Bryn Mooth| Enquirer contributor
We’re fortunate to have so much fantastic craft bread available in our area: Shadeau Bakery in Over-The-Rhine, Blue Oven at Findlay Market and neighborhood farmers’ markets, Sixteen Bricks on the menu of top restaurants, small bakeries like Cake Rack, Breadsmith, Frieda’s and North College Hill, even talented home bakers. So it seems a shame to schmear a slab of Blue Oven’s Bad Girl seeded loaf with plain ol’ stick butter (or, horrors, margarine).
Good bread demands good butter.
You could purchase fancy butter imported from Italy or Ireland. Or you could make your own. Homemade butter is fun, impressive and just plain delicious. Easy, too: Just whirl heavy cream in a stand mixer (or go old-school and shake it in a lidded jar) until the solids separate, press out all the liquid and add salt (or not) to taste.
Make butter with local Snowville cream, and you’ll wind up with a product that’s truly seasonal. In spring, when this Athens County dairy’s cows are munching pastures full of dandelions, your butter will be gloriously yellow; in fall, it’ll be pale and sweetly grassy.
Homemade butter keeps for two to three weeks in the refrigerator, up to six months in the freezer. Smear it liberally on sliced bread, toast or fluffy homemade biscuits; scoop it into a baked potato or melt it over roasted vegetables. (I don’t advise baking with homemade butter, as its water content is different from stick butter.)
Here’s how to turn 2 cups of heavy cream into about 1 cup of butter.
2 cups heavy cream (be sure it doesn’t contain thickeners like carrageenan, you just want cream; Snowville is preferred)
Sea salt to taste (optional; see notes below)
Let the cream sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. Pour it into the bowl of a stand mixer (or use a large, deep bowl and a hand mixer). Begin whipping on high speed; once you reach whipped cream consistency, keep going ...
After about 6 to 8 minutes (more or less; the process takes less time if the cream is warmer), the butter will begin to separate. You’ll see a thin, watery liquid accumulate in the bowl, and you’ll see small bits of solid butterfat. At this point, reduce the mixer speed to low and mix slowly until the solids come together into a clump.
(To make butter in a jar – which is a fun kids-in-the-kitchen activity – add up to 1 cup of heavy cream to a lidded glass pint or quart jar. Shake vigorously until the same thing happens: the butter solids separate from the buttermilk. Proceed as follows.)
Set a strainer or colander over a bowl, and transfer the butter and liquid; strain off the buttermilk. (Note that this is not the thick, cultured buttermilk you’ll find at the grocery, but more like skim milk with tiny flecks of butterfat.) Retain the butter in the strainer and save the buttermilk for another use (for drinking, for cooking pasta or potatoes, or baking).
Place the strainer under cold running water and rinse until the water runs through the strainer clear. Shake the strainer to drain off as much water as possible, then gather the butter into your hands and knead like dough to remove more of the water. To make salted butter, sprinkle salt over the butter and knead it in with your hands.
Salting the butter: For 2 cups of cream, add 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt for a fairly salty butter, or 1/4 teaspoon for lightly salted; alternately, leave unsalted. Keeps 2-3 weeks in the fridge or 6 months in the freezer.
Compound Butter
Once you’ve whipped up homemade butter, add herbs and flavorings to make compound butter. You can also do this with unsalted stick butter. To 1/2 cup of softened unsalted butter, add any of the following and stir to combine well:
Lemon-Thyme Butter: 1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme, zest of 1/2 lemon and a pinch of salt. Great on grilled vegetables or seafood.
Parsley-Garlic Butter: 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley, 1 clove garlic (finely minced) and a pinch of salt. Fantastic melted over grilled rib-eye steak.
Strawberry Butter: 2 tablespoons good strawberry preserves. Dynamite on pancakes.
Cinnamon-Sugar Butter: 3-4 tablespoons brown sugar and 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon. Toast’s BFF.
