Small lot · Spring cream
Cultured Sheep's-Milk Butter
Cream separated from the morning milk, cultured eighteen hours, then churned cold and worked by hand. Pale rather than yellow, dense rather than airy, and high enough in fat that it browns in seconds.
- Milk
- Sheep 100%
- Culture
- 18 hours, mesophilic
- Fat
- 84% minimum
- Salt
- Unsalted · 1.2% salted
- Format
- 125 g roll, wax paper
- Lot
- Churn 06 · 40 kg
Taste
Clean lactic tang from the culture, then a long sweet-cream finish. Sheep's cream carries less carotene than cow's, so the colour is ivory even at the height of spring.
Keeping it
Refrigerate at 4 °C and use within three weeks, or freeze the roll whole for six months. Cultured butter picks up fridge odours fast — keep it wrapped.
Using it
Best raw on bread with a little salt. In the pan it browns quickly and smells of hazelnut; pull it a shade earlier than you would cow's butter.
Why there is so little of it
Sheep's milk is rich, but a flock our size gives a fraction of what a dairy herd does, and nearly all of it is committed to the feta barrels. Butter is made only from the cream that rises off spring and early summer milk, when volumes briefly run ahead of the make schedule.
In a good year that is six churns of forty kilos. It goes to the list first, then to the counters that already carry the feta, and it is usually gone by midsummer.