By request, butter

 

The other day, my old man asked me when I planned on actually writing about butter and bread, rather than just using the words as a name for my blog. He had a point. He is, after all, the guy who coached me, at age 2, to identify and name all the herbs in the garden, and taught me how to make snow ice cream as a child and omelets when I was a teenager. Later, he passed along other useful tidbits, like how it's a bad idea to throw back tequila at the end of a night of drinking…and something about never, ever reciting the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in Middle English, to the cops. Since all of this guidance served me well at one time or another, I figure I should listen to him now, right?

So this one's for you, Dad, if you happen to be reading. As it turns out, this summer has been all about making my own butter–and bread. Probably, that’s why I haven’t gotten around to blogging much lately. Out in the country, we have access to quantities of raw cream straight from the farm, which is Stone Wall Dairy Farm in Cornwall, CT. Between shepherding children, driving from farm to farm to do our dinner shopping, and the shaking and rinsing that goes into making butter, there’s precious little time left for the computer–a blessing, really.

The butter started as an activity for the kids over 4th of July weekend, and then it just kind of stuck: we make our own butter now. My daughters have pretty much lost interest in the shaking of mason jars, a mindless pursuit I find to be a satisfying companion to porch-sitting when my hands get twitchy, but I don't have the time for a real project. It's more idle than baking, more productive than staring off into space.

The first time I went by the farm to fetch a gallon of cream, the folks there were more than happy to talk me through it. The farm owner, a man of few words, said “you have to wash the butter, you know…you have a computer?” And the lady farmer, who looks after the chickens (which, by the way, lay some of the orangest-yolked eggs I've ever seen), chatted me up about her own technique: leave the cream out on the counter until it is about 65 degrees, otherwise separation will take forever. Then she went on to describe, in detail, the process of washing the butter…and passed along her bread recipe, too.

The final rinse

Except, the washing part was a little tricky to get a hang of. The shaking part, too. On my first go, I shook the jar too hard and too long, beyond the point of separation, heating the whole business up and frothing it back into emulsification–so I got a kind of whipped butter that seemed more cream than butterfat. This was just a mess to wash. After poking around on the internet for suggestions vis-a-vis temperature, I determined the best combo is to leave the cream out until it’s coolish room temp, chill the mason jar (or other butter-making implement), then shake the bejesus out of it. There's that magical moment when the cream, which has become so stiff it’s all but impossible to budge, suddenly breaks and there’s once again sloshing within the jar–but a different, more emphatic kind. Sploosh-a, sploosh-a, sploosh. A few more shakes and you’ve hurled the butterfat into shape–with any luck a firmish yellow ball of it. Pour out the thin buttermilk it's bobbing in, and save that for pancakes or biscuits.

If you have nice chilly water flowing from your spigot, as we do (it’s from a spring), just run it into a comfortably-sized working bowl, press the butter blob down into the side of the bowl, and “massage” the buttermilk out. They make special paddles for that, but I find clean fingers work just fine. If your water runs tepid (as does our water in Brooklyn during the summer), drop an ice cube or two in the bowl–that's to firm up the butter and make it less sticky. As you press on the butter, you’ll see buttermilk wisp and fog into the water. Massage the butter and change the water a couple times, until it runs clear. Then dump out all the water. I blot the butter with a clean paper towel and mix it with a little sea salt if I’m so inclined. If you have fresh herbs lying around, like chives or tarragon or thyme, chop them up fine and fold them into your shining new butter while it’s still soft. Compound butters are decadent simplicity on grilled fish or steak…or of course, bread.  

Last week, I took a break from all that crazy shaking and drove from Brooklyn to Cleveland, to visit my dear friend Cary. She’s the only one who could ever convince me to make that drive. Let me tell you, it turned into a grueling 12 hours (one way) with 2 kids in the back, and that night I was still dodging tire retreads in my sleep. On my way there, when I was about to burst into tears after 4 hours and little progress, she called to check on us. We were somewhere in Pennsylvania and had just eaten a grim lunch at a "family restaurant" off the highway (it involved scoops of coleslaw dusted with cinnamon).

“Where am I? What’s out there, anyway?”

“Amish country,” she said, and then her voice shifted, and I knew she was going somewhere with this. "…which gives me an idea for when you’re here.”

