I promised more fermented goodies in the near future.

Specifically cultured butter.

What is cultured butter? Butter that went to finishing school and went on to get a MFA from the Chicago Art Institute?

No.

It’s butter made from cream that has either been allowed to ripen over several days without the addition of any bacterial culture, or real honest to God homemade Creme Fraiche, or cream that has been cultured with the addition of commercial cultured buttermilk.

Essentially, it’s butter made from tangy cream, not sweet cream.

In the United States, not a whole lot of folks know about cultured butter, nor do they tend to like it. It’s rather hard to find and when you can find it–its very expensive. The first time I tasted commercially available cultured butter, I popped my head up and said, “Oh, it tastes like butter at Gram’s house.”

And this is how we can tell that my Dad’s father’s family were from fairly recent European immigrant stock. It all has to do with the foods they liked to eat–many of which were unfamiliar to most American palates when Dad was growing up and when I was growing up as well.

Gram always left her butter out at room temperature. She stored it in a cupboard and in later years, the microwave, to keep bugs, dust and mischievous cats from getting into it, but it was pretty much left out to the open air. I always thought it was to keep it soft so it was spreadable, but it always had a different flavor than everyone else’s butter, and my Dad told me why.

“The Old Man,” he said, meaning his dad, my Pappa, “Liked his butter to be kind of tangy, almost rancid, just like his father and mother liked it.” Apparently, Pappa’s parents, had kitchen help who made the household’s butter by skimming cream from the milk delivery and then letting it ripen on the counter for up to three days before churning it in one of those hand-cranked glass butter churns that everyone had back in the day.

That was the way their parents, who were from Germany, made butter and to them, that was just how butter was supposed to taste.

Dad didn’t know what that was called, but it was cultured butter–which is not at all what most Americans like–we prefer “sweet cream” butter–which if you look at most any package of butter sold in grocery stores these days, they are all going to be labelled as such.

Dad said Gram’s butter tasted sort of like that, but he didn’t like any of it at all–he preferred sweet butter.

I like them both, I have to admit, with a preference leaning toward cultured butter, especially when it comes to a spread on toast or bread, or for use in sauces or on vegetables. Sweet butter is still my preferred butter for baking.

But cultured butter is SO DARNED EXPENSIVE! Usually at least twice as expensive as sweet cream butter and it’s harder to find, too.

So, do like I did and figure out how to make it on your own.

How to Make Cultured Butter

Step One: To make cultured butter, you need cultured cream, which you are not likely to find at your corner grocery. So you need to follow my directions on how to make what the French call creme fraiche which is a tastier version of sour cream. Please do not try to use commercial sour cream to make butter. It will not work. There are all kinds of stabilizers, thickeners and who knows what all in sour cream to make it artificially thick and then it is usually pasteurized nigh unto death, which is going to make it nearly impossible to use for butter making. So take the time to culture the cream your own self. Start out with the best cream you can afford–I used Snowville Creamery heavy cream that comes from pastured cows. If you live where you can get Snowville, I urge you to use it–the butter it makes is fantastic, but if you cannot get it, use the best cream you can find. (If you can get cream from a local farm or your own cow–all the better!)

Step Two:You need to churn that creme fraiche into butter.

In order to do this, you need a means by which to agitate your cream so the fat molecules bash up against each other and start clinging together into clumps that eventually become butter. (In a nutshell, that’s what happens when cream is turned into butter. Molecules bash together and stick and you get something creamy and delicious to eat on bread or cook with.)

There are lots of ways to churn butter, some of them low tech, some of them high tech and one of them no tech.

Being a frugal sort by nature, I started to use the no tech version which is to stick the creme fraiche into a glass jar so that it’s only half full, seal it up tightly, and shake the dickens out of it until you see lumps of butter separating and floating around in the thin, bluish buttermilk.

There’s a problem with this method. Two, actually. Well, there are probably more, but the reasons I gave up on it this morning are that the rough and ready agitation that is necessary for sufficiently shaking the cream such that it turns into butter makes my boobs jiggle annoyingly, and it takes forever, so my hands and wrists started to hurt.

(No, there is no video available of me shaking the jar on YouTube so do not ask.)

I refuse to wear a sports bra and wrist braces just to make butter so I put the jar down and switched to a high tech method: I used Conan, my big bronze and barbaric Kitchenaid mixer.

