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These days the word "butter" evokes an inoffensive pale white stick in your fridge, but in the days before refrigeration, butter was made at home. And while it
by dustintrex 5y ago
These days the word "butter" evokes an inoffensive pale white stick in your fridge, but in the days before refrigeration, butter was made at home. And while it keeps much better than milk, it can and does get seriously funky over time.
You can get a faint taste of this (literally) with French cultured butter like Pepe Saya, which blurs the line between butter and soft cheese, but if you ever visit Tibet or even a Tibetan temple, the entire place is permeated with the smell of what the Western nose and palate would consider straight-up rancid butter. No wonder the Romans weren't keen on the stuff. (Of course, I imagine the "barbarians" felt the same away about the ubiquitous Roman condiment garum, aka fish sauce.)
- skinkestek 5y ago> the smell of what the Western nose and palate would consider straight-up rancid butter. We produced very high quality (as determined by the local dairy who paid us for it) milk at the farm where I grew up. Yet I remember that whenever we tried to make butter at home it would invariably turn rancid within a very short time. I know there are a few people here with farming background and whatnot, anyone has an idea why that would happen? What did we do wrong?
- mannerheim 5y agoWas it made from unpasteurised milk? Maybe that's the difference.
- katbyte 5y agoSalt. Salt preserves butter and without it will go bad faster then you would expect
- JohnWhigham 5y agoProbably still had a nontrivial amount of water in it. Last time I helped make butter, we repeatedly squeezed it through the cheese cloth to get as much water out as we could.
- ksdale 5y agoI don't know if this is too basic, but we tried to make butter from scratch one time and everything we saw said that if there was even the tiniest bit of liquid left when you're done churning, it would cause the butter to go rancid basically overnight, and sure enough, that's what happened the first time! The next time we made sure there wasn't any liquid left and it lasted much longer. I don't even know what the liquid part is called, but it would get stuck in tiny little air pockets while you were churning and it was very difficult to ensure that it was all gone by the end.
- floren 5y ago> I don't even know what the liquid part is called Buttermilk.
- skinkestek 5y agoFrom the ideas so far (thanks everyone!) this sounds most probable since salting and pasteurisation seems like something we either did by default or after the first spoiled batch. Also, even if it is well over half my life so far ago I think I can vividly remember small drops of water in the butter.
- tdeck 5y agoOne thing I learned recently is that salted butter used to be much, much saltier for preservation. People basically washed it with water to reduce the salt content before eating it.
- namdnay 5y agoThe salted butter we use today is actually “Demi-sel”, “half-salted”
- OJFord 5y ago> the word "butter" evokes an inoffensive pale white stick in your fridge ...perhaps where you live! A pale white stick in my fridge would be goat's cheese. Butter is a yellow block in a dish on the side, not refrigerated (except the spares, and the unsalted for cooking).
- dustintrex 5y agoButter color depends on animal feed (grass-fed = more yellow), but commercially produced butter is often dyed.
- OJFord 5y agoI'd be surprised if that's allowed here, certainly quickly checking a few - including supermarket own brand, i.e. the cheapest - none lists ingredients other than milk (or derivatives, incl. simply 'butter') and optionally salt. Sounds more like margarine to me, to have additives like colouring. 'Pale white' and I doubt I'd even recognise it as butter - probably assume it was lard. From 'sticks' I think this is the US, though there's at least one French brand that does sell it like that as well as the normal (to me) block or tub (more common in France in my experience, but some here too).