Fermented Butter (Cultured Butter)
Allowing your cream to ferment before making butter adds healthy bacteria AND a delicious flavor! 1 quart of heavy cream yields approximately 3/4 lb of butter.
Ingredients
- 1 qt heavy cream raw OR pasteurized-see notes for more!
- 2 tbsp yogurt (with live cultures) about 50 g
- salt by weight- kosher or fine sea salt
Instructions
- Place your yogurt in the bottom of a bowl or large liquid measuring cup and pour the cream on top of it. Whisk with a fork to distribute the cultures and lightly cover the container.
- Leave the cream mixture on the counter for 24-48 hours to ferment.
- Transfer the cream to the fridge for 8+ hours- the butter will form better if the cream is chilled.
- Pour your cream into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment.
- Side note- you can, alternatively, use a handheld electric mixer with a large bowl, or just a hand whisk. Having tried this a couple ways, I really prefer the stand mixer, because it's more hands-off and causes less splashing.
- Start with the mixer on low speed until the cream starts to thicken a bit, then increase to medium. It will feel like nothing much is happening for a while as the cream continues to thicken.
- Continue to whisk- the cream will thicken, then solidify, then rather suddenly change to solid butter and liquid buttermilk. Let it keep mixing for a couple more minutes.
- Use a colander or strainer over a bowl to separate the buttermilk from the butter. Save the buttermilk!
- Gather all of the butter together. Rinse it under cold water, squeezing a couple times to release as much of the buttermilk as possible. Then fill a small bowl with ice water and continue to rinse and squeeze the butter until no more buttermilk runs out. If buttermilk is left in there the butter will go rancid faster so you want it ALL out.
- Weigh your butter in grams and add salt- you want about 1.5% salt by weight. For example, if your butter weighs 350 grams, you'll add 5 grams of salt. Distribute the salt throughout the butter as evenly as possible.
- If you have butter paddles or a butter mold, use that to shape the butter to your desired shape! Or, simply wrap it up in parchment paper and press it into a block.
- Store your butter in the fridge. You can generally use as you would any regular sweet cream butter, but I would urge you not to use it all up in baking!
Notes
-You can use raw cream but make sure it has had ample time to rise- if it is too early it won't have enough fat content to form butter (I have learned this the hard way). If you're using raw cream it has plenty of good bacteria and the starter culture is optional.
-If you're using store-bought cream, choose one that says just "pasteurized" instead of "ultra-pasteurized", and try to avoid additives and thickeners.
-You can swap the plain yogurt out for dairy kefir or another live-culture plain dairy product.
Nutrition
Serving: 1TbspCalories: 102kcalProtein: 0.1gFat: 12g
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