May The Source Be With You

We venture on a culinary journey around France to learn all about an invaluable kitchen staple ingredient – butter.

- Vijaya Cherian

A week-long tour through dairy farms and butter factories in France supplemented by workshops on how to cook with butter has transformed an uninitiated dairy consumer like myself to a more informed buyer. I have always believed that we are what we eat and, therefore, over the years, have pored over product labels before settling on brands that I have thought would be healthy choices for my family. It’s still a work in progress. Butter, however, was thus far not subject to so much inspection – until now.

The gastronomic tour was a fascinating journey that didn’t just introduce us to a gamut of different flavours of butter but helped us understand the importance of tracing it to its source; the ingredients, the ethics, the art and the skill that go into making chemical-free butter and more importantly, how you can make your own flavoured butter at home or use it as it should be, to enrich the flavours in our foods.

Butter making itself is a simple process and one that some of us have probably seen our grandmothers practice back home. Typically, milk is skimmed to separate the cream; pasteurisation eliminates pathogen flora; maturation helps to develop the aroma; churning joins the fat matters together; washing helps eliminate the lactose and casein in the butter; kneading eliminates excessive residual waster and finally, it is packaged for commercial use.

Although the process itself is similar, the secret to each commercially produced butter lies in the quality of the milk, its fat content, the use of different materials to churn the butter, the culture that is added to the butter to refine its taste and so on. Of course, the first and foremost rule to making any good butter is to ensure that the milk is sourced from healthy and happy cows that graze in lush green pastures – a landscape that defines France thanks to its temperate climate.