The best way to recapture the taste of old-fashioned butter may be to make your own.
A few months ago, when all of the fields began to gently turn that soft, bright spring green, I started to crave butter. Not plain everyday butter, but butter that tastes special and handmade, the kind that my grandmother used to set on the table with a reverence usually reserved for relics.
A number of excellent Minnesota butter producers have survived the mass creamery extinction of the past century (Hope Butter from Hope, Minn., among them), but you can easily replicate that old-fashioned creamery taste right in your own kitchen. With just two steps and two ingredients, butter might just reign as the simplest recipe ever.
Thoughts of butter bring back fond memories for me. Sunny but not quite yellow, denser than most, glossy and very lightly salted, my grandmother's butter sat two sticks thick in the center of the table next to a Jenga-like stack of white bread. Like everything on her table, the butter seemed to come from a far-off place, or a foregone era. I found out later that it came from the Little Rock Creamery in Little Rock, Minn., two towns over.
Once, after polishing off pickle-and-butter sandwiches on homemade white, we made a pilgrimage to the creamery. The massive creamery stretched itself out in the middle of its shrinking community like a giant paperweight holding down the town. I remember countless curves of mirrored stainless steel, large bell-shaped vats of cream, and a batch of butter drooping out of the paddling machine in heavy, overstuffed folds.
Little Rock Creamery finally ran out of parts for its old machines and stopped making butter in 1998, at which time I reluctantly had to find a new favorite small-batch butter to root for. Or, I figured, I had to whip up my own small batch.
Making your own butter
For many, buttermaking is an unfortunate consequence of over-whipping cream. If you lose your focus while whipping the cream, before you know it the soft white plumes have crinkled into tight, unforgiving wads.
The sweetened vanilla butter is always welcome on morning pancakes, but what if I don't want to make an accidental, fluffy spread? I want to make butter to rival that of Little Rock or French Plugra or Hope -- butter that sits pert and solid in the heat, so high in butterfat it hardly sweats; the kind of butter that makes pie crust shatter, buttercream shine and plain buttered toast taste like Viennese pastry.
OK, so let's revise what I said before: Making butter is easy, but making awesome butter takes some practice.
From the beginning
On my first attempt I poured two pints of local cream into a mixing bowl and began whipping. It gathered into folds of whipped cream quickly, but took a surprising additional four or five minutes to turn into curds. And then suddenly I heard the sloshing, the sound of golden clumps of pure butter bobbing in a sea of frothy buttermilk.
I pressed the curds into a lump and began to knead the butter on the countertop. Naturally, cool hands are best for this, as the butter quickly melts. Mine must run hot, so I grabbed a metal bench scraper to assist with the kneading -- which helped immensely -- and a clean tea towel to absorb the oozing buttermilk.
For dense, high-quality butter it's important to push out and mop up every bead of liquid. When it felt firm and creamy, like putty, I mixed in a rounded 1/8 teaspoon of fine sea salt.
Two pints of cream yields an astounding 2 cups of buttermilk, a quantity too significant (and too delicious) to ignore.
This buttermilk has none of the tang of cultured buttermilk, but is absolutely refreshing. It tastes clean in a natural way, like green straw or fresh milk bathed in wheat. With the first sip I finally understood why the pioneers would drink a tall chilled glass of it on a hot day. I blended up the rest of it with the season's first strawberries for a luscious strawberry drink, and that was even better.
Unexpected color of the past
Excepting the green months (May to October), your homemade butter made from Minnesota cream will be stone-white, which is a bit of a shock if you're used to yellow butter, as most of us are. I thought immediately of Ma Ingalls in "Little House in the Big Woods," and how she would color the winter cream by grating a carrot into a fluffy mass and squeezing its juice into the cream before churning. I've wanted to try this since age 8, and my big day had finally arrived.
Ma was a genius. Not only does the carrot juice tint the butter so it looks like it came from July's prairie-grazing cows, but it also lends it a faint sweetness. Excited by the honeyed undertone, I added a stream of basswood honey to capitalize on it. Slathered on a scone, this subtly sweet carrot butter was too good to be true.
But I began to develop a fixation for making the perfect "bread butter," an ultra-rich creamy butter scattered with crystalline bits of coarse, flavorful salt, something to complement a self-respecting artisanal loaf.
I tried conventional heavy whipping cream, but quickly discovered that the added carrageenan (a thickening agent added to many conventional whipping creams) made the buttermilk extra thick and frothy. And the butter seemed a little lean. It wasn't bad, but it didn't taste old-fashioned, either.
Finally I found a Minnesota cream with the slightly thrilling meadow-sweet flavor I was after. This one, from Stony Creek Dairy in Melrose, has the guts to actually taste like something,
But the butter. Shiny, golden and pliable, butter this honest possesses a magical ability to vitalize everything it touches. The tiny shards of fleur de sel (French sea salt) crunched in my mouth and slipped around on some of the most velvety butter I'd ever tasted.
Wait -- was it better than Little Rock? Nah. My memory drew up a pedestal for a gilded block of Little Rock butter a very long time ago and I see little point in rocking it off.
Amy Thielen is a writer and chef who divides her time between Two Inlets, Minn., and New York City.