Cultured Butters: A Comparison

Recently, we did a post on how to make your own cultured butters. You can skip the culturing step, of course, by why? That post used the crème fraîche culture, but you can use any of them.

Once I’d undergone my massive, 5 pound process with the CF, I thought it might be fun to do all of the soured creams we offer for a taste comparison! This was… well, it was a lot of butter. I won’t need butter for at least a year, I’m guessing, after all of this.

You may, if you wish, also use mesophilic yogurt cultures or milk kefir for this. It’s really up to you how you culture your butter. I may at some point do some comparisons of those, but if I do it will be when I’m nearly out of all the butter that went into writing this one.

Crème Fraîche

As you know, we’ve made the most of this one. 8 pounds total, with 3 pounds being done during our comparisons. So much! Not really sure why I didn’t just use the original 5 for the basis of this culture’s comparison.

The CF produces a lovely sweet butter. Child Tester asked me why I didn’t salt this butter, and was surprised when I said I’d actually oversalted it. I used French grey salt to match the culture.

This is my personal favorite.

This batch ran into trouble, in effect because it accidentally was worked without first being washed. It had a horrifically broken grain, and Ross and I finally had enough of dealing with it and decided to salt it. Ross decided to give it a whirl in the mixer thereafter to see what happened, and it released all its water and impurities and unbroke itself! This butter was just as delicious as the first, bigger batch.

I didn’t know that was even a thing, but apparently if you have butter you’ve done bad things to, try salting and re-churning it. May work in your situation, may not.

This is the CF butter. All of my cream is coming from Aldi, and their cream is produced by grain-fed cows. You can tell because the butter is white instead of yellow. Grass-fed cows generally produce yellow butter, and grain-fed cows generally produce white.

Mexican Crema

We can all thank Ross for asking me, “is something wrong with this butter? It smells like yogurt.” I had forgotten that the Mexican sour cream smells like yogurt! It does not taste like yogurt, though. I got the tub from the freezer so he could smell that they’re the same. We’re all thanking him for this question because I wouldn’t have thought to mention it to y’all. If it smells like yogurt, nothing is wrong with the culture.

I really like this one. It’s got some tang and a bit of funk to it, which can be really nice in a butter. Despite that, still a prominent sweetness. This became my least favorite when I spread some on a croissant. Turns out that croissants don’t appreciate funk. I didn’t know that, but I toggled over to using this for cooking instead of spreading on breads and I returned to loving it. In particular, this is amazing in risotto.

Child Tester made a weird face when she tried it. I asked if she doesn’t like it, and she said, “no. It’s good! It just doesn’t taste like… butter.” I asked if it tastes like yogurt, and she said, “yeah, like yogurt butter!!!!” So I guess we can thank both of them for noting this big difference? She also said she likes it a lot. Ross said this is an excellent butter but that he isn’t choosing favorites because they all have their own spaces where they’re better than the others.

This butter got Colima salt, so that’s match match like the French.

Ross basically did all of the heavy lifting on this Mexican butter, but which I mean he both washed and worked this butter. I had just cut, but not yet removed from the mold or wrapped it.

Swedish Sweet Cream

The Swedish sweet cream was a fun one, as well. For this, I didn’t have any Nordic salts of any kind, let alone Swedish specifically. I do, however, have a lovely Balinese salt that I almost never use but like a lot. That’s what went in. Those of you who like to be aware that your butter is salted will want to go heavy on this one. I used a heaping half teaspoon, I believe, for these 2 pounds and it still wasn’t enough. Holly Stockley of Brambleberry Meadow says she needed 3/8 teaspoon of kosher salt and also found that the butter was very sweet. Regarding croissants, this is the cultured butter to make your strawberry butters with! I just add plain butter to mine, but many people I know love fruit butters with croissants. You could cut back on the honey recommended in the recipe, given the sweetness of the butter itself.

Fun, but irrelevant fact: the only reason we still offer this culture is because when we discontinued it, y’all lost your minds enough to change our mind! This is a great culture, so well done!!

Back to the ranch, we did 2 pounds of this one. To be honest, we’re all tired of butter-making at this point. As a result, we decided to do the original butter extraction in the stand mixer per what’s largely been going on here, and to wash the butter in the mixer. Washing is waaaaaaaaaay faster this way. So that’s another tip if you’re using a stand mixer to make butter.

We used the buttermilk from this batch for pizza dough. This is because I had nearly half the buttermilk from the CF and Mexican left in the