Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/16/culturing-butter-at-home-to-en.html
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Oh man I hate you! I am irresistibly drawn to your coeliac torture porn…
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Dammit, @jlw. Because of you I’ve grown a sourdough starter using our airborne Bay Area critters and have been forcing my family to eat my sourdough bread experiments. The first one was a bit, uh, dense (still tasty, though!), but it turns out that was because of user error on my part. Subsequent loaves were better and should be even better now that I ran out and bought a food scale.
Now I’m going to have to look into this butter thing…
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Nice!, I love making homemade pizza at my home once in a while. I use Martha Stewarts recipe for dough, then I let it rise for 2-24 hours. If I let it rise for 24-hours I cover it and put it into the fridge for later.
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@jlw You better watch out, or I’m going to pinch one of your loaves.
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I’ve done this a few times. It’s a fun and interesting thing to do a few times.
But it costs significantly more, and the results aren’t as good as just buying cultured butter.
One thing I picked up is that the cultures used for yogurt and cultured butter milk are not the same as those used to culture butter. Ideally you want to culture it with something creme fraiche as it tends to use the other set of cultures that are more butter appropriate. But that tends to send the price even higher.
So fun, and you’ll learn a bit about butter and fermented dairy, but it’s not something worth doing on the regular.
Caputo is great for more traditional neopolitan/wood fired and thin crackery crusts.
For NY style pizza the baker/pizzaiolo I used to work for uses gold medal all trumps, said the full strength brand can work too. Both are close to standard high gluten commercial baking flours in the US. And are near as I can tell wholesale only, like the Caputo used to be.
Heckers and King Arthur’s commercial flours seem well liked as well. KA is agressive about selling it’s specialty and commercial flours retail. The others might take a bit of looking or require you to buy a 50lb sack. Again like it used to go with Caputo before it caught on.
I know that around 1 1/2 cups of water works with around 3 1/2 cups of flour. Reserving 1/4 cup of flour or water will probably be enough to let you fiddle. You can also just add a bit more flour or water. It will not hurt anything.
You will get more consistent results if you weigh your ingredients. Volume measurements for powders is notoriously finicky, and it’s easier to scale your recipe up and down with a scale.
For instance my usual bread is 700g AP flour, 270g whole wheat, 30g gluten flour (to mimic bread flour), to 850g water. It’s quite high hydration but I like it that way.
FAR less fiddly and “feel right”-y, which is mostly a product of using volume measurements. It removes a lot of the subjectivity of it.
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Your loaves look under-fermented. Give them more time…
And look into overnight autolyse. It’ll make all he difference for whole wheat fresh milled flours.
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You’re making my loaf of Wonder Bread look pretty bleak about now.
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Homemade butter! Awesome!
I usually toss a tablespoon of diastatic malt into my dough mixes - (used to buy it online but now I make my own) - and the yeast loves that stuff. Fresh made butter is amazingly rich in flavour. All of this stuff takes more labour (and usually cash) than any sort of store-bought stuff but that’s not really the point is it? Come the zombie apocalypse we’ll be able to have healthy and delicious snacks between severing the heads of the undead. It’s good to have a plan.
I noticed that you put the flour in as cups - I would highly recommend making bread by weighing the ingredients in grams and using that measurement every time.
Homemade butter is awesome, but I’ve only done “churned” butter in the food processor.
^^^^^^^^^
Baking does not require all the finicky stress people claim it does. I use cup measures, I eyeball amounts, my pinch is not your pinch, etc. People have been baking bread, brewing beer, etc for thousands of years – I’m not gonna break anything.
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