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 ago, when I was a kid, my Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, Uncle John and I made at least a hundred pounds of sauerkraut.

And no, that wasn’t even the German side of my family. That would be my Dad’s family, but oddly, he and many of his siblings despise sauerkraut and apparently never developed a taste for it.

Nope, it’s the Cherokee/Anglo-Irish/Lapsed Amish side of the family who made and ate all of that kraut.

Weird, huh?

But yeah, I remember the five of us gathering in the cold basement of Grandma’s house on a cool day in October or early November, with bushel baskets of plain old green late-season cabbages piled high around our feet, making kraut. I washed the cabbages in the sink, bobbing the heads up and down in frigid water until all traces of dirt were removed from the outside, then dried them and handed them off to Grandpa or Grandma, who would take turns shredding them using the horribly sharp kraut cutter that Grandpa had built himself.

That kraut cutter was ominous: it looked like a combination of a regular kitchen mandolin with just a whiff of guillotine added. I figure it was the rustic wood and carbon steel slanted blade that gave it a certain murderous air. And it was scary sharp. Only Grandma, Grandpa or Mom were allowed to touch the thing. And as Grandma got older, she wasn’t allowed any more.

Anyway, one would shred and the other would sprinkle the shreds into the two huge twenty gallon crocks. It was also my job to scoop a teacup of kosher salt and sprinkle it over the cabbage when directed to, sprinkling it over each crock, half a teacup in one crock, half in the other.

Mom and Uncle John had the hardest job of all–pounding the cabbage with the big, heavy wooden kraut tampers that Grandpa had turned out of oak and walnut wood on his lathe. They had a good time with it, pounding and squashing the cabbage like mad, laughing and even though it was cold downstairs, working themselves into a sweat.

I remember asking Grandma once why we never made kraut out of red cabbage, and was answered with laughter.

“Who’d want to eat purple kraut?” Grandpa said. “It wouldn’t be appetizing.”

“But kraut, when it’s been cooked with sausages isn’t very appetizing looking anyway,” I said. “But it still tastes good.”

“But being purple isn’t going to make it any better looking,” he stated and went back to making shreds of cabbage fall like snow into the deep bowl with the cutter.

Well, that’s why most folks don’t make kraut from red cabbage. Because who would want to eat purple kraut, and it’s not appetizing looking and there’s no reason in the world to make something like that.

Well, Grandpa was wrong.

Because I personally want to eat purple kraut, and it is perfectly well pretty AND it turns out to be really good for you, too.

Anthocyanins are the chemical compounds in plants that give them a blue, purple, pink or red hue. These are what give red cabbage their lovely red-violet tint, and many scientists are discovering possible health benefits for those of us who eat (or drink in the form of grape juice or especially red wine) our anthocyanins on a daily basis.

It turns out that anthocyanins are anti-oxidants, and they have properties that lower the risk of heart attack or stroke, and some of them have been found to help prevent or slow tumor growth.

Sign me up for some of that! (Note that many anthocyanin compounds are driven off or destroyed by heat, so many of these vegetables and fruits are best eaten uncooked or maybe just fermented, since acids preserve anthocyanins.)

And plus–I don’t care what Grandpa said–purple kraut is pretty and looks plenty appetizing to me–you can see for yourself in the photograph above. Seems so silly for him to say that since he loved pickled beets, but I digress.

I made this small batch of kraut with both white and red cabbage…two small heads of red and three small ones of white.

And since there was so little cabbage, I didn’t bother with the evil looking kraut cutter which resides safely high up on top of a kitchen cabinet, looking just as scary as it ever did.

Instead, I shredded it with a knife, by hand. I just cored and cut the heads in half through the stem end to the top, and then laid the half heads flat on the cutting board and then carefully sliced them into dime-thin slices. It’s easy and once you get into the rhythm, it isn’t too bad at all. In fact, it’s pretty darned good.

