You’ve probably seen the commercial. The one in which romance cover model Fabio tells us all about the wonderfully buttery taste of some imitation butter product and how it’s suppose to be sooo much better for us then the real thing <inset eye roll here>. Just in case you don’t remember the commercial, the wonders of YouTube can allow us all to see it again and again:

If you are reading this post in a reader then you might not be able to see the video above. Clicking through to the post should bring the video up.

I don’t know about you but a product filled with a vegetable oil blend (soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil and canola oil), water, sweet cream buttermilk, salt, natural soy lecithin, natural soy lecithin, vegetable mono and diglyceridess,potassium sorbate, calcium disodium EDTA,citric acid, natural and artificial flavoring, vitamin A (Palmitate) and beta carotene (for color) doesn’t exactly just scream out buttery goodness. Actually, I really can believe it’s not butter. It’s not. Really, it isn’t.

Growing up, my family used store brand margarine on toast or bread and either liquid vegetable oil or solid shortening for cooking. Butter was not an option. The doctor said it was bad for you. Plus the margarine and shortening was always cheaper. Having a product like the one sold in the commercial would have been great. The fake butter flavor would have been a big improvement over the artificial margarine after taste. 

Once I had a family of my own I switched over to butter. I didn’t make the change because I had learned about all the myths (and out right lies) told about fats in our diets. I didn’t do it because butter was a good source of fat soluble vitamins and fatty acids that are essential to our health. Or that those margarine’s that are suppose to be trans-fat free actually contain mono and diglycerides which are still a type of bad hydrogenated oil. I did it purely for the taste. Butter tastes better. End of story.

I’ve continued on using butter over the years thinking that all butter is pretty much the same until recently. Now my taste buds have been sent into a tail spin thanks to a recent post on cultured butter at Girlichef. I may never look at butter the same way again and it’s all her fault!

The recipe is easy enough and her pictures are much nicer then mine so stop by and check her site out. While your there check out some of the other great recipes along with the Hearth and Soul blog hop! Then check out the steps below to learn how to make homemade butter.

Cultured Butter

1 quart heavy cream
1/3 cup whole milk yogurt (the stuff that has live active cultures in it)
salt

I picked up a quart of heavy cream at the local whole sale club. For yogurt I went with a new one that recently showed up at the grocery store – Stoneyfield Whole Milk Cream Top. It had a thick layer of cream at the top. I’d tell you how it tasted compared to regular yogurt but I really dislike yogurt by itself and mixed with most things. When my milk is sour and chunky I throw it out. I don’t eat it for dessert LOL. Oddly I do like yogurt in baked goods, soups and other things where the sour flavor doesn’t stand out.

* In a covered bowl combine the cream and the yogurt. Allow them to sit at room temperature for up to 24 hours. The mixture should thicken up a bit.

* Place the bowl in the refrigerator to cool down before you begin whipping it. I forgot about the container being in my refrigerator and didn’t get around to whipping the butter until two days later. It didn’t seem to cause any problems to wait this long.

* Once the mixture has cooled begin whipping the cream on high speed. If you had a stand mixer it will be a big help. The instructions I had said to beat on high speed until stiff peaks formed, reduce speed and, once mixture breaks, turn off the mixer. Since I had no idea what breaking cream/butter looked like here’s what happened:

The cream started to rise as it was being whipped on high speed. After several minutes soft peaks formed. Soon stiff peaks formed. Shortly after that the whipped cream seemed to deflate and the level in the mixing bowl dropped. I stopped the mixer and scrapped down the sides. After several minutes my oldest daughter, who was helping me, said the mixture was starting to look like scrambled eggs. She was right. It had become kind of yellowish and grainy. As we watched small amounts of liquid began to form around the edge of the mixture. I wasn’t sure if this was the breaking so I shut off the mixture and poured it into a strainer. Under the strainer was a bowl to catch the buttermilk.

I put the grainy mixture back into the mixer bowl. Using a large spoon rub the mixture up against the side of the bowl. This seems to release the buttermilk. I was completely amazed at the amount that appeared after only doing this a half dozen times.

* Pour off the buttermilk into a container to save for baking and continue to rub until no additional buttermilk appears. Once this is done the butter now needs to be cleaned to remove any residual bits of buttermilk that might cause the butter to spoil. This is done but adding water to the bowl and rubbing it through the butter. At first the water will be a bit cloudy. Pour it off and add more clean water. After 2 or 3 times it should be clear. The butter is now clean.

* I like my butter lightly salted so I added a few pinches of sea salt to taste. Girlichef added in a few more exotic ingredients such as black truffle sea salt. I would imagine that you could let you imagination go wild with this and try your favorite herbs, dried mushrooms, spices, cheese, etc. I wanted to stick with just salt to see if there was that much of a difference between cultured butter and the regular stuff. Was it really worth the extra time and effort to make something as simple as this yourself? Hell yes! Culturing the butter adding a tangy depth to it that even the best organic, small farm butters don’t have. It is truly something that I did not expect. It was so delicious that we stood around and made sure that every last morsel of butter was removed from the mixer bowl.

Heavenly!

This buttery post is being linked back to the following blogs. Stop in to check out all the other great recipes, tips and ideas:

Real Food Wednesdays at Kelly The Kitchen Kop

If, in the future, I should become some kind of renegade dietitian who sits in class chanting “fat is good” quitely to myself then Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories is the one to blame. Though my teachers would be very unhappy I would happily thank him for causing such trouble.

For too many years fat and meat have been looked down on. They’ve been blamed for all of our health woes. Numerous scientific studys have been done that supposedly point the finger at these evil foods. We don’t really hear or see what they actually show so we can have a better understanding of what they have discovered. Instead we only get bits and pieces which are then blown out of proportion by the media and even the scientists themselves. This is the first book that I’ve read that goes over the evidence that’s often touted to condem meat and fat.  I’ve read about many of these dietary studies in nutrition classes. What they often fail to do is fully explain things because, if they did, you would see that meat and fat are not the evil doers that they are made out to be.