I skipped straight over the low tech methods, because I do not have any kind of butter churn. Nope, I do not have the Little House on the Prairie model that sits on the floor and has a churn dash attached to a pole that you plunge up and down for however long it takes to make butter sitting in the corner of my kitchen looking all pioneery and picturesque. Neither do I have one of those really neat old glass one from the early part of the 20th century that you turn a crank and a dash inside swirls around and makes butter. That’s the low tech kind I’d have, because that’s what my Grandma used to make butter when my Mom was a kid, but they are pretty expensive. Apparently people collect them and stick them on shelves in their kitchens to look all vintage and retro. I mean, I’d stick one on a shelf in my kitchen, but I’d also make butter with it too.

But I digress. Be that as it may, I used a high tech method. If you lack a Kitchenaid, you could use a hand-held mixer. Or, you could use a good heavy-duty blender. Or a really good food processor would do the trick, too. You just need something that has a part that can move very quickly through the cream and act as a churn dash, whirling and bashing and sloshing that cream together so the fat molecules start getting dizzy and grabbing onto each other for support.

If you have no low tech churn or no high tech electric device to churn your butter, I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with the boobs and wrists problem and just shake, shake, shake your jar until the butter comes. I guess you could put on a Carmen Miranda or Harry Belafonte album and dance and shake to the beat so that you get a good workout. Maybe it will burn some extra calories to make up for the butter you are making and presumably are going to eat.

Step Three: Pour your cream into your churning vessel–I used four cups of cultured cream–and start agitating. With Conan the Kitchenaid, I used the whisk attachment and started on low speed and gradually moved it up to high speed, taking great care to adjust the speed so that I didn’t slosh the cream over the lip of the bowl and all through the kitchen.

So, you agitate.

And agitate.

And agitate.

(Do you feel agitated yet? No? Well, your cream probably does.)

After a few minutes, your cream is going to come to the soft-peaks stage of whipped creamdom. That’s good, but you need to keep going. Soft peaks are when you stop the mixer and lower the bowl or lift the whisk and you end up with the cream forming a peak that goes up and then slumps over into a Dairy Queen kind of swoopdydoo.

A few minutes more, and the cream will come to the stiff peaks stage. That’s when you stop the whisk, lower the bowl or raise the whisk and your cream stands right up at attention, like a, well like something stiff. It makes a nice peak. This is where you would stop if you were making whipped cream.

But, you’re not, you’re making butter. So keep going. Soon you will come to the stage where the cream stops looking creamy and glossy and all whipped and it turns all ugly, and lumpy and curdled looking. Like this picture right here.

Kind of unappetizing looking isn’t it? This is the stage where your whipped cream has broken, and if you were trying to make whipped cream, you’d cry, tear out your hair or gnash your teeth. (It can be rescued, by the way. Just add a bit more cold liquid cream and start whisking again, first on low speed and then on to medium until it goes smooth and starts acting like whipped cream again.)

But we’re not making whipped cream, we’re making butter, so no tears are necessary. Just keep going.

And going.

And going.

The cream stays at this stage for a long time. It seems like forever. But then, you will notice little odd clumps in your curdly looking yucky cream–little granules. They’ll look something like this:

Those are wee tiny granules of butter forming, so don’t stop now, but keep going.

It will seem as if it’s taken forever for those tiny butter granules to start forming clumps, but trust me, if you turn away for a few seconds (to comment on Facebook, for instance) you will find yourself being splashed in the face with buttermilk. (That is if you are using a mixer–something self-enclosed like a real butter churn or a food processor will save you from a buttermilk bath.)

Quickly, turn the speed down if you are using a mixer, so that you do not shower your entire kitchen with buttermilk. What you will see at first is small clumps of butter clinging together with pools of buttermilk in between and yellow, lumpy cream in the center, but within just a few seconds, all that will remain in the bowl will be butter that has for the most part adhered to itself and is entangled in the wires of your whisk, with a few smaller lumps floating in a small pool of buttermilk.

Stop your churn, mixer or other mechanical device, or your arms from shaking the jar, and lift out the butter.

Step Four: (I’ll bet you never thought we’d ever get to step four.) Pull your butter out and after letting as much buttermilk drain off of it as possible for a few seconds, set it in a bowl. Fish out any smaller lumps of butter from the buttermilk and set them in the bowl as well. Then, set a fine strainer over a jar and pour the buttermilk into the jar. Rescue any butter bits that end up in the strainer, and put them with their brethren in the bowl, tightly close the lid to the jar and put the buttermilk in your fridge. This can be used for baking, and I suspect for starting another batch of creme fraiche. Some people like to drink it–my Dad liked to when he was a kid, and so did my Mom.

Step Five: Now, you must knead the butter to extract as much buttermilk as possible from it. Here’s where I went all Little House on the Prairie, and used a small wooden (well, mine was bamboo, but whatever) paddle, working the butter all around the bowl. Pushing and scooping and pushing again with the paddle, kneading releases tiny droplets of bluish white buttermilk which ooze from the mass of butter, and form puddles in the bowl. Drain these off carefully by tipping the bowl, while with one hand you keep the butter from falling into our sink.