And it’s certainly safer than getting near Madame Guillotine, which is what I call the Grandpa’s cutter.

Since I’m the only one who eats kraut in the house now, and I was experimenting with using Caldwell’s Vegetable Fermentation Starter, I decided to not bother with dragging a crock out of the basement. I just used a glass jar with a locking gasket and lid. This wasn’t ideal, because the jar had a neck on it that is narrower at the top, just enough to make it difficult to weigh the cabbage down once it was put under the brine in the jar. I may end up finding a smaller crock and just using that.

Weighing the cabbage down once it’s in the jar is imperative, really. It keeps the kraut away from the air–air exposure is what allows molds to grow on the surface of the kraut–which, while it isn’t dangerous–can give a weird off-taste to the finished ferment. (You just scrape it off the top and toss it and eat the rest of the kraut.)

Also, kraut ferments faster in warmer weather. (That should elicit a big “duh” from the audience, but alas, it’s been a long time since I played with kraut. Though kimchi isn’t all that different and I just made a nice batch of that.)

AND, did I mention I was playing with a commercially available culture?

Yeah, I did, didn’t I?

And how did that turn out for me?

I’m still on the fence about it. I let the cabbage ferment for seven days, with the lid closed on it, but not sealed so there was still plenty of air circulation. There was no mold growing on the kraut, and there were little fermentation bubblings and fizzings here and there, but when I tasted it, it tasted saltier than I thought it should. It has a nice cabbagy flavor, but it doesn’t seem fermented enough to me.

I followed the directions on the package to the letter–and it included the use of a brine, which I had never done with kraut–instead we beat the hell out of the cabbage to make it release it’s own juices–and the flavor is okay, but saltier than I would like and not nearly as sour as I would want.

Hrm.

So, it’s back to the drawing board for me and my purple sauerkraut.

Next batch is going to be made old-school–the way Grandma did it, and if it works out, I’ll give the recipe.

Then, I’ll try this starter business once again and see if maybe this first batch was a fluke and I can get really tasty fermented cabbage from the little green box.

What’s next in my fermentation fun?

Stay tuned for cultured butter–coming soon from a kitchen near you.

‘Cause I been doin’ a lotta jammin,’ and I wanna jam it wid you.

Last year, I only made strawberry jam, and I THOUGHT I made enough for last at least part way through the winter, with something like 12 half pints, but I was so wrong. WRONG because Zak liked it so much that he invented reasons to eat it. Totally unnecessary peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on good bakery bread with good peanut butter were made and consumed just so he could eat more of that strawberry jam.

This year, I made twenty-one half pints of it and then froze a bunch of berries to make more when that ran out. I made strawberry jam back in May, and guess what? I already have to break out some frozen berries to make up another big old batch.

But that’s not the jam I made today.

Oh, no, chile.

Strawberry jam is good, but what I made today is like heaven in a jar.

Because Kat, Zak and I went out to our friend, Rick Vest’s farm and picked blackberries from bushes that were burdened with heavy fruit. And to me, there is nothing better than homemade blackberry jam. Nothing. It’s SO good. So tangy-sweet, sticky and the color–red-violet–is just eye-popping.

And, if you leave the seeds in, which I always do, blackberry jam is simplicity itself to make.

Why do I leave the seeds in?

Well, I figure when I eat blackberries, I’m eating the seeds so why should I object to the seeds being in the jam? I mean, really. Plus, I’ve found that if you try and remove the seeds, you lose a lot of the fruit pulp, too, and I refuse to waste something that I spent hours in the hot sun picking in the company of bees, wasps, mosquitoes and a child complaining of heat and thirst.

So, when you eat my blackberry jam, you’re eating it with the seeds. And if I use it in any of my baking, you get the seeds. If you don’t like the seeds consult with a less lazy blogger to find out how to remove the wee buggers without ending up needing to pick a thousand pounds of berries for a few pints of jam. I’m just not your girl for that process.

