Showing posts with label Butter. Show all posts

Its Saturday, a workday like any other, and yet the kids and I still have to eat even when we are busy. We also have to feed our souls. Here is the ultimate solution to the busy summer lunch - a tomato sandwich.

Now it is not even worth beginning without fresh tomatoes straight from the garden, so warm and full of sunlight that they are about to burst. Choose one that is almost too ripe, so soft that it start to split just from the pressure of picking it. Be careful it doesn't fall off the vine as you reach for it. At this point of the season, the variety of the tomato hardly matters - Brandywine, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter, a Lemonboy or Cherokee Purple, even those unidentified generic 'tomato' plants you picked up down at the local WallyWorld and planted amongst the weeds off the back deck. What matters here is the ripeness and your awareness and appreciation of the imminent end of summer.

Pick your bread. It should be soft and absorbent to pick up all the juices that are welling out of that perfect tomato. A good choice is my Daily Bread, or even some of that store bought white stuff. This might be the only real use for that stuff. Don't try to get all fancy and use a crusty artisan bread here, don't even toast it. It has just got to be soft.

Butter just one slice, preferably with Homemade Butter, but again, since the tomato is the star, you might cheat a little and still get a good result, but only if you have to. This is to be the top of your sandwich. You may add a bit of mayo here too if you like, and sometimes I do, especially if I have recent made it and have a little left, but its not absolutely necessary.

Now lay your bottom slice of bread on a plate close to your cutting board and prepare to slice that beautiful fruit. Use the sharpest knife you have, with smooth serrations if necessary, and try to preserve that precious juice. Try not to smash your tomato as most of the flavor is in the juice not the flesh as some folks may seem to think. Let them think it and keep the juice for yourself, summer is too short to argue. If you lose precious juices onto your cutting board carefully pour them onto you bread before arranging you slices of tomato. Afix the top slice and enjoy. Savor. Mop up any excess juice with more bread, and wash the works down with cold milk, Fresh Farm Milk.

Repeat.




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Butter

I cook with a lot of butter. I refuse to use hydrogenated oils and things I cannot even decipher. Butter is simple, butter is wonderful. Unfortunately, butter in the store is often expensive. I beat that by buying it on sale and freezing it. It will keep a long time, I dunno how long because it never seems to last. Anyway, store bought is OK for cooking or baking, but for on home made bread or fresh biscuits, nothing beats the taste of fresh butter you just made yourself. In my case, I find it is cheaper too. I buy my raw milk from a farmer who allows me to clandestinely siphon it off for about half the price per gallon as store bought milk, and I simply skim a bit of the cream each time and make our table butter. It only takes a few minutes, and I feel good knowing that not only are we eating butter rather than some test tube fat spread, but raw milk butter has a greater concentration of nutrients for my kids. And, darn it, it just tastes great!

You can use store bought cream, if you must. Buy a pint of the stuff marked Heavy Whipping Cream. It is “Ultra-Pasteurized” and so will probably not clabber, that is sour, but it will still taste better and fresher than the sticks you buy for baking.

You will need:

· 1 pint cream
· salt to taste

and
· A quart mason jar with a lid and ring, or similar jar with a lid
· A butter bell, half pint mason jar, or similar jar with lid

OK, now this is tough, so get the kids.

1. Set the cream out on the counter, covered overnight, this will get it warm, and will allow natural enzymes to slightly sour the cream for better taste. As I said, this is traditionally called clabbering.
2. In the morning, pour the cream into the quart jar, fasten the lid tightly, and shake. You can shake fairly rapidly at first, though it is not necessary, but when the cream starts to coat the inside of the jar, slow to about one or twice per second. A snap downward with a rapid stop is especially effective, but really any technique that whips the cream will work. Watch as the cream begins to thicken and be “whipped”. Continue to shake.
3. After a few minutes, (and this varies greatly with your technique, the quality and temperature of the cream, and some ineffable qualities that I still have been unable to define), the whipped cream will begin to “break” and loosen. Particles or tiny grains of butter are beginning to form. Continue to shake.
4. Rather suddenly the butter will simply stick itself into a single mass. Stop shaking, and open the lid. Carefully drain the buttermilk into a glass or other container. Don’t let your butter slide out yet! You can save the buttermilk for cooking or baking or simply drink it. If the cream was clabbered it will have the wonderful sour taste that contributes so much to other recipes, and if it has not clabbered, it will simply taste like other sweet milk, and still carries the nutrition of say, skim milk.
5. Keeping the butter in the jar, slowly run the coldest water you can get over the butter to rinse away the butter milk, dumping it a couple of times. Then, leaving space to shake, fill the jar with water.
6. Shake as before, this time to wash the butter. Drain and repeat a couple of times until the water stays clear and no more milk can be drained out of it. At this point, the butter can be worked with buttersticks, but that’s really too much trouble for the small amounts we are making, and is really only to help preserve it by removing all last traces of buttermilk and water.
7. You should have about half a pint of butter, and it can now be put in the butter bell, Mason jar, or some other handy container. It can be refrigerated or frozen, but we simply leave it out on the table, covered of course, right beside the bread cutting board. I don’t have any data on how long it keeps that way, because we have never had it longer than 4 or 5 days, though it was great all the way to the bottom of the jar!


Some other things that you can do with butter:

Clarified Butter

Brown Butter

Herbed and Flavored Butters