 

Two days later, we wound up in Amish country, Ohio, with our 4 kids and an ulterior motive of shopping. It turns out Ohio has the biggest Amish population of any state in the U.S., and as we entered the heart of it we spied their black buggies stamped with orange reflector triangles. Women rode by in their long, dark dresses and little white pillbox hats, children in their gauzy black sun bonnets. We saw men's heavy black trousers pinned  to clotheslines and spotted families working the fields in 90 degree heat, their hand-heaped haystacks stretching into the distance like something out of a Millet painting. After a while we forced ourselves to stop slamming on brakes and snapping pictures, once we realized we were behaving like tourists on safari.

Then we reached our goal: Lehman’s, a mega-store built in 1955 to serve the Amish. They specialize in “old-fashioned merchandise”, much of which operates by hand–a must if you’re not allowed to use electricity. There are wood stoves, grain mills, lots of cast iron, and even a literature section. 

I headed straight for the butter-making aisle.

They actually had these! Exciting stuff, but alas, their scale is incompatible with our living space–I would have had to give away the dog to make room for one. I did, however,  walk away with the rig pictured below, along with countless other items to simplify my life, Amish style. Ironically, all they really did was make me more of a consumer. 

I can now spin butter by the pound rather than the pat, and each time I do I thank the ladies: Dolly and Stardust and Miracle and Dancer and the rest of those pretty Jersey cows we visit whenever we pick up our milk, cream, and eggs. 

Photo courtesy of Tara

Note: Since raw cream can only be sold frozen in Connecticut, I've been mostly working with thawed cream. I've also tried ultra-pasteurized, homogenized supermarket cream with similar results.  

This butter still contains a bit too much water to be ideal for baking–I haven't worked that one out yet. My choice for baking is organic, European-style butter (it has a high fat content). Check the label. "Natural flavors" are anything but, and can impart an almost artificial buttery taste.


Homemade butter:

• 1 pint heavy (whipping) cream 
• 1 quart mason jar with lid
• cold water and ice

Instructions:

Let cream sit at room temperature (low 70's) for a few hours, so it's no longer cold. You can chill your jar. Pour cream in the jar and shake for around 10 minutes. The cream will thicken then separate into butterfat and buttermilk. Shake for a few minutes longer, until buttermilk forms a single mass. Carefully pour off the buttermilk into another container. Put the butter in a medium bowl and fill with chilly water, adding a few ice cubes if necessary. Carefully "massage" as described above, pouring off water and repeating with a clean change of water, until no more buttermilk clouds the water. Pat butter dry, mix in salt or herbs if desired, and store in a mold or rolled into parchment paper.

Zucchini

Summer’s cute phase is over, and our neighborhood has gone to seed earlier than usual. Weeds are bolting up through the cracks in our bluestone sidewalk, merging into a mass that’s more wilderness than pavement. The trees are raining frizzled leaves from the heat wave, which has also addled the human contingent: crime is doing its annual mini-spike. Not Son of Sam type stuff, but restless, fiddly transgressions. I see the posters plastered to telephone poles ("Wanted for Deception and Burglary"), and I hear neighbors whispering of stolen bicycles during evening dog walks. Last year around this time my bike got clipped. A few nights ago, our GPS was lifted (OK, so I asked for it by not locking the car) and our patio got broken into; nothing was taken, but a woman’s sandal was left behind as a calling card.

It’s time to say good-bye to friends for the summer, too. Many, with origins and family abroad, have already flown until September: Korea, Canada, Spain. Each year, they lift away as naturally as birds migrating.

The upside? Some of those weeds in the sidewalk are wildflowers: thistles, sweet peas, morning glories, Queen Ann's lace. It’s easier to get a parking spot, and there's no need to queue up for a table in a restaurant. But still, all signs point to the inevitable: it’s a good time for me to pack up the brood and head out of town. This week marks the last one of routine, of stillness around the house while my kids sing and schvitz at day camp. From here on, I’m the camp director and we’re out of town more than in it. Once we hit the road my heart will lift with new possibility, as it should. It will also, quietly, sigh. The cover of this week’s New Yorker shows a happy family rolling out of town, car laden with sporting equipment. In the back seat, a girl stares miserably at the receding Manhattan skyline. I always secretly feel like that a tad, each time I leave. 

New York…rank July garbage and all, you're magnetic.

If you're wondering how any of these ramblings relate to food, or anything appetizing, I have just one word: zucchini. If there ever was an edible indicator of summer’s overripe, overly generous, poised-on-the-edge-of-decay stage, it’s zucchini. They recently made their yearly debut in our CSA basket, so they’re still on the delicate side. Soon they will balloon to the size of baseball bats, and even the constant baking of zucchini bread won’t be enough to keep up.