And while you’re looking stuff up, find out how to clean and treat your jars, lids and rings for safe canning by looking at the USDA National Center for Home Food Preservation’s website. They have all the information you need to know to can safely. They will of course, also try and scare you to death about canning, but the fact is, lots of us have canned for years and never killed anyone yet, so just follow their directions to prepare your half-pint canning jars, new lids and rings for this recipe and you will not go wrong.

For this recipe, I cleaned and sterilized 18 half pint jars, lids and rings, but ended up only using 17 of them. You might end up with 18. It could happen–you never know.

AND now, let’s talk about pectin.

Pectin is a surprisingly sore subject with lots of folks who make jams, jellies, preserves and marmalade out there in the food blogging world, because apparently there is a contingent of “preservistas” who think you just suck the big wang if you use any kind of pectin to get your jams to gel and will get all huffy and be like, holier than thou about it.

I say “horse-hockey.” If you want to use pectin, use pectin. If you don’t, don’t. But I will tell you what–my Grandma made literally gallons of the clearest, most delicious wild blackberry jelly in the world–we’d literally pick the tiny seedy things in five gallon buckets so she could extract enough juice–and she used pectin.

If it was good enough for Grandma, then it’s good enough for me.

Look, pectin isn’t evil. It isn’t artificial, and the use of it doesn’t denote that you’re a bad jammer. It’s nothing more than a substance that exists in fruits in their natural state, that when placed in the presence of sugar and heat, causes your liquidy fruit juice to turn into a nice, thick gel. That’s all. It’s not extracted from a cow’s stomach or made out of plastic. It’s fine and dandy, and I use it, and you can, too.

That all said, I tried out a new to me pectin today and am a convert to what I see is the pectin of choice for all the food blogging world. That would be Pomona’s Universal Pectin, and instead of relying upon sugar to make it do it’s job and make a gel, it utilizes calcium.

Now, before you start frothing at the mouth about the calcium, remember, you need it for strong bones and teeth, so hush and listen. Pomona’s is made from citrus peels–again–nothing bad there–and it has two packets in each box. One contains the powdered pectin and the other has the calcium powder. You can tell them apart because the calcium is in the tiny packet.

Before you start jammin,’ though, you need to make calcium water, and Pomona’s has directions on how to do it right in the box. You just mix 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder with 1/2 cup of water in a small clean jar with a lid. You use the directed amount for your recipe and the rest you can keep sealed up in your fridge for the next time you haul off and preserve some fruit for winter.

After you do that, you can start jammin’ with impunity. All you do to make cooked low-sugar jam (AH HA! Now you know why I like Pomona’s Universal Pectin. I can make low-sugar jams that taste great and gel exactly the way I want them to!) is mix the mashed up fruit with the directed amount of calcium water and lemon juice if you need it to balance the flavors, and bring that mixture to a boil. Meanwhile, you measure out your sugar, stir the pectin in completely, and when the fruit boils, you stir in the sugar, and keep stirring for about two minutes while the lovely scented fruit mixture bubbles happily away. This makes certain you dissolve the pectin thoroughly into the fruit and juice. You bring it back to a boil, then remove it completely from the heat and pack your jars. Then you use your hot water bath canner and process it in boiling water for ten minutes, then take the jars out and sit them on a towel to cool off and seal properly. And voila! Jam.

It really is easy.

And it gels up much better than the regular grocery store brands of pectin that I’ve used for years. It’s more reliable, from what I can tell.

So, finally, we get to the recipe for the jam pictured above. It’s very simple, it uses Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which you can get at local natural food stores, Whole Foods or online.

Once again, if you want to remove the seeds, keep in mind you will have to have picked more berries. For my recipe, I got 2 mashed cups of fruit from each quart of whole berries–if you remove the seeds, it will be a much smaller ratio of fruit. Think about that while you are picking or buying berries.

