by Chef Andrew Little, Sheppard Mansion
Friend, chef and awesome blogger recently posted about butter… and I had to share it with all of you! Enjoy.
I eat a lot of different foods. Complicated, easy, expensive, cheap, exotic, mundane….you get the picture. If it’s edible, I’m gonna try it. Regardless of how many different foods and combinations of foods I eat, I always go back to one seemingly simple combination: warm bread and salted butter. This simple combination always makes me smile. Think about it. Who doesn’t like buttered toast or the crisp snap of a proper grilled cheese sandwich? OK, before the diet and cholesterol police get too excited, let’s move away from the idea that ‘butter is BAD’ and let’s treat butter as a luxury ingredient.
There are a few food stuffs that I have an amazing love affair with. One is bacon and another is butter. I started out liking bacon, but realizing that if it was made on a small scale, it could be way better than commercial bacons that are bought in the store. So, a couple of years ago, I started on a journey to make the best bacon I could and through much trial and error(what a tough job; eating bacon and trying to figure out how to make it better….) Now, we’re getting raw pork bellies that are raised in an amazing manner and we have a recipe that I think makes some of the most amazing bacon I’ve ever tasted. Yes, at one point, I even did a blind ‘bacon tasting’ where I lined up four of the most commercially sought after bacons and mine. We had some cocktails and ate bacon all night. Now that’s my idea of a dinner party! Come to think of it, in the interest of quality control, I think it’s time for another bacon tasting. Who’s in?
Anyhow, I told you that story, so that I could tell you this one. I’ve always admired great butter and have even tried my hand at making it a couple of times, but I never was able to get the flavor that I wanted. Again, I’m coming back to the idea of terroir. I think food should taste like where it came from and dairy products are a great vehicle for doing this. So, I’ve tried many different angles to get where I want to be, but I never really felt like the product was a ‘knock it out of the park’ success. It was good, but not in any way remarkable and if we were going to produce this butter at the restaurant, it needed to be remarkable to warrant the time it takes to produce. So, last week, I got the butter itch again and decided it was time to get a technique together that was going to produce a remarkable butter. Honestly, I was just thinking to myself, ‘it’s time to stop pissing around and make an amazing butter. So here we go.
For the full story click here.