You could do this with your hands, but your hands are warm and will begin to melt the butter. This could make your hands slippery, so when you try to tip the bowl without dropping it–well, you can imagine the tragedy that could strike. You can’t very well scrape butter out of your sink into which shards of bowl have embedded themselves and then eat that. It doesn’t have to be a paddle–it could be a wooden spoon, or I suspect a metal spoon for that matter, though a wooden one would be more comfortable to hold for the job.

Keep kneading until you can get no more buttermilk out. The more buttermilk you remove, the longer your butter will stay fresh. If you leave buttermilk inside it, your butter will go rancid, which is not the same thing as cultured, and it will smell and taste awful.

Step Six: Rinse the butter by running very cold water over it in the bowl, while kneading it with the paddle. You can run water into the bowl until it is half full, turn off the water, knead for a while, and when the water turns cloudy, dump the water out and start again with fresh cold water from the tap. Keep rinsing until the water comes out perfectly clear–as clear as it was coming from your tap. This is how you get rid of those last tiny, stubborn droplets of buttermilk. Drain the rest of the water out–which magically doesn’t carry your butter out with it because fat and cold water do not mix!

Step Seven: Next, if you want to, add a bit of salt to the butter by sprinkling very fine salt over your mass of butter and kneading it in with your paddle. Taste as you go. Salt not only helps bring out the fullness of the cultured butter’s flavor, it also acts as a preservative, helping it last longer.

Once you’ve put in as much salt as you want–go slowly and sparingly with the salt–you do not want to overdo it–you can pack the butter into a jar or roll it up into a cylinder in waxed paper and pop it into your fridge to chill and solidify.

And that, my friends, is it. That’s how you make cultured butter!

It really is simpler than this huge post would let on. I just tried to make the explanations as thorough and descriptive as possible and then put in a lot of photographs so you’d see each step of the process. This isn’t meant to make it look complicated–it’s to help build your confidence if you decide to try making your own cultured butter in your own kitchen.

You can use these instructions to make sweet cream butter–just leave out step one and start out with plain old heavy cream from the store–not ultra-pasteurized if you can manage it.

Taste your butter and enjoy it. You can use it just as you would use sweet cream butter–on bread or toast, or in cooking. It adds a wonderfully tangy, somewhat nutty flavor to any dish to which it is added and pastry made with it has a more complex flavor than that made with regular sweet cream butter.

I hope you do try making this–it’s fun to do–especially if you have kids helping–and you end up with a product that would cost you quite a bit if you bought it in the store. Four cups (one quart) of cream yields about one pound of butter, and around two cups of buttermilk. If you bought that in the store–it would be about ten dollars for the cultured butter and the buttermilk usually goes for three or four dollars a quart.

I spent about four dollars, maybe for that quart of cream, so look at how much money I saved–but the money isn’t the main point. The main point is the flavor of the butter is so much more intense, fresh and delicious than any cultured butter I’ve ever bought, and I have the satisfaction of making it in my own kitchen using ingredients I know and trust.

Long time readers probably know that I love to cook with yogurt, and that it appears in a great many of my recipes. I use it in mashed potatoes, curries, baked goods, pancakes, sauces, cheese dishes and lots of cold salads and raitas. It is, in fact a staple in my kitchen, so right before I started writing this blog again, I had decided to take up making my own yogurt.

I’d been told it was simple to do, and the results were better than what you can buy at the store, and generally cheaper.

Now, I have to cop to being very picky about my yogurt. I use whole milk Greek yogurt, which is strained, thus making it thicker and creamier in texture, and my preferred brand is Fage. But, I knew that the milk the folks at Fage was still from CAFO dairy cows, who are fed God-only-knows-what and are treated pretty abominably. I really wanted to use our delicious local Snowville Creamery milk that is from cows who eat grass, hay and the tiniest amount of grain, who are never fed bovine growth hormone, and who are beautiful and lovingly cared for on fields very close to my home.

The milk from cows who eat grass is structurally different from the milk from cows who eat grain and God-knows-what-all, and it is healthier for us. Snowville cream and milk are what my family drinks, so it made sense to switch over to making yogurt from their milk if I was serious about making sure to give my family the best food possible.

So, I had to take up yogurt making.

And, it really isn’t all that hard, but it isn’t something that you can kind of do slapdash and get really good results. Remember, I’m picky about my yogurt. I like it thick, tart, and creamy, so I had to work a bit to get the good results I wanted.