Summer Blackberry Jam
Ingredients:

10 cups fresh blackberries, washed, picked over and mashed
5 teaspoons calcium water
5 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons butter
5 cups sugar
6 teaspoons Pomona Universal Pectin
1 1/2 tablespoons Cortas rosewater

Method:

Put the fruit, calcium water, and lemon juice into a heavy-bottomed pot on a medium low fire and bring to a boil.

While the fruit is heating, stir together the sugar and pectin quite thoroughly. After the fruit mixture boils, add the butter and sugar/pectin mixture all at once and stir the still bubbling fruit for at least two minutes to ensure that the pectin and sugar dissolve thoroughly.

Bring back to the boil and after it boils, stir in the rosewater thoroughly, then remove from the heat and ladle the hot jam into jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headpace. Fit a flat lid and then add the screw lid, making the ring tight.

Process in a hot water bath for ten minutes under fiercely boiling water. Remove from canner, set on a folded towel on the countertop, and leave undisturbed for twelve hours.

As mentioned before, have 18 half pint jars ready. I only needed 17, but I had quite a few scrapings and tastings before I packed the jars, so I might have had enough before Kat, Zak and I started taste testing it.

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.

I’m very familiar with this way of cooking because that’s what I used to do for other people back in the day when I was a personal chef in Maryland. I used to get up in the morning, go grocery shopping for one of my client families, go to their house with my box of equipment and car full of food, and then cook up enough entrees and side dishes that were freezer friendly for a week’s worth of meals. Then, I’d freeze the meals in containers, clean the kitchen get paid and go home.

It’s not a bad way to do things, but for people who work and are loathe to give up a weekend afternoon–and frankly, I don’t blame you one bit for wanting a weekend afternoon that is NOT spent in the kitchen–it just sounds like too much work. And that’s because it IS work.

I just wanted to let you know that there’s an easier way to go about this, and while it works more gradually, it still works. This “slacker method” of cooking ahead has saved me on many a night when I was either too damned tired to cook anything or too damned busy to remember that I had to cook dinner until it was, oh, a half an hour before dinner time.

All you have to do is this: on a night when you are cooking something that goes nicely in the freezer, cook at least twice the amount you need. Then, when the food is done, you put it in a container or wrap it up and put it in the freezer.

Most foods that go well in a freezer don’t really take any longer if you double or even triple the recipe. Mind you, when I first started using my “slacker method,” I didn’t even do it on purpose: (that’s how you can tell its the “slacker method–” I came upon it by accident!) I wasn’t doubling or tripling my recipes–I was having trouble transitioning from cooking in quantity as a chef at work to cooking for two adults and one toddler at home. So, I accidentally cooked too much and had a buttload of leftovers that I had to do something with.

Rather than eat the leftovers for a week, I started packaging them up and putting them in the freezer to be used the next time I came home from work in time to cook dinner but without an ounce of will or gumption to stand in front of a stove again. On those nights, I could open up my freezer door, find a container marked, “taco filling,” defrost it in the microwave, heat up some taco shells and shred some cheese and cut up lettuce and cilantro, and BOOM! Like magic, a home cooked, nutritious meal seemingly out of thin air, put on the table faster than you can say, Rachael Ray. (With nary an utterance of EVOO in sight or hearing range.)

I’ve since refined my slacker method of cooking ahead. I actually keep freezer bags, reusable plastic (BPA-free, of course) containers, and a Sharpie marker in my kitchen so I don’t have to go hunting around frantically when it’s time to package stuff. (In my early days of cooking this way, I neglected to label some containers thinking, “Oh, I can tell chili from taco filling!” only to find that when I’m tired, headachy and hungry, no, I can’t.) I also buy extra ingredients on purpose and everything.

Dishes that are good for this method include chili, beans, lentils, stews, curries, mashed potatoes, nearly any kind of pasta sauces including marinara, puttanesca, pesto, and bolognaise, meatloaf, soups, rice dishes like jambalaya and pilaf, and casseroles like lasagne, squash (or any vegetable, now that I think on it) gratin, and arroz gratinado.