If you want a better explaination of what they did discover then I would highly recommend you read this book. It gives incredible, easy to understand explainations. Often times many of the researchers are quoted and their own words will show you that what we have been told are the reasons for the current dietary guidelines are actually not in our best interests. It’s a long book, 601 pages in length, but it’s worth slowly making your way through it especially if you have any type of diabetes, are prediabetic, have PCOS or have often wondered why you can never lose weight no matter how little you eat. You won’t be sorry.

The ones who one day will be sorry are the manufacturers of high carb, low fat, overly processed foods. Oh, and the drug companies and the government most likely won’t be too happy when more and more people take back their own health by dropping the processed carbs and eating more fat and meat.

A few of the things I’ve learned from the book:

* Dietary fat is not evil and is not the cause of obesity, heart disease and diabetes……white carbs are to blame!

* The more processed the carbs the greater the impact on the body and insulin secretion.

* Sugar, even if it’s naturally produced (raw cane sugar, turbinado sugar, honey, etc) just might be the source of all evil…well, dietary wise anyways. If sugar isn’t evil then High Fructose Corn Syrup most certainly is because of the way it’s broken down by the body.

* I FINALLY understand why I’ve never been able to lose weight and keep it off following all those low fat, high carb diets….I was physically making myself more hungry and always felt horrible (I was told it was my body detoxing from everything the evil dietary fat had done to me)

* Insulin is the main hormone that regulates fat storage. Meals filled with mainly carbs, especially the highly processed ones, are quickly turned into fat. This happens even if you consume fewer calories by dieting.

There’s so much more information in the book then I could cover in one blog post. My suggestion to you is to buy this book or get it from your local library and slowly read through it. You won’t be sorry!

Our society has become very fat phobic. With heart disease, diabetes and obesity on the rise we need something to blame and fat has become the perfect scapegoat. Studies are done to determine the cause of the increase of various diseases but there is no definitive answer. When studies do not point out an absolute reason they ignore important data (such as all the other countries whose diet contains lots of traditional fats) and usually point the finger at fat. We are told it’s evil and we should make every attempt to stop eating the stuff. Sadly, what most studies don’t explain, is the fact that the “evil fats” are actually the newer, industrial fats that have been created in the last hundred years or so. This includes trans fats, hydrogenated fats and fats produced under highly processed conditions. Since their introduction to our food (along with the other “axis of food evils” – refined flour and sugar) our heath problems continue to increase no matter what we seem to do.

Rather then listen to this nonsense I, and many others it seems, are returning to real food. Traditional foods that our great grandmothers or even their mothers would have probably eaten. Foods that are made from actual ingredients rather then boxes, can and foil sealed packages containing ingredients we can’t even pronounce. Returning to traditional foods isn’t always easy. There is a surprising learning curve involved. After all my own grandmother barely remembers eating some of these foods so rediscovering them takes time. So far it’s been worth the effort.

One of the projects on my traditional foods to do list was finding a source of pasture feed beef fat. It would have been nice to find a store that sold it already to use. Instead I learned that rendering my own wasn’t all that difficult. At the local farmers market I decided to ask the pasture feed beef vendor if he happened to sell the beef fat along with the cuts of meat he had to offer. I didn’t expect him to actually have any on hand. He surprised me however by pulling out an 8 lb chunk from the freezer:

If you would like to learn how to render your own beef tallow here’s all you have to do. Take your piece of beef fat and cut it up into pieces about 1 1/2 to 2 inches in size. If I had a meat grinder or a food processor I would have ground it up even smaller. But I don’t so I had to cut it with a knife. Once your done toss the chunks into a large pot.

I added about 1 cup of water because that’s what I had read on another site. I’m not sure it was necessary. After all this was nothing but fat. It’s not like it was going to stick to the pan. But I was following the directions and added the water. I put the pot over a medium heat and stirred it every now and then. After a while the fat will start to turn translucent and look something like this:

I think it took about 2 hours for it to get to this point. From this transluscent point it didn’t take much longer for the fat to completely melt. I ended up with a pot full of golden liquid. There was a small amount of debris at the bottom of the pot. This material seems to be the fine membrane that was holding the fat together. There wasn’t any meat or other material attached to the fat so this what I believe it to be. I used a slotted spoon and scooped out most of it. In the end there was still smaller pieces that the spoon could not get out so I strained the liquid through a brand new nylon. Here’s what was removed:

All that was left behind was a beautiful, golden oil:

I covered the pot and allowed it to sit at room temperature over night so it would cool down. The liquid oil solidified and turned creamy white.

All that was left was to gently ( so I didn’t scratch the pot)  run a butter knife through the pot to break the fat into smaller pieces. I lifted each piece out and wrapped it in plastic wrap. I packaged the pieces up so they were small enough to use within a reasonable amount of time. From 8 lbs of fat I got 5.5 lbs of rendered fat. Several sites I consulted said you may have liquid beneath the solid fat. If so simply remove the solid fat and discard whatever is left. I did not have anything beneath the solid fat. The water I added in the beginning must have evaporated during the cooking process. I cut that amount up into 8 equal pieces.

I’ve left one piece in the refrigerator to use and the remaining were placed in a freezer bag. I am storing them in the freezer for future use. After the initial time spent cutting the fat into pieces there was relatively little work involved. This turned out to be a very easy project. Now I have a good supply of health fat to use in cooking.

This post has been entered into the Fight Back Fridays over at Food Renegade. Stop by the site and check out the other great blog posts featuring real, traditional foods.

Beef Tallow