The Dirty Chef by Matthew Evans

Author:Matthew Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO029000, book
ISBN: 9781743435656
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

I have spent a bit of time playing around with butter. The end result of getting a lot of Jersey milk is that you get a lot of cream. And at its heart, butter is just over-whipped cream. I’d made quite a bit of butter when I was an apprentice, to my chef’s chagrin. Once the mixer gets to thick whipped cream, it’s only a minor distraction before the cream curdles and looks grainy. While this isn’t great when it’s got sugar and vanilla in it and you’re making 20 litres of whipped cream for desserts, you can then continue to whisk until the curdled cream clumps together, leaving yellow bundles of butter in a wash of buttermilk. This, of course, is just what we wanted to do with our surplus cream on Puggle Farm.

Then, it’s simply a matter of pressing the butter and washing the buttermilk out. Originally, though, we didn’t wash out the buttermilk, relying on the action of kneading and pressing, but any amount tends to send the butter sour within a day or two. Now we do the tedious but necessary rinsing of the butter in fresh water, while also massaging it as we go.

But there are more complex ways to make butter. I cultured some cream using a little homemade yoghurt stored by the side of the cooker for warmth, and whipped it to produce a lightly soured, clean-tasting butter that would put any commercial stuff to shame. I spoke to a local who told me to clot my cream on the side of the cooker, as they used to do when she was a lass. You scald the cream on the edge of the cooker before whipping and then pressing out the buttermilk. I clotted some cream on the Rayburn, and ended up pouring the runny half of it over my porridge. The other half I whipped, though I should’ve scooped off the crust first—a splendid caramel-flavoured layer that made the butter grainy—but it tasted like the essence of cream.

While Maggie wasn’t a big producer by any commercial standard, as a small family we were awash with milk and well graced with more butter than we could use. We did what they do commercially, and froze the surplus butter for the time when Maggie would have to be dried off, left unmilked for a time, ready to have her new calf.

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