But the work was worth it and I can pass on what I learned to my readers and make your putative journey into cultured milk products a bit smoother than my own was. (Because, yes, readers, I DID screw up a couple of batches of yogurt. Yep. I was very sad I had no hogs to feed it to, just some cats, because two quarts worth if ick yogurt is too much for kitties to eat!)

So, first of all, let’s talk about tools.

The first and most important tool you need for making yogurt is NOT a yogurt maker.

It’s a good, accurate food thermometer. Preferably with temperatures marked in five or ten degree chunks. Or a good digital thermometer. I have a Taylor that goes from 0 to 220 degrees–for yogurt you only need it to go to 160 degrees F. but you won’t find a probe thermometer that stops at 160, so don’t worry about it. It’s not a digital thermometer–I don’t love those because you cannot calibrate some of them, so I stick with the good old fashioned ones with the dial on them.

To calibrate a thermometer with a dial, check and see if there is a hex nut on the back where the probe meets up with the dial. If it’s there, you can test and calibrate it. Do this by setting up a glass of ice water and sticking the probe into it. It should read after a few seconds, exactly 32 degrees F. If it’s off by a bit in either direction, you will notice on the probe’s plastic cover (which you should always use when you’re not using your thermometer) a plastic hex wrench–a cut out the same size and shape as the hex nut–so you use that to move the dial up or down to get it to 32 degrees. Pretty neat, huh? You will find that right out of the package, your thermometer may be off by a degree or three in either direction, sometimes as much as five degrees.

Just calibrate it and get ready to play with milk.

Other necessary tools: a heavy bottomed pot that holds at least four quarts of milk–that would be a gallon. No, we are not going to make a gallon of yogurt at a time, but we going to be stirring two quarts of milk in this pot rather vigorously, and then whisking it, and you will make less of a mess if your pot is only half full than if it’s about to boil over.

A whisk. Self explanatory. A wooden or plastic spoon. A metal ladle and a four cup capacity liquid measuring cup.

If you are going to strain your yogurt to make good Greek style yogurt, may I suggest that you obtain a bag made of fine cloth for doing so. I tried using cheesecloth and it was MESSY, and it let too many milk solids out with the whey, so I got frustrated and got some unbleached finely woven 100 percent cotton muslin at the local quilt shop–but you can get it in any fabric store–and sewed myself up some bags a little smaller than a standard pillowcase, and prewashed them, then hung them to dry. I use my bags inside out to keep the fraying bits of cotton on the seams from getting into the yogurt. You can also use a cotton pillowcase–lots of people on the ‘net suggest that. I just didn’t have any extra ones laying around.

But whatever you do–don’t do the cheesecloth thing–it will annoy the bejeezus out of you, and you will end up with far less yogurt in the end than you should, because lots of it will seep out of the cheesecloth no matter how many times you prewash it and how many layers you use.

Oh, and you need something to culture your yogurt in.

Here’s where a yogurt maker can come to play. You can use an electric one, but I don’t love them. They tend to use little tiny jars to make your yogurt in, but I use it in cooking, so I want to make lots of yogurt at a time. But if you want to make it to replace those little fruity cups of yogurt you buy in the store, then maybe the electric version with the wee jars is for you. We’re all different.

Or, you can use just a plain old two-quart glass jar with a towel wrapped around it placed inside an oven with a pilot light lit, or a warming oven, or a preheated 110 degree F. oven which is then turned off or inside a parked car, or in a styrofoam cooler with lots of towels wrapped tightly around it to keep it warm, or inside a thermos bottle with a towel wrapped around it set in a styrofoam cooler. All of these methods work, but I found that I got annoyed at keeping tabs on the temperature.

See, yogurt needs a temperature of about 110 degrees F. for about 8-15 hours to culture. And while all of these methods do work, they can require some fussing and futzing, and I got annoyed at all of that.

So, how did I decide to make my yogurt if I don’t like electric yogurt makers or the jar and towel in some insulated warming device methods? Did I do it in a crockpot? No, that bugged me, too. I wanted to do it without electricity if I possibly could because that just makes sense to me. (Being without power after the derecho storm for days probably had something to do with it, too.)

I decided to use a Yogotherm yogurt maker, which doesn’t use electricity, makes up to two quarts of yogurt at a time, and works much better than the jury-rigged methods I tried before I got it.

It’s a simple thing, really. A BPA food grade plastic bucket with a lid and a handle to hold the culturing milk, and a Styrofoam inner layer that the bucket fits very tightly to for insulation, and an easily wiped clean styrene outer layer that provides easy cleaning and looks nice and lasts longer than Styrofoam, because it’s tough and not apt to be destroyed by five year olds and cats.

No moving parts, no heating elements, and all easily washable.

I highly recommend it.

And then, you need milk.

