99% of the butter that’s produced in the United States and Canada, let’s say North
America, is sweet cream butter.
The milk is separated and pasteurized and immediately churned into butter.
We make a cultured butter.
We take fresh cream, add a mix of bacteria over time, and then we, we churn.
That’s how butter was made for literally thousands of years.
Back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, a lot of these what were becoming larger dairies
figured out that they could pasteurized cream immediately and it saved them time and was
more consistent.
So they were like, ‘Huh, we’ll just make it sweet cream butter.’
The problem with that is it didn’t have much taste, it’s just fat.
So they started to add things to make it taste like butter.
If you’ve ever had microwave popcorn, that compound or that smell is called diacetyl
and it’s one of the additives that you might have for these sweet cream butters or butter
spreads or something to make it taste like the real thing.
One of many, many flavor compounds, might be hundreds of flavor compounds that are created
naturally through the culturing process.
[Sound of butter hitting metal sides of churn].
This is a chiller.
Basically chills a bunch of cold water.
And then we push that cold water into the culturing tank to cool the cream.
We bring the cream in, put it in our culturing vessel, we raise it to a certain temperature,
like 72, 73 degrees and then add bacteria so that they eat the milk sugar and release
all of these wonderful flavor compounds.
We actually culture over about 36 hours to really bring some deep taste, we chill it
and then pump it into the butter churn and then we rotate the butter churner as you’re
seeing right now until it breaks.
The membranes that are encompassing fat, they bash together and release the fat and then
the fats starts to clump together until you have buttermilk and then you have butter.
And that’s what happens when it breaks, when the butter breaks.
We’re going to take this filtered water.
We’re going to take this filtered water, take the ice out, run it through, let it touch
all the surface area of the butter.
The molecules, I guess, of the butter, sort of come together and they squeeze out the
additional buttermilk and then firm it up.
And then we go through this like working process.
The water is still kind of on the outside and it needs to be incorporated efficiently.
By doing the working process you’re going to get that consistency but it also makes
it smooth and silky and delicious when it comes out.
And it becomes a particular consistency that we know that it’s ready to take out and
prepare it for packaging.
And because each batch is different you can’t just assume 25 minutes of ‘x’ temperature
is going to give you perfect butter.
Once it comes out, we spread it onto trays and then we chill it.
Then we bring it back up to a 50-60 degree temperature that does something to the structure,
the crystalline structure of the fat to make it more spreadable.
We put the butter into a former and then push it through a mold.
Depending on the mold that you choose, it’ll push it through and then we cut at different
increments for different sizes and weights.
We’re looking at 300 pounds of butter right now?
[Laughter].
Maybe more, maybe like 380 or 390.
We’re going to test the butter fat percentage here to make sure we’re getting the amount
that we expect.
The legal minimum is 80% butter fat in the United States.
Most of the butter that you’re buying in the grocery store is 80 to 82%.
We’re producing a butter, because of the batch process and some of the things we do
that ranges from 85-87%.
The 80% butter fat butter, it’s just a lot of water.
It’ll dissipate really quickly, if you’re sautéing with it, it spatters.
Butter is particularly unique because of its melting point.
It actually melts right below body temperature.
It will melt in your mouth and then slowly deliver the flavor so your senses have a chance
to sort of catch up.
It’s a great medium for delivering flavor, by adding compound ingredients, adding other
ingredients into the butter you can get a really delicious thing to put on steaks and
vegetables and pastas, things like that.
Butter is an awesome thing.
It’s a basic ingredient but umm, it has so many uses.
My wife and I, a number of years ago, we both love food, and it was one of those things
that was just treated as a commodity.
We felt like there’s really an opportunity to really think about taste and the different
ways you can use butter.
And we’ve failed a lot and done things wrong, but gotten better as we’ve failed.
There’s such an emotional connection with the product.
People are putting these products in their body, there’s much more of a connection.
And I think that that has been such a surprise that you can go to a farmer’s market and
connect so immediately with food.
It’s a shared experience.