The gilt has not worn off the zucchini yet, though—on our summer table it’s featured prominently in pastas, gratins, and ratatouilles, its prodigious pulp not yet hidden away in breads and frozen for fall minestrone. My favorite at-home dinner right now is crisp, homemade pizza crowned with shaved zucchini–because also, I’m having a love affair with the no-knead baking technique in Jim Lahey’s My Bread. You can bet this book will hitch a ride wherever I go until September. And I know, I'm a bit of a late adopter of this minor craze, but better late than never: the bread turns out brilliantly every single time. If you’re a kneader by nature, you might miss the intimate, tactile interaction with the dough. The laissez-faire approach also goes against everything I learned in culinary school, about the science of having to muscle together all those good gluten strands with your hands. 

The  pizza crust recipe makes two full sheet tray sized pizzas, so you can freeze half the dough or make a few smaller, round pizzas. I whip up the simplest tomato sauce imaginable and use my beloved and scary mandoline to get those veggies paper thin, so they don’t make the pizza soggy. And the just-made, brine-dipped mozzerella from Caputo's is what I crave most of all...I might as well get my fill, because I'll miss it where I'm going. Farewell for now, Brooklyn!

You can, of course, use store-bought dough and/or sauce if you aren't in the mood for a project. On the topic of zucchini, I also like this simple pasta recipe from over at The Wednesday Chef. And, this article from last year’s New York Times offers some great ideas for using up zucchini. Readers: if you have a clever zucchini idea you'd like to share, Please! I invite you to pass it along in the Comments section.
 
Zucchini Pizza

Pizza Dough 
Adapted from Jim Lahey's My Bread

• 3 3/4 cups bread flour (500 g.) or, substitute a cup or so whole wheat flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast (10 g.)
• 3/4 teaspoon sea salt (5 g.)
• 1 teaspoon sugar 
• 1 1/3 cups room-temperature water (300 g.)
• Extra-virgin olive oil for trays

 Simple Tomato Sauce  
(enough for one pizza)

• 1 large ripe tomato or two smaller ones
• 1 small clove garlic, crushed
• Extra-virgin olive oil 
• Sea salt to taste

Other pizza ingredients  

• 1 small zucchini 
• 1 small onion–preferably a spring onion (greens still attached) 
• 1/2 ball fresh mozzerella, shaved or torn into shreds
• Optional: Fresh ground pepper, basil leaves

Instructions for Dough: 

Whisk together dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the water and mix with a wooden spoon or your hands until blended, at least 30 seconds. The dough will be a bit stiff. Cover the bowl with a dish towel and let sit at room temperature about 2 hours, or until the dough has more than doubled in volume. 

Using a large rubber spatula or bowl scraper, scrape dough from bowl onto a floured surface. Divide and gently shape dough into two balls, separate, and cover with a damp dish towel for a half hour or so. 

Meanwhile, when you're ready to use dough, preheat oven to 500 degrees (may want to do 475 degrees if your oven gets too hot). Prepare tray(s)–this dough will cover two 13 x 18 rimmed sheet trays. Oil tray–and your hands–liberally. Gently stretch dough the length of tray and then press evenly onto surface, concentrating on places where dough is thicker. Pinch together any holes that form.


Instructions for Sauce: 
Put a medium pot of salted water on to boil. Cut an "x" in bottom of tomato with a sharp knife. Once water boils, dunk the tomato for about 30 seconds, remove with a skimmer and refresh under cold running water. Then, you can easily peel the skin off. Cut out the stem end and then chop tomato into segments. Remove seeds and tomato jelly and discard, then mash up tomato flesh with your hands or a potato masher, until you have puree consistency. Stir in garlic, a few drops of olive oil, and salt to taste.
  
Assembly and Cooking: 
Preheat oven to 500 degrees if you haven't already. Cut off root and stem ends of onion and remove peel. Use a mandoline or sharp knife and, starting at root end, slice onion very thin horizontally, into rings. Slice zucchini into paper thin rounds. Top dough evenly with sauce, then cheese. Spread onions on top, then finally zucchini. I arrange slices so their edges are touching (not overlapping). They shrink during cooking. Put tray into middle rack of preheated oven, then bake for 25-30 minutes, until crust is crisp and browned and pizza looks ready. Rotate halfway during cooking, and lower heat to 475 degrees if top is getting too brown but crust doesn't seem done in the middle. When pizza is done, scatter with basil leaves and ground pepper, if you like.