Lasagne is a great example of the slacker principle at work. It’s already a pain the butt to make and it takes a while. I have found over years of extensive experimentation (that’s a fancy way of saying, trial and error) that it takes no longer to layer noodles, fillings, sauces and cheeses into three casserole pans as it does for one. The prep is also not much more onerous for three pans as it is for one–the prep time doesn’t triple, or even double, but rather takes half again as much time as it would normally. (And for lasagne, I have found that shortcuts like using pre-shredded cheeses–which is not going to kill you–really cut the prep time down considerably.)

That’s a lot of different types of dishes. And truly, most of these dishes, if you double or even triple your recipe, you aren’t doubling or tripling your cooking or even your prep time. In my experience, it doesn’t take twice as long to make a six servings of puttanesca as it does to make three. Nine servings takes maybe five minutes of prep time longer for the same recipe. Pesto–if you make it in your food processor, only takes more time to pick off more leaves from your basil, but really–how long does it take to pick leaves off of basil in the first place?

Yeah. Not that long.

The beauty of this slacker method of cooking ahead is that if you cook five times a week normally, and you double the amounts you are cooking, you have put away meals for five days in the same time as it takes to cook dinner for those five nights anyway, with maybe 15 extra minutes added on.

And personally, I think it’s a heck of a lot less intimidating to spend an extra fifteen minutes five times a week for a total of one hour and fifteen minutes of extra labor, than it is to spend a whole a afternoon–two to four hours say–cooking all day on a weekend when you could be spending time with your friends and family doing something fun. The end result is the same–you fill your freezer over the course of five days with five more days worth of dinners. Do that a couple of weeks in a row and you have built up a stock of really varied, healthy, home-cooked meals for you and your family to enjoy on evenings when time is of the essence, or when everyone is just too damned hot/tired/cranky/or otherwise poopy to even think of cooking from scratch.

Yes, I’m ignoring the fact that for some of us, spending two to four hours cooking on a weekend afternoon is fun, because I’m not writing for us–I’m writing for everyone else. Or rather, I’m writing for the folks who do think its fun, but have other things to do on the weekends than cook all afternoon. And, I’m writing for the folks who are really intimidated by cooking five or six different dishes and packing them up for the freezer in the span of an afternoon. Let’s face it, that’s lots of prep, cooking and clean-up, and if you aren’t a professional, like me, or someone who just cooks a lot habitually, that kind of cooking marathon can seem like endless, purgatorial and just plain old no damned fun.

In conclusion, I want you to try my slacker method. It’s perfect remedy for busy folks who want good, nutritious, home cooked food, but who just have days when they can’t pick up the knife and saute pan.

As for recipes that work really well for cooking ahead–try these from my archives–I’ve used them for slacker freezer stockpiling exercises for years, and they never fail to taste good.

Taco Filling
Mangalore Chicken Curry
Mixed Greens and Mushroom Dal
Chana Bhatura (you can freeze the bhatura dough before cooking it, then thaw it out and fry it)
Shepherd’s Pie
Jamaican Beans and Rice
Arroz Gratinado
Braised Rabbit With Marsala Wine and Wild Mushrooms

There are plenty more applicable recipes here at Tigers & Strawberries–I just gave you a few to start out with.

Have fun cooking and filling your freezer like a slacker all week, and then enjoy doing nothing this weekend! It’s a good thing.

Slacker Notes:So, uh, when I wrote this post, I was such a slacker, I didn’t really give as much specific information as perhaps I could or should have, so some readers asked a few great questions down in the comments section. I decided that the information was so pertinent, that I should just put it up here in an addendum to the original post just so folks who aren’t in the habit of reading the comments to a blog post get the benefits of it, too.