I say that you should buy the best milk you can buy. I use whole milk, and I sometimes add extra cream for extra richness, but good whole milk will do fine for the first time.

Good milk, and oh, yes, some yogurt culture.

Now, you might be able to hike down to your natural food store and pick up a box of culture. Or, you can pick out your favorite natural unflavored brand of yogurt and use it–lots of people swear by Stonyfield for having the most live active cultures in any commercial yogurt.

Or, you can order some online from Cultures for Health. They have lots of different specific strains of yogurt culturing bacteria in freeze-dried form, and they give explicit instructions on how to activate them and whether or not they can be used serially to make new batches of yogurt from the previously made batch.

I did a combination of both methods: using commercial yogurt and two cultures from Cultures for Health–I chose a combination of Fage and Stonyfield yogurt and a combination of both Greek and Bulgarian culture strains. I added each one singly and ended up blending them together to come up with a really tangy, rich yogurt with good flavor and texture.

To use commercial yogurt as your starter, just follow my directions. To use Cultures For Health’s starters, first follow the directions they provide for activating the starter (basically you make a small amount of yogurt) and then following my directions, make a full batch of yogurt.

There are a couple of caveats I’m going to mention before I give the recipe/formula for the yogurt.

One–it is absolutely essential to heat the milk up to at least 160 degrees F. but no hotter than 180 degrees F. Yogurt cultures need milk between 90-110 degrees F. to work, but don’t think you’re being smart by only heating your milk up to 110 degrees and putting in your cultures and letting it go. IT WON’T WORK.

You need to heat the milk up to 160-180 degrees F. to denature the proteins in the milk so that when it cools off and the yogurt culture is added, it will turn into a nice, smooth, creamy, delicious dairy product that you will want to eat.

If you only heat up the milk to 110 degrees, and add your culture and let it sit, you will end up with a ropy, mucousal, slimy and icky mess of a dairy product that if you have hogs around, they will thank you for, but I guarantee, you will NOT want to eat. It’s nasty. It’s icky. It’s gross. Don’t go there, because I’ve already gone there for you.

Do not waste your milk.

That’s the first caveat.

The second is simple–make sure all of your tools and utensils and hands are perfectly clean before starting. If you are really OCD about it you can sterilize everything with boiling water–but don’t submerge your entire thermometer–just the probe–otherwise you break it. But you don’t have to be completely nutty about it. Just make sure stuff’s clean and well rinsed–detergent in your culturing vessel will make your yogurt not work right–and it will make it all taste funny.

The third is this–if you want, you can add powdered milk to your milk to boost the protein content and to make a thicker product. I personally have had good results without taking this step. But I will note where you can add it if you want, (After the milk has been heated and then cooled down to culturing temperature) and I’ll give you an amount if you want to use it. (About a half cup per quart of milk.) You can get organic dry powdered milk from Organic Valley.

Okay, now I think we’re ready to get us some culture!

Strained Greek-Style Yogurt
Ingredients:

2 quarts of whole milk (Or, a mixture of whole and two percent milk, or a mixture of whole milk and cream, etc. If you add cream, do it in this ratio: 7 cups milk and 1 of heavy cream)
1/3 cup of commercially available yogurt or “mother” culture made by following the instructions from the company that makes the culture
1 cup nonfat dry milk

Method:

I bet you never thought you’d read a recipe from me that had two or three ingredients, but here we are. I’m just full of surprises.

Set out your yogurt or mother culture to warm up to room temperature about an hour before you make yogurt. If it’s too cold, it will cool off your warm milk too much when you add it. You do not want this to happen.

Get out your big pot that holds at least four quarts, and your thermometer, wooden spoon, ladle, whisk and big measuring cup. Make sure everything is really clean and wash your hands really well. If your hair sheds, this is a good time to wrap it in a do rag, pop it under a hat or shave your head.

Pour your milk into the pot and put the pot on medium heat and start stirring. Get used to it: you’re going to stir a lot for a while. Don’t worry, it’s good for you. Builds character and forearm muscles.

Take out your thermometer and check the temperature with one hand while you stir with the other.

When it gets to 160 degrees, turn your heat down and keep stirring. At this point, you can keep it at 160 degrees for five minutes or you can slowly let it heat up to 180 degrees. I generally stop at about 170. I keep it at my high temperature for five minutes and then remove it from the heat. I set the pot on my counter, but you can also fill your sink with ice water and set the pot in there. That will help you cool the milk faster.

Cooling the milk is easy, but it can take a while. If you use a sink full of ice water, it will go faster, but just using your ladle to stir, scoop and let the milk pour back into the pot from a height of about seven to eight inches will cool the milk by about five degrees per eight minutes or so of work. It cools faster at first, but the last five degrees seem to take forever. Whatever, you need it to get to 110 degrees. Do not let it cool down past 90 degrees. 110 is what you are shooting for.

