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The texture of pure butter is too heavy for my taste, that's why I make the spread with butter and oil.
Yeah, that may be the case for me also....that toast was pretty good yesterday, but I was in a hurry and didn't really take the time to notice the difference in taste. Wasted butter. LOL
I found out one thing last night when I went to buy the peanut oil....it's a lot more expensive than canola, or even corn oil or the "blends". eek! I bought a bottle to try, but I don't know....on a tight budget around here.
Is lard expensive? I may just switch to that for all my frying. (No sense anyone taking me to task or giving me dire warnings....I've read up on it.) I'm wanting to give it a try in my biscuits also. Right now I'm using butter.
I made butter for the first time today. It was very tasty and fresh, but not quite sweet enough. It also was savory, but left an aftertaste that was just a bit sour tasting. Is that normal? I added only a dash of sea salt to it.
I used one of the two only heavy creams in the nearby grocery store, and it was organic but ultra pasteurized. I've read that the pasteurization could affect the taste. So maybe the better question is what is the best cream to use for more tasty, "sweet" butter? Could the taste also be affected by how much of the buttermilk is drained from the butter?
I had some more today after it had been refrigerated for 18 hours. No aftertaste. It tastes great.
But I noticed there was still some milk in it. When it softened enough, I washed the butter again about three or four times with cold water to try and squeeze out more of the milk. So I did that, molded it back into my container and refrigerated. I didn't add any more salt. I'll taste some soon to check for a difference, then if necessary I'll soften and add salt again if it washed out.
The milk issue is really bothersome because I'm worried I'm not squeezing enough of it out and wondering whether the butter will spoil before the week is out.
To my knowledge to make sweet butter at home would require sweet cream and nothing more. You might be able to begin with making home-made whipped cream and then just keep going from there (home-made whipped cream is practically the same process)(milk turns into whipped cream turns into butter as long as you keeping whipping/churning it).
As for keeping butter for longer than a week...you can potentially go two weeks tops unless you culture the butter. Some people simply begin with cultured sour cream with the process remaining the same and others use plain yogurt mixed into the cream and allowed to ferment, er... sour, er... culture, at room temperature. You can also use a cheese culture but I do not no much about that. My local home-brew shop (LHBS) sells cheese cultures and culturing kits. Yours probably does, too.
Culturing butter was how it was done before refrigeration and to my knowledge all commercial butters, sans one or two, are cultured.
If you are looking for a sweet butter I mistakenly made one a couple weeks ago. I was whipping cream with honey and mascarpone for a cake and over whipped. Mascarpone Honey Butter was the result and it was great challah bread.
I had some more today after it had been refrigerated for 18 hours. No aftertaste. It tastes great.
The milk issue is really bothersome because I'm worried I'm not squeezing enough of it out and wondering whether the butter will spoil before the week is out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by K-Luv
As for keeping butter for longer than a week...you can potentially go two weeks tops unless you culture the butter. Some people simply begin with cultured sour cream with the process remaining the same and others use plain yogurt mixed into the cream and allowed to ferment, er... sour, er... culture, at room temperature. You can also use a cheese culture but I do not no much about that. My local home-brew shop (LHBS) sells cheese cultures and culturing kits. Yours probably does, too.
Culturing butter was how it was done before refrigeration and to my knowledge all commercial butters, sans one or two, are cultured.
You can also freeze the butter; do, however, try your best to rinse ALL of the milk out. The legendary Bredan Creamery in Denver sold their unsalted butter frozen. They added sour cream as well.
I've appended some more information on definitions and how to culture your cream. You can find other methods as well. Be sure to use an accurate thermometer. The culture needs to be warm enough to ferment, but often the optimum fermentation temperature and the killng temperature are uncomfortably close together. Just remember the taste of cultured cream butter is very different from sweet cream butter.
Just a quick update....leaving the butter out in a Rubbermaid container is working fine for me, even though it gets pretty warm in my kitchen. I find that I have to replace it about every week or week and a half. I use butter now for everything, no more margarine used in this house at all. Using it full strength is fine also, not too heavy.
I found some Organic Valley cultured butter at Wal-Mart and tried a box....I really liked it because it has a little more flavor than Land O' Lakes and is also (supposedly) organic. It only costs around 90 cents more per box. Anyone else like it? I have wanted to try Kerry Gold because America's Test Kitchen rated it the best-tasting butter, but I haven't found it anywhere I shop (small town, rural area), and I think it's pretty expensive, anyway.
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How to make sweeter butter?