Honor berries

My mom had certain rules about food when my sister and I were kids, strict lines we were not to cross or we were entering into hostile junk food territory. Let’s just say we had to sneak over to our neighbors’ house for our Twinkie fix, and the jones was fierce. Mom made sure we had salad every night, and there was no way in hell cafeteria food was passing our lips. But then, her Berlin wall-like barriers were somewhat arbitrary. For instance, she wouldn’t dare bring home Frosted Flakes, yet she plied us full of Quaker 100% Natural, which probably had twice the corn syrup and derived its crisp from hydrogenated oil. And in the kitchen she kept a gum drawer, which all the neighborhood kids were wise to and raided on the sly. It was full of Chewels. Remember those? You bit into the sweet pink gum cushion and got a squirt of sticky fuchsia syrup in your mouth. 

But Mom’s firmest line was drawn right down through the middle of Entenmann’s country. It dictated that never would a box of Entenmann’s coffee cake or doughnuts see the inside of our house, but the chocolate chip cookies were a-OK–in fact, a staple of every Safeway haul. Health food. But, there were limits on even those, and we were allotted precisely two a day, after school, before homework. We adhered to our two-cookie ration obediently, washed down with our 2% milk. But later, after retiring to my room with my books, I would creep down the back stairs in an Entenmann’s frenzy and collect a towering stack of those cookies, so tantalizingly soft, the chips so sweet they scratched faintly at my tooth enamel. I couldn’t help it–swiping was just too easy and I was a scrawny, ravenous kid with no impulse control. So much for the honor system in our house.

Today, I adore the idea of an honor system, and not because I can work it to get more goodies. No. I’m happy to say that this former cookie thief grew up to be a law-abiding citizen; Mom must have done something right. You won’t catch me fudging so much as a snow pea over the weight limit at CSA pick up. I never, ever sample chocolate almonds from the bulk bin–though believe me, the temptation is there.

When we spend time up in rural Connecticut, I delight in all the honor system offerings set out by farmers and folks with prolific chickens or bees. To me, they are an indicator that trust and honesty are sufficiently alive in the world to keep these little businesses going the way they do. Driving down a road, you might see a hand-penned sign proclaiming EGGS or HONEY, propped atop a cooler by a mailbox. Along a minor highway, an unknown someone built a rickety wooden stand, which functions as an unmanned flower booth when its owners get around to stocking it with bouquets. And our dairy staples all come from a farm where there’s a “dairy sales” room adjacent to the milking barn; inside the door a fridge offers neatly arranged raw milk and eggs, and you pay via a wooden lock box plastered with Post-it note IOU’s. You can’t even get change unless the farmer happens to be there emptying out that old-timey till.

But my most favorite honor situation by far, one I go into yearly raptures over, is the blueberry patch down the road from us. It’s the best blueberry patch on earth–I truly believe this–set back behind one of the most gorgeously bucolic roads I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving down (the same one festooned with maple syrup buckets in winter). Its owner, a lovely lady who settled there decades ago, reserves the right to open the patch at her own convenience–or whim. If a red, white, and blue flag looms into view as you round the bend in the road, your heart sinks and you know you’re out of luck. But if that musty old flag is thrown back to reveal the peeling sign, on goes the blinker.

Through a hay field, over a bumpy rise, grasshoppers pinging off the car’s grill–that’s the way to the patch, which opens up on the far side of a small apple orchard, beside a pond where bullfrogs burp and thrum. The owner of this small farm once told me the land was all apples when she first moved in, but she doesn’t much care for apples so she ripped out most of the trees and made way for the blueberries, which she adores. Welcoming the public into the patch–and her home, really–is the only way she can possibly keep up with her crop, so she hung a scale and set a little money jar on a table in the open barn. They’re organically grown, these berries, and she picks off the beetles by hand, drowning them in coffee cans of soapy water, and keeps the birds at bay by netting over the whole thing (more power to the occasional lone bird that finds its way in).  

It’s best to bring your own containers, though usually in the barn you'll find a carton or two, maybe some plastic bags or a cut-open orange juice jug for collecting. If you’re thoughtful, you will, in turn, surrender whatever surplus cartons were lying around your kitchen. That’s collectivism at work. Follow her note to find the ripest berries (because she probably won’t come out to tell you in person), go in through the mesh door, and settle into a rhythm. 

My kids are pros now, I’m proud to say. Over the 4^th, we spent a sweaty afternoon picking with our friends Tara and Josh, and the four kids between us more than contributed to the pie that night. Is it child labor if they gorge themselves purple on their favorite fruit?

