I’ve been anxious to start fermenting dairy for a variety of reasons; this experiment with cultured butter is my first. Of course I used the raw local cream I’ve raved about before, which is endlessly inspiring me. However, as it isn’t pasteurized it doesn’t tend to stay fresh very long, even refrigerated.

Butter has always been crafted as a method of preserving the fat of milk for use during the leaner winter months. It’s use has a long history across nearly every culture and culinary tradition. Dairy was traditionally preserved and consumed fermented, with cheese and yogurt being the most familiar to our palates. Fresh dairy actually has a far shorter history of use, which I’ll bet corresponds with refrigeration technology.

Butter typically falls into two categories: sweet butter, made with fresh cream and typically no salt and lactic or sour butter made with cream which has been “cultured”, or lacto-fermented.

There are seemingly innumerable reasons to lacto-ferment dairy. Much like with fermenting vegetables, which I’ve posted a bit about before, cultured dairy is created by beneficial Lactobacilli bacteria which produce lactic acid. Lactic acid breaks down milk proteins (casein) and milk sugars (lactose) making cultured dairy imminently more digestible. Culturing dairy also increases enzymes such as lactase, available vitamins such as B and C, minerals such as calcium and increases beneficial flora in the digestive tract.

Perhaps the aspect of lacto-fermentation which captivates me the most, though, is the process’s ability to increase resistance to infectious diseases. By increasing the beneficial flora in our systems more pathogens can be resisted and more antibodies created, which contributes to long term immunities. In a future where high-technology medical services may not be readily available fermented foods may be a home based first line of defense.

I’ll admit, though, that my fascination with cultured dairy is in large part culinary. I made the simple cultured butter used extensively in France and Germany. First, the cream was left on the counter overnight to ferment. Then it was chilled and *scooped* into the churner. I love this farm cream.

After a few minutes working the cream the butter fat started to separate from the buttermilk.

After a bit more agitation the cream is suddenly transformed into butter!

After the butter forms it simply needs to be pressed through a colander to remove the last of the buttermilk. I rinsed the butter a couple of times, patted it dry and combined it with a bit of my favorite flaky grey sea salt.

The taste of this butter set my heart racing. It has a clean, creamy flavor from the high quality raw cream and an incredibly rich and complex taste which I hesitate to call sour.