Curds and Whey Meets a New Friend

In our attempt turn back the time to 1908, Curds and Whey visited Champoeg Creamery on Sunday in order to get raw milk to make our own butter.  We met some new friends, the cows Josie and Brielle, and got to view the way they spend their days. Hint, it involves a lot of eating grass.

Charlotte of Champoeg Creamery follows the pasture philosophy on her beautiful Jersey cows, only bring them inside when the grass stops growing.  The cows move to fresh paddocks every twelve hours, unceremoniously mowing her field of grasses.  This process, of moving the cows from paddock to paddock often, means the cows eat new grass that has the most bang for the nutritional buck, keeps her fields healthy and constantly growing, and keeps the cows are mostly clean (they are cows, after all).  When Curds and Whey get our own cow, we have decided to bring it each of our houses every twelve hours, so it can mow our grass as well.  Transporting is going to be a little difficult.  As is a cow finding enough to eat in my yard…

We will cross that bridge when we come to it.

When we returned from the farm, which we all agreed was a worthwhile experience, we had 3 gallons of raw milk and some meat from Full of Life Farm, Charlotte’s brother and next door neighbor.

And we immediately got started on making butter.  Which meant we sat around for a couple hours waiting for the skimmed cream to warm to room temperature.  In the meantime, we made some mozzarella (and agreed we are getting much better at making this simple cheese), ran errands, drank a glass of wine, and still had time to kill.  When it was finally at room temp, we threw it in the food processor for a couple minutes, strained it, cooled it down even more, and then we had butter.  I suppose we could have churned it with some old school contraption, or roll a cream-filled jar back and forth, as Lindsay, a new member of Curds and Whey did as a child, but it isn’t actually 1908 and throwing it in the food processor took two minutes and worked well.

The butter (unlike the yogurt I made) looks and taste just like butter, actually better than regular butter – and it is still unsalted, it is going to be crazy good with salt on bread.  Mmmmmm!

Here is the recipe for making your own butter:

Yields 1/2 pound

4 cups of cream (skimmed from raw milk or heavy cream)

Bring cream to room temperature.  Place in food processor for 1-3 minutes.  You should listen for when the food processor changes tone, it will get much higher when the butter and buttermilk separate.  Strain the butter through a cheese-cloth lined colander (reserving buttermilk if desired).  Fold the edges of the cheese cloth together and quickly mold the butter into a ball and then dump in a ice water bath for 5-10 minutes.  Once cold, press as much buttermilk out of the butter as you can, working fast as to not heat up the butter.  The butter will keep on the counter for two days and in the fridge for a couple of weeks.