Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

We’re still experimenting with butter making (discussed earlier here) and this time we’ve made our own cultured butter, by adding a heaped tablespoon of Pete’s Greek yoghurt to 500ml of fresh cream and letting it sour in the fridge.  We also soured a large container of plain cream concurrently, to provide a comparison (the big block in the photo is the plain cream butter, the small one is the yoghurt cream version).

The batches soured in completely different ways. At the end of two weeks, the yoghurt cream had a pleasant, mildly sour aroma, whereas the plain cream had a strongly acidic and quite “off” smell.

The yoghurt batch took slightly longer to split, but produced the most delicious butter we’ve ever had.  It had a tangy flavour with a long aftertaste -  the other butter tasted bland by comparison.  Pete wants to make all our butter in this way from now on, but I’m withholding judgment until I try cooking with it.  It will be delicious for eating, but I’m just not sure whether the flavour will be too strong for baking.

The by-product of the cultured butter was a rich buttermilk quite similar to the commercially available product (albeit a bit thinner).  I was able to use this, with our own butter, homemade vanilla extract, Pete’s nectarine conserve and Ray’s fresh eggs, to make a buttermilk and almond cake.  Dusted with homemade vanilla sugar, of course!

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More here : Old Friends & Homemade Butter
and here : Step by Step Butter Making Photos