Tara and I swear the berries taste different on each of the 100 or so bushes, and each time we make a game of finding our favorite, the one with just the right balance of tart and sweet. Grabbing as many as we can get becomes compulsive and hypnotic, and usually a kid at the point of meltdown is what it takes to rouse us from our stupor. We weigh our take on the scale in the barn, rounding up for those intercepted by our stomachs, and go bouncing back over the field, dreaming of the things we'll bake. 

Inevitably, someone sits on a bag or capsizes a carton on the ride back, but those squished berries don't have to be goners–they just have their own purpose now. Into the freezer they go, where they will later fill out smoothies and morning baked goods, well into the winter if we stretch them out. And plenty get devoured as is. Last year I held off on cooking them for the longest time, because I wanted to burn the taste of fresh summer blueberries in my memory. So I whipped up a lemon vanilla ice cream, super rich and custardy, and tumbled berries on top. One day I'll post that recipe for you. Then, of course, came the muffins and scones that roused the kids from bed before camp. For the 4th this year, we improvised a pie by baking a simple graham cracker crust, cooking berries down with sugar and lemon zest, and then baking it all with an easy crumble topping. Incidentally, we strained away some of the berry juice prior to nestling them in the tart shell, and it made a delicious sauce over pancakes the next morning. 

The recipe below is something a little different. Back when I was catering parties, this was my go-to dessert during blueberry season. It's taken from Claudia Fleming's beautiful cookbook The Last Course and is ever so slightly fancy, sophisticated enough for a dinner party or host(ess) gift but soothing in its interplay of childhood flavors of graham cracker, cream cheese and blueberry. If it seems too complicated and rolling your own graham cracker is not your thing, you can cut corners by using a store-bought graham cracker crust, or the simpler one I linked to above. 

Thank you, Tara and Madeley, for supplying many of the photographs in this post!

Blueberry-Cream Cheese Tart with Graham Cracker Crust
*Recipe makes two 9-inch tarts or about 10-12 individual tarts

Adapted from The Last Course, Claudia Fleming with Melissa Clark
  
Graham Cracker Crust

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
• 1/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Cream Cheese Pastry Cream

• 1 cup whole milk
• 5 Tablespoons sugar
• 4 large egg yolks
• 2 1/2 Tablespoons cornstarch
• 3/4 cup (6 oz.) cream cheese, cubed and softened at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup heavy cream (whipping cream), whipped to soft peaks

Blueberries

• 2 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
• 1 tablespoon sugar

Instructions: 

1. Graham cracker crust: use an electric mixer to cream together butter and sugars in a medium bowl. Mix for a minute or two, until blended and fluffy. Add honey and beat until combined. 
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together flours, salt and cinnamon. Mix the flour mixture into the butter in two additions, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Mix until well combined. Form dough into a two disks (or smaller balls, if going the individual tart route) and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate until firm, at least an hour. 
3. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. On a floured surface roll the dough to a 1/8 inch circle, or individual circles as you wish. If you are making a 9-inch tart, roll circle to 11 inches. Lift carefully and lay over tart mold, then press dough evenly into mold and trim away excess. Prick all over with tines of a fork and refrigerate for about 20 minutes, until it is firm again. Bake for about 25 minutes on the middle rack of oven, until golden brown. 
4. Pastry cream: In a medium saucepan, combine 3/4 cup of the milk with about half of sugar, and bring to a gentle simmer. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk together egg yolks, cornstarch, and the rest of the sugar. Add the remaining 1/4 cup milk to the yolk mixture. Remove milk from the heat and whisk a little bit of hot milk at a time into the yolks, whisking the whole time until yolk mixture is warmed up. You want to avoid scrambling the yolks, so keep it moving! 
5. Add the warmed yolk mixture back into the milk pot, whisking constantly, then put back over a low flame. Whisk for a couple minutes more until you begin to feel a  resistance against the whisk and the mixture becomes thicker. Remove from stove and strain into a clean bowl, using a very fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth-lined strainer. Cover surface with parchment or plastic wrap and refrigerate until chilled. Once chilled, whisk smooth and fold in whipped cream until combined and even.
6. Blueberries: In a medium saucepan, combine 1 cup of berries with sugar. Simmer gently over low heat until berries have burst and liquefied, about 5 minutes. Strain the cooked berries into a clean bowl and throw out the solids left behind. Add the rest of the blueberries to the syrup and stir together to combine. 
7. Assembly: Once tart shell is cool, spoon pastry cream into it and top with some of the blueberries.