I like cream, but what I like best about it is that it can be made into butter.
Ten years ago, it was almost impossible to find any high-end butter besides Plugra, a “gourmet” butter with a slightly higher butterfat content than the supermarket varieties. Now there are a variety of premium butters available: My favorites are Kerry Gold, an excellent Irish butter with a smooth mouth feel, and Deletia Parmiggiano Reggiano butter, a wonderfully grassy-tasting imported butter that is of course made from the same cream that produces the famous cheese.
Even better than a premium store-bought butter is one that you make yourself with good local cream. You can make butter the old Colonial Williamsburg way, with a butter churn, or you can make it the way my wife showed me, with a electric mixer, a strainer and some cheesecloth.
We recently discovered a delicious, flavorful cream, perfect for making your own butter, produced by Morning Fresh Dairy, 60 miles north of Denver. The cream is made the old-fashioned way: It is drawn from a single herd of cows, which means it tastes of terroir, of the land and microclimate that nurtured it. The cream is flash-pasteurized rather than ultrapasteurized, which means it has a fuller, more complex flavor than most creams; and it is sold in glass bottles rather than wax cartons, which means it doesn’t pick up “off” flavors from the packaging.
The secret to a delicious homemade butter is not only in using fresh cream; you must also extract as much water as possible. The best butters have about 86 percent butterfat (mass-produced butters have about 80 percent butterfat; Plugra has 83 percent). The waxy mouth feel that most butters have derives from their high water content: Mass-produced butters reincorporate some buttermilk during the churning process. Premium butters remove the buttermilk for the best mouth feel. Whipping the cream until the buttermilk separates and then draining the butter and pressing on it to extract as much remaining liquid as possible will give you the best butter.
John Broening cooks at Olivea and Duo restaurants in Denver.
Homemade butter
Yields about 8 ounces butter. Best used within three days.
Ingredients
3 cups fresh cream (not ultrapasteurized)
1 teaspoon salt (optional)
Directions
In an electric mixer, whip the cream on medium speed for about 5-10 minutes. After a few minutes, it will thicken into whipped cream, then into a kind of thin butter. Keep whipping until it separates into butter and thin, whitish buttermilk.
Drain off the buttermilk, and then place the butter in cheesecloth in a strainer or chinois set over a bowl or crock. Let the butter drain about 10-20 minutes, pressing on it with a spatula to extract additional water.
Place the butter in a mixing bowl and work in the salt with a spatula. Spread into a crock or roll into a log with a piece of wax paper. Store tightly wrapped, away from odorous foods like garlic or onions.
Note: Morning Fresh Farms cream is available at In Season Local Market, 3210 Wyandot St.