Scoop about a cup of milk and put it into the big measuring cup. Now is when you add the nonfat dry milk if you are going to use it. Whisk it into the milk in the measuring cup and do not stop until it is completely combined. If there are lumps in this milk, there will be lumps in your yogurt.

Whisk in your yogurt or starter.

Check your temperature. If it is below 110 degrees F, especially if it’s below 90 degrees F, you need to pop it onto the stove, and heat it up until it comes to 110 degrees and NO hotter. So put it on low heat, stir the whole time and keep that thermometer in the milk and when it gets to 108 degrees, take it right off the heat and turn off the stove. It will go up the next two degrees on its own.

Pour the yogurt into your culturing container, close it up and do whatever it is you are going to do to keep it warm. In the case of my Yogotherm, I just pour it into the plastic inner chamber, close the inner lid and then close the outer lid and leave it in a warmish, quiet place.

Now, leave it alone for eight to twelve hours. I get it ready before I go to bed and then check it in the morning.

After it’s been between eight to twelve hours, open up your container and see what has happened. What you should see is a thickened mass that is still somewhat fluid, but mostly solid. The cream will have floated to the top, and underneath it should be thickish yogurt.

Put it in your fridge and let it cool off and firm up for another five hours at least. I often leave it for eight hours. It thickens a good bit on its own while it cools down slowly.

Okay, if you just want regular yogurt, it’s done and ready to eat.

If you want Greek style strained yogurt, now is the time to get out your straining bag or pillowcase.

Pour your yogurt into the bag, twist the top and tie it with a string. Hang the bag from a shelf, a cabinet nob, a hanging pot rack or whatever other sturdy thing you can find to hang it from, with a bowl underneath to catch the whey. Put it someplace cool, where no cats, children or other flies can get to it. I hang it from a shelf in my utility room which I keep closed.

Leave it for two to three hours and when it’s done, scrape it into a storage jar, and whisk it lightly to distribute the cream.

The whey you can keep to put in soups, cook vegetables in, or to use as the liquid in bread baking. You can also use it as a starter for kimchi or sauerkraut. Or, if you have cats, you can give it to them, or you can make ricotta cheese with it, or you can feed it to your dog or hogs if you have them.

When all of this is done, you will have thick, creamy natural Greek yogurt at a fraction of what Fage costs in the store.

We’ve gotten to where we like the flavor and texture of the homemade yogurt much more than the commercial. It’s the quality of the milk and the different cultures I used in it, as well as the amount of cream I use in it that I think makes the difference.

Eat your yogurt however you like or use it in cooking. You just need to leave 1/3 cup of yogurt for culturing your next two quarts of milk which you should make within 7 days. After that, your cultures may die. I make my yogurt on Sundays.

And my best friend (and partner in film making crime) Dan said I should make a blog post of it, so that all of my loyal readers can discover that even The Culinary Nerd has her off day in the kitchen. That way they can take heart when all goes awry in their kitchens and know that they are not alone, for lo, The Culinary Nerd is with thee.

And with thee, I most certainly am today.

It didn’t actually start in the kitchen.

It started in the adjacent utility room. I went to do some laundry, so I put a load in the washer, then went to clear the load out of the dryer from yesterday and discovered something.

Something bad.

Something really bad.

A ballpoint pen had been washed and dried. And had thus leaked its ink all over the load of laundry and worse, the drum of the dryer.

Luckily, no clothes were harmed in this debacle. The load had been the bathroom rug which had been helpfully watered by a visiting two year old who didn’t quite make it to the potty, along with all of my farmer’s market bags, dishtowels and cleaning rags. The pen likely was in one of the bags, but it could have been dropped in the pile of cleaning clothes by accident.

However, while none of the clothes were touched by ink, two dishtowels I had embroidered by hand WERE marked hideously by splotches and splortches of blue-black ink.

I was strong.

I neither cried nor threw anything.

I just ran to the internet to find out what would remove ink from a dryer drum.

Hairspray said one site. Goo Gone or Oops! said another. (These are commercial solvents that do great work on crayons, sticker gunk and bubble gum.) Nail polish remover.

Then a fourth site said “Rubbing alcohol.”

I was suddenly reminded of my senior year of high school, when my then boyfriend had taken up a Sharpie marker and had written, “Aardvarks Have More Fun” in large letters across a classroom wall. And then admitted it to our journalism teacher. While she marched off to get the principal, he and I skedaddled to the chemistry lab where we beseeched our favorite teacher for a solvent to solve our wee dilemma.