Casserole Specifics

Okay, for lasagne or other casseroles–a reader asked if I cook it first and then freeze it, or I assemble it and then freeze it uncooked.

The answer is: I’ve done both and they both work pretty well.

And there are several ways to go about it. You can just make your regular one big pan of lasagne, (one that normally serves six people, say, and its only you and a significant other eating) and bake it as normal and then after dinner, cut the remaining lasagne into one or two portion bits and pack them up in containers, and then you can either thaw them in the fridge or microwave them from frozen. Works just fine. I’ve done it with lasagne, arroz gratinado, macaroni and cheese and shepherd’s pie, and none of them have suffered a bit for it.

Or, you can assemble one or two extra whole casseroles in freezer to oven dishes, and freeze then uncooked. To cook them, preheat your oven to about 25 degrees lower than your usual cooking temperature for that particular casserole, and bake it for about 50 percent longer than you usually would. In order to brown the top of your previously frozen casserole, in the last fifteen minutes of baking, turn the heat up on the oven to the regular temperature and that should give you a nice crusty brown, bubbly top.

I’ve frozen moussaka, pastitsio and lasagne this way and baked them both thawed and frozen and they all come out of the oven smelling and tasting divine.

Now, this isn’t very slackeriffic, because it involves prior planning, but if you just know that tomorrow is going to suck big-time at work and you are going to come home hungry, cranky and just plain not in a mood for cooking, you can take one of these uncooked casseroles out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge until you get home from work the next evening. Then, you preheat your oven all the way to its usual temperature and bake it as usual, just adding an extra five to ten minutes to the time it spends in the oven.

See–isn’t that simple?

Thawing Out And Reheating Liquids

I didn’t even think about telling everyone how I thaw out liquidy dishes like soups, stews, curries and sauces that freeze into a coherent block of ice until Kim, down below, asked me how to go about it. She’s right–beans and rice or taco filling or jambalaya–stuff that is relatively dry is simple to heat up from frozen in the microwave. But those troublesome liquidy dishes are a pain in the butt, and while yes, you CAN put them in the fridge to thaw overnight and during the day while you’re at work, planning ahead just isn’t a slacker-approved activity.

So, how do you get say, marinara sauce and meatballs that has frozen into a scarlet cube of tomato sorbet to thaw and heat up quickly?

This is going to sound bass akwards, but the way I do it is I use the defrost function on my microwave to get the frozen liquid to mostly return to a fluid state, and then I plop it all into a saucepan and finish heating it up to a boil on the stove.

My microwave has a defrost function that sets the time and temperature for thawing a frozen item based on its weight. A true slacker like me guestimates the weight, but if you have a baker’s scale you can tell your microwave the exact (or rounded up) weight of the marinara and meatballs. (In fact, if you are only partially a slacker, and are thus somewhat organized, you could write the weight of the item on the label when you pack it up for the freezer in the first place, so you don’t have to play guessing games or find your scale after work.)

Anyway, use the defrost function on your microwave and when you’ve got your stuff mostly thawed out, with maybe a little bit of ice in the center of the container, just sploosh the contents of said container into a saucepan, turn the heat on high and stir like mad, chipping away at that ice until it breaks apart and melts into the rapidly boiling liquid that surrounds it. Then, you just stir and cook until everything is heated through to serving temperature.

And then, dinner is served!

Tips from Readers:

So, as is usual, I got some nice ideas from readers. Just for the folks who don’t read comments, here’s some ideas that didn’t come from my slacker self, but instead are from the myriad of good, clever cooks who read this blog:

From Jenny V: One thing that can work if you’re cooking an entire extra casserole or lasagne is to line the baking pan with foil before filling it with the food. Then, after it is frozen solid, you can remove the pan from the freezer, leaving the foil-wrapped food behind in the cold, and add it back to your cabinets to use for other meals in the meantime. When you want to eat the leftovers, just pop the pre-formed foil container into the baking dish again and bake.