeable from the turn of the last century to about 1954.  I spent hours searching for books or ephemeral from that time period with very little luck.

It all started when I wanted to learn about the icebox.  

I thought it would be a rather easy thing to learn about, but the internet is suspiciously mute when it comes to this subject.  Sure there are tutorials on how to put a block of ice in a non-functioning fridge, or how to use a camper cooler, but that's about it.  The wiki page has about the most useful info I've found so far, and this rather nice picture:

From the wiki page on iceboxes linked above

The icebox arrived as people moved to the cities from the country   Before the icebox, houses had cellars and larders, usually a room dug into the ground to keep food cool.  As population density in the cities increased, there was less and less room for cellars, but that's okay because there was always someone wiling to sell you something, and you could buy your food fresh daily.  Although buying food daily cost more than buying it when there was a surplus and keeping it in your home.  The idea of iceboxes sprung up, and were easy enough to make yourself or buy as your economic predicament dictated.  Having a place to store your perishables really helped save money and time.  

I've seen mentions of versions of the icebox pre-dating the Victorian period, but basically they took off during the middle of the 19th Century.  But the icebox has a rather short hayday.  It wasn't till the twentieth century that they really took off, and then as electricity moved across the nation, and houses were being wired into the grid, the icebox lost it's charm in favour of the electric refrigerator.  So, it seems that the rice and fall of the icebox corresponds to the same period of history that I'm having trouble finding information on.

You think about the time between 1900 and 1950.  There is a huge change in society in general, and this is reflected in the kitchen.  2 world wars, crop failures, Victory gardens, ration stamps, wide spread acceptance of industrialized agriculture, and industrialized pre-packaged foods. Go from the pantry to the icebox, to the electric ice box.  We moved from the country grocery store where you shop at least once a day and often had food delivered to your back door, to the once a week supermarket.  Microwaves were invented, a side effect of the atomic bomb I'm sure.  TV dinners.  Electric Freezers.  From wood, to coal, to gass, to electric stoves.  Mas transportation  highways, railroads, airplanes moving food not only across the country by around the world!  Perfection of canning techniques that no longer poison people with lead, and the creation of aluminium which allows lighter weight cans.  SPAM!  The fact that people were hungry enough to eat SPAM!  

Sure, we've had agricultural revolutions before that, and the major shift from rural to urban dwelling brought about by the 1800s, but I don't know of a time in history when so much changed in the way that people approached food.  It really surprises me that there aren't any books written on this topic.  At least I haven't found any.  I cornered the librarian and asked her to do a search, with no luck.  The next step for me is to brave the local archives and see if I can locate some ephemera from back then.  

Although I only started out wanting to know how people use to build and use an icebox, now I want to know more!  Project Gutenberg has a few wartime household manuals put out by the government (both US and UK) so I think I'll start there.  

Another place I'll start is asking old people about what life was like back in the day.  I bet there is a lot of good know how there that could be useful today, especially as a way to save energy in food storage.  

Taken at Fort Rod Hill park last summer.
A bit before the time in question, or maybe not,
electricity arrived quite late in many parts of North America.

I wonder how weird it would be if I went to the local old people home and asked 'hey, you got anyone old enough to remember what it was like to be a housewife pre 1950, but still with-it enough to tell me about it?' Probably be turned out on my arse, but it would be a bit of a lark to try.  Maybe I should put an add up on UsedAnywhere, "anyone got an old person who was a housewife pre 1950 who I can borrow for a few hours and listen to stories about how life was like back then?"  

It is my goal to build a working icebox, using old timey knowledge and modern materials.  I'm very curious about how efficient can we make it and what the temperatures are for different parts of the icebox.  Using an icebox requires a whole different mindset and approach to food safety which I'm curious to learn about.  

Anyone have any ephemera or household manuals, or experience with the kitchen between 1900 to 1950, please let me know know (to donate or for sale at a reasonable price - or even scan in to share with me?). Any good links or books you can recommend?  Just leave a comment here, I would love to hear from you.