Nice article from Slate about the evolution of buttermilk from a by-product of home churning to a fairly different commercial product:
"All Churned Around: How buttermilk lost its butter"
While the author picked up on several good points, she missed a couple. In particular:
- One doesn't churn milk. While ways of making butter differ, the general way to do it is to skim the cream off the milk, then churn the cream. After removing the clotted-up butter from the churned cream, what's left is traditional buttermilk (she probably has this right and just phrased the sentence differently than I might have).
- What some people do is to allow the skimmed-off cream to sour slightly, or "clabber," before churning it. This fermentation results in a more flavorful butter and more acidic buttermilk. It also results in a more buttery-tasting butter, if you will, from the natural creation of more diacetyl during fermentation.
What you're left with after churning cream is butter and buttermilk. They go together like twins. :) And, as the author of the above article noticed pretty quickly, the amount of fermentation and acidity level are (for a given batch of milk, which itself can vary widely) the biggest variables one willl usually encounter with respect to flavor.
The home producer of butter doesn't have the tools a huge commercial dairy does to manipulate their butter and its flavor, but they do have a few. The biggest variable to manipulate is the fermentation: how much and when. And the potential biggest effect there is to manipulate the acidity of the final products. That's such an important handle that some folks (including this author) will, when the larder is bare of buttermilk, instill a bit of vinegar to fresh milk to sour it, then use it as an emergency replacement for buttermilk. But fermenting the cream is a natural way to do it.
There's no requirement sour milk or cream be used in making butter. Indeed, it might be easier not to. One can take perfectly fresh milk, chill it, skim the cream off, then churn the fresh cream to get butter. The result is "sweet butter," and should be what commercial dairies mean when their product is labeled thus. Some people mistakenly refer to unsalted butter as "sweet." This author prefers to call butter salted or unsalted, reserving the term sweet for butter that hasn't been soured by fermentation. Almost all mass-market butter is sweet. The author above seems to have bypassed any fermentation, leading to fairly basic and straightforward results.
Washing is another handle one could use to manipulate the butter's flavor: The majority of the butter is, of course, fat. The fat is comparatively rather stable flavor-wise at room temperature. However, there are milk solids left in the butter, most of which are dissolved in any leftover fluid. Most of those solids stayed behind in the buttermilk, along with most of the milk's water. But some remain in the butter. They contribute some flavor, but they also can go bad faster than the butter by itself. One can stabilize the butter's flavor and make it a bit more straight-forward by removing more of the milk solids. After the butter mass is removed from the buttermilk (usually to a large bowl), you add water to the butter mass, and work the butter and water together with, say, a large spoon. More milk solids come out of the butter, and are poured off with the water. This changes the flavor of the butter, and its flavor willl be more stable afterward. Some people prefer a more flavorful butter, and are going to refrigerate or freeze it anyway to hold it, so this step can be omitted. Whether you're washing your butter or not, it's best at this time to use your bowl and spoon (or whatever you're using) to remove as much liquid as you can — you want butter left, not liquid.
While acid and fermentation is one big handle for adjusting butter's flavor, there are others. The aforementioned salt is another. Salt, among other things, is a preservative. Salt added to butter helped retard other changes to it, and some people prefer its flavor in the butter. If one wants to salt homemade butter, it's best done after the butter is removed from the buttermilk, and after any washing. Fold finely ground salt into your butter mass. While this is a matter of taste, I believe the typical supermarket quarter-pound stick of butter has the equivalent of about a quarter-teaspoon of salt — not so much as you'd think.
After any salting, the still somewhat soft butter is usually packed into a mold and allowed to chill. The mold my family used to use was carved out of wood, probably by my grandfather, and was a somewhat flat cup that turned out to hold about a half-pound. The closed side of the mold had what was basically a piston in it, with a very simple flower design incised in the face of the piston. The shaft of the piston went through a hole in the bottom of the cup. The mold, with its piston inserted, is filled with butter from your butter bowl (again, leaving behind any fluid). The butter is packed in as solidly as possible. Then one inverts the cup over a plate or waxed paper ot the like, and uses the piston to push out a cake of butter, which now carries the design that was carved into the piston. The butter needs to be cool enough at this stage to be pushed out as a mass, or it'll be messy, but it'll still be delicious butter. :)
So, after all that, you still have the fluid you removed your butter from. Remember that? That's your buttermilk. :) It probably has little flecks of butter floating around in it. It's also not milk, although the milk was its mother, so to speak. It's not commercial buttermilk either, which is cultured ("clabbered"), thickened, low-fat milk. And it is a lot like milk, with a lot of water and milk solids in it. Again, its flavor, for a given batch of milk, is affeccted strongly by how much it has fermented or soured by now. And, as the author of the article referenced above noticed, if it's made from totally unfermented milk products, it's not very acid, so not so good for reacting with baking soda or adding flavor. But having read both articles now, you now know what to do with your butter and butttermilk, and hopefully how to make something more to your liking.
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