He handed us a gallon-sized container of industrial grade isopropyl alcohol and sent us on our way with the admonition that unlike water which is just called “the universal solvent,” isopropyl alcohol really did dissolve just about anything you’d use to put a mark on a wall.

Which it did. My boyfriend wiped it off the newly painted eye-bleeding yellow wall, while under the eyes of ten fellow students and then handed me the jug and sent me off to return it to the lab.

By the time she got there with the vice principal, there wasn’t even any fumes left to tell the tale.

And all of the students smilingly denied knowing anything about any aardvarks having anything looking like fun in that general vicinity. Since there was no proof of vandalism, no one got in trouble, though I suspect that incident, along with a few others, probably drove the poor journalism teacher to drink.

So, with aardvarks and graffiti dancing in my head, I went to get my rubbing alcohol, and found that there was barely a tablespoon left in the entire house.

So, I went out to buy several bottles of it and returned. (Mind you, it’s nearly time to pick up Kat from art camp, and the laundry is still not done.)

So, pour, pour, wipe, wipe, scrub, scrub, cough, sputter, cough, swoon, sneeze, swoon, gasp.

Yeah, I discovered that even with the household strength alcohol you can get at the drugstore, you really shouldn’t stick your head in the drum of a dryer while you try and clean it. The fumes are….um….heady. And unpleasant.

On the other hand, how the hell you are supposed to see what you are doing while cleaning ink out of the dryer drum with alcohol without sticking your head in and feeling a bit fumy is more than I can tell you.

So, I’d clean for a while, start gasping and coughing and then would take a rest and breathe fresh air from the open windows.

After an hour of scrubbing, and a break to go pick Kat up in a torrential rainstorm, I managed to get it clean. Then, I had to let it air out, lest I stick laundry in it, turn it on and the alcohol fumes ignite with the gas flame that warms the dryer.

So, I figured while I was waiting for the airing out process to do it’s job, I’d go into the kitchen and see how my newly fermented yogurt was doing while it was straining.

Yes, I’ve taking up culturing my own dairy products. And yes, there will be more posts. In fact, I had planned today to write a post about making yogurt, but well, things got in the way.

Like ink stains in the dryer and on my towels. (Though the alcohol also took most of the ink out of the towels as well. Which is good, because I worked really hard on the embroidery.)

Anyway, I cut down the yogurt and promptly splashed whey on the counter and when I squeezed the cheesecloth wrapped yogurt lightly, discovered that the cheesecloth I was using was not finely woven enough to let the liquid out without letting out too much of the yogurt solids. Even with four layers of it employed, I ended up with yogurt squirted up one arm and down my chest.

So, yeah.

Another mess to clean up. Which I did, but I was mighty grumpy to have lost so much yogurt.

However, after licking it off my hand, (waste not, want not–besides my hand had been scrupulously washed in hot water and soap before touching the wayward dairy product) I discovered that the taste was better than the last batch, so I was getting somewhere in making my own personal blend of cultures in my quest for Greek yogurt that is even better than the creamy and dense commercially available Fage.

So, I scraped the yogurt out of the useless four layers of cheesecloth into a glass storage jar, which ended with lots of cursing and attempts to pry the sticky zillion yards of cloth off my person.

And then I did some more laundry, which did not result in the house catching fire, so I must have done that right.

While that was going, I decided to start preparing to make dinner. It WAS going to be ma po tofu with dry fried string beans and steamed jasmine rice.

I always make the rice first, so I measured out two cups of rice, rinsed it and popped open the rice cooker, ready to pour the rice in, and gagged when I was confronted by a swarm of fruit flies, and the stomach churning odor of rotted rice.

The last time the rice cooker had been used was two weeks ago when I was in Reno, Nevada, at a family meeting. Morganna had made Thai food for Zak and Kat while I was gone and no one had cleaned out the rice cooker.

I scrubbed it clean, swooned, gagged and scrubbed it some more and declared that I was not about to eat rice tonight, and called Zak to tell him my adventures.

He agreed we’d go out to eat and I thought nothing of it.

I cleaned the kitchen, finished the laundry and thought it was all over.

However, I was wrong.

The pork I had thawed out for the ma po tofu had leaked pink raw pork juice all over the microwave.

It dripped out and down, onto the toaster, the counter top and…the bowl of heirloom tomatoes from my garden below.

The tomatoes nearly made me cry.

I tossed them in the compost bucket to feed my worms, then scrubbed everything on that side of the kitchen clean again, putting the turntable from the microwave into the dishwasher and cleansing every nook and cranny of the toaster inside and outside.

I put the pork back in the fridge after double-bagging and resealing it, and after Zak came home, we went out for dinner.

