Scoop it out, letting the watery milk drain off, and place your solid butter in a bowl of clean ice water. Fold it and press it around the bowl a few times, dumping and replacing the water until it rinses clear.
Dispose of the last bit of rinse water and continue to knead the butter a little while longer, expelling excess liquid.
Water promotes microbial growth, and failure to remove the watery skim milk can result in it souring, which would spoil all of your beautiful butter.
Once you've squeezed out as much liquid as humanly possible, pack it tightly together, wrap it up with plastic wrap, and refrigerate or freeze. Or maybe spread directly onto some good bread and get it into your mouth pronto. Remember way back when, before Gustaf de Laval busted out his centrifuge? Remember those dark times? Back then, the only way to separate delicious, fatty cream from milk was to let gravity do the work.
Raw milk would just sit there, and someone would have to skim the cream off of the top. Well it wasn't actually that bad. All that sitting around meant that bacteria had time to grow, something that sounds gross but is actually awesome. Bacteria is what gives cultured cream, butter, and buttermilk their delightfully acidic tang. These "cream cultures" are a group of various bacteria that allow us to create wonders such as cheese and sour cream.
One of these guys is Lactococcus lactis "lacto" meaning "milk" and "coccus" meaning "sphere" , a microbe that is informally classified as the lactic acid bacterium, due to its ability to transform lactose into lactic acid through fermentation. When bacteria are introduced to dairy, it makes a meal of lactose, converting it into energy and producing lactic acid as a happy byproduct.
The increase in acid decreases the pH of the cream, changing the flavor and making the environment inhospitable to other, less friendly microbes.
This nutty, buttery, soured cream has many savory and sweet applications. Use it as a dip for chips, on blinis with caviar, or as a tangy foil for sweet, ripe berries. The stuff can be frustratingly hard to find in prepared form and—if you do happen to find it—can cost you as much as a dollar an ounce. Making it at home is much more cost effective, and only requires heavy cream, buttermilk, and patience. Simply add two tablespoons of buttermilk to a pint of cream, leave it at room temperature, and let the bacteria take it from there.
The cultures will get to work, chowing down on that delicious lactose, producing not only acid, but other flavor compounds, such as the buttery diacetyl the same molecule added to "buttered" popcorn.
Depending on the cream, and the temperature of your home, this process can take anywhere from 8 hours to days. Lactococcus lactis is happiest at around 70 degrees, but as long as your house isn't a freezing tundra or tropical rainforest, you should be okay.
Eventually, the cream will thicken and the pH will reach around 4. Stir and refrigerate, and then put it on everything. Check out the full recipe here. A word on the cream: I had always heard that ultra-pasteurized cream should be avoided at all costs when attempting to make any type fermented dairy. In On Food and Cooking , Harold McGee states that ultra-pasteurization decreases the lactose content, effectively putting the bacteria on a diet and robbing them of their favorite meal.
Being the experimental chemist that I am, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison, and was surprised to find that the ultra-pasteurized batch actually came out perfectly. Here is how they looked after twenty four hours of thickening:. Besides reminding me of my undergrad research—where every day was opposite day and the chemicals never did what they were supposed to—this flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about soured dairy.
Once I collected the shattered pieces of my brain off the floor, I consulted with some of the Serious Eats editors and we came up with a few as-yet untested and unproven theories:. Carrageenan may be thickening the ultra-pasteurized cream. High temperatures can change the texture and flavor of the cream, so food companies often add congealing agents such as carrageenan to return the cream to its original viscosity.
These agents could work in tandem with the microbes to thicken the cream, speeding up the process. Make sure to check your heavy cream labels! The more pasteurized the cream is, the less the added cultures have to compete with. Ultra-pasteurization effectively wipes the microbial slate clean. A crucial step that is often overlooked, chilling your bowl is just as important as chilling your cream. Once the chilled cream comes into contact with a warm or even room temperature bowl, the fat inside it will immediately begin to lose its emulsifying properties.
In fact, you should even chill the utensil you plan to whip the cream with to make doubly sure! Many people like to keep a stock of all-purpose cream on hand, which is a great versatile addition to all manner of sweet and savoury dishes. Instead, you should aim for heavy cream or the aptly-named whipping cream.
As mentioned above, heavy cream or whipping cream are the perfect consistency for whipping. Any others, including single cream, half-and-half or just plain old milk will not serve your purpose and, no matter how much elbow grease you put into the whipping, will not achieve the fluffiness needed. This is a bone of contention on the internet, since some observers seem to be of the opinion that frozen cream can be thawed and successfully whipped, although the process may involve adding an agent to help re-emulsify the cream.
Even cream which is still in date but has been sitting in your fridge for a couple of days is not ideal. For the best results, use fresh cream bought that day as it will be far easier to manipulate and can even show great results in less than a minute.
Organic produce offers a number of consumer benefits, including sustainability and ethical purchasing. View her work at www. Tip Whipping cream is easier done by hand mixer or stand mixer rather than by hand because it is much faster and will whisk more air into your heavy whipping cream.
How to Thicken Dairy Whipped Cream When making dairy whipped cream, the colder your ingredients are, the faster the heavy whipping cream will turn into whipped cream. Add Powdered Sugar Use a flour sifter to add powdered sugar instead of white sugar. How to Freeze Chocolate Ganache. How to Thicken Frosting Without Sugar. How to Thin Cream Cheese.
How to Store Shredded Coconut. Take a cube shaped block from a child's set of blocks, and drill three holes between pairs of opposite faces.
If you were to take a large number of such blocks and stack them together, the holes would join up, and both the remaining solid of the blocks and the air in the continuous hole channels would be continuous phases.
Most gels do not have such a regular defined structure, and they certainly would not need to have this structure.
And with whipped cream the gelation is usually only partial. Pmb Naked Science Forum King! The only problem I have with whipping cream is that it makes my hands slip out of the handcuffs. Surface tension affects only a small fraction of the volume of a liquid, but a foam is practically all surface, so surface tension dominates. Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Mention of cream and whipping seems to awaken strange thoughts in the male mind. Pages: [ 1 ] Go Up.
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