Butter

Today we made butter.

                While the day from 8-5 is filled with the standard variety of farm work (today: harvesting garlic scapes and cabbage, remay rollup, and five hours of weeding carrots), the time thereafter varies more. My basic pattern is shower, food, and books. Food often involves cooking; reading often becomes derailed with random tasks or conversation. Over the past couple days, inspired by the sudden appearance of a rickety and twice-melted immersion blender, as well as an overabundance of ageing milk, we have made butter. (I also executed a highly successful horchata experiment).

                Reba, our farm mother extraordinaire, walked us through the remarkably simple process. First, we skimmed the cream off all the jars of ageing milk in the fridge. These date back to the 16^th- just under a week ago. Raw milk seems to stay unambiguously fresh for about a week. At that point, the cream is fairly separated on the top, and the milk smells a bit sour. It’s still safe to drink I imagine, but given the effectively unlimited supply of milk in our fridge (six or seven 1.5 liter mason jars at any given point), we usually toss the older ones to the pigs. Farmer Bill is looking to improve the cow barn to meet standards necessary for milk sale (primarily a poured cement floor), but in the meantime we’re saddled with more than we can possibly ever use. 

                The skimmed cream is left out for an hour or so to warm up a bit. Then we poured it into a larger mason jar dimensioned perfectly for the immersion blender. Like when making whipped cream, we blended the cream constantly until suddenly a portion of it coalesced into a fluffy mass. The cool thing is that while a portion of it becomes butter, a fixed fraction of it becomes buttermilk. Continuing to mix won’t change the fraction of butter to buttermilk that results from mixing the cream.

                We poured the buttermilk into a smaller jar (pancakes tomorrow?), and transferred the butter to a bigger bowl. To remove any remaining buttermilk from the butter, we sort of kneaded it with a butter pat, also adding cold water to “wash” out as much buttermilk as possible – this helps the butter keep longer.  Then we added a little bit of salt and put the butter in a little Tupperware.

                Despite my lack of any specific love for butter, I found this process really pretty cool. Butter is the simplest thing, but somehow exotically rural inasmuch as people generally have any sense of how to make it. Because realistically, why do people need to know how butter is made? However unnecessary, though, it’s a small thing that makes the world feel a bit more coherent.