I even ate a piece of cheesecake for dessert–which is something I NEVER do, especially when I am not sure what the hell went into the making of said cheesecake.

But it tasted pretty good, and I didn’t have to make it myself.

Because lord knows what would have happened if I’d turned my hand to cheesecake today.

The water bath probably would have exploded or something.

That all said–I want to let all of you know–shit happens. It happens in quantities large and small, sprinkled throughout a week, or like I had, all in one day.

And when it does, the best thing to do, is shake your head, laugh, clean up the mess and then have some cheesecake.

Because even bad cheesecake makes a bad day better.

It’s a good introduction to making your own cultured dairy products, too, as it is beyond simple, since you barely have to heat the cream above room temperature and add either some commercial cultured buttermilk or a creme fraiche starter culture. You then cover it loosely and let it sit on a warm, not hot countertop out of drafts and away from the sun for about twelve hours and like magic, you come back to some rich, thickened, lightly tangy cream that is stable when it’s heated.

Yeah, let’s say it again, and more firmly this time. Creme fraiche is stable when it’s heated.

Commercially available sour cream is most emphatically NOT stable when it’s heated. In fact, it’s rather unstable after being heated and will often “break” when whisked into a simmering sauce, There is nothing more annoying than adding sour cream to a delectable sauce at the end of cooking and have it go all lumpy and curdly instead of making a nice, smooth, tangy creamy sauce. And yes, this can happen even when you are good and “temper” the sauce by whisking a small amount of the hot sauce into the sour cream before incorporating it into the rest of the sauce. (This is part of why I’ve used full fat Greek yogurt in my Beef Stroganoff for years–because it can be boiled and it will not break once it’s put into a sauce.)

But creme fraiche–well, it doesn’t break. You can boil it. It’s fine. You can temper it into a sauce, but you don’t have to. For all it’s velvety, lightly tangy delicate flavor, it’s tough, like a streetwise flower child who wears love beads and a set of brass knuckles.

And it tastes really, really good, too.

Very rich and satisfying.

Oh, and did I mention how easy it is to make?

Well, I’ll say it again. It’s easy to make. Easier to make than yogurt, because you don’t have to hold it at 110 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to twelve hours.

If you use commercially cultured buttermilk, just heat up a pint of heavy cream to 80 degrees F. (I used our local Snowville Creamery Heavy Cream, which is from grass-fed antibiotic free, growth hormone free cows just one county over from where I am typing) to room temperature and stir in two tablespoons of buttermilk. Pour into a clean glass jar (I use the locking ones with the gaskets like the one pictured above) and cover with the lid, but don’t lock it. Leave it in a warm, draft-free area out of the sun for 12 hours. Yes, I said twelve hours. Twelve. Please don’t get all worried about spoiling your cream or food poisoning. In this process, you are making friends with good bacteria, and they are keeping the bad bacteria at bay and are making your fresh cream into something sublime. Trust me.

After twelve hours, the cream should have thickened without solidifying, and should have the texture of commercially available yogurt. It isn’t as thick as the sour cream you’re used to buying from the store, but if you want to thicken it, you can put together several layers of cheesecloth and spoon the creme fraiche into it and tie the ends together and hang it up to let some of the whey drain out for an hour or so.

I used a starter from the company Cultures for Health. They sell yogurt starters, kefir starter, various dairy cultures and starters for vegetable ferments and soy ferments, and so far, all of their products I’ve tried have worked well. (Yes, you’ll have more posts on culturing milk coming up in the future.)

Their instructions are a bit more complicated, but not by much. They instruct you to heat one quart of heavy cream to exactly 86 degrees Fahrenheit, then stir in the contents of one packet of starter (they are sold in a box of four packets which can only be used once for $4.99–which is more expensive than the buttermilk, but in order to not use milk from a confinement dairy, I decided to go with the culture instead) into the cream, cover it and let it sit in a nice warm, non-sunlit place for 12 hours. I used my jar as noted above–I covered the jar with the lid, but didn’t seal it up.

How did it turn out?

Well, let me just say that everyone who tasted it buckled at the knees and rolled their eyes up in their heads. I ended up giving lots of my first batch away, so I never got to use much of it. That’s okay. I love my friends.

What can do you with Creme Fraiche.

Use it in any way you’d use sour cream, except be prepared to have your socks knocked off by the result. You can use it to top a cheesecake. You can use it in your Beef Stroganoff sauce. You can use it on a taco, on a baked potato, in mashed potatoes or swirled on top of a bowl of cream of tomato soup. It can go on top of fresh berries.

You can also just dig a spoon in and have at it plain and straight up.

Just use your imagination.

It’s good stuff.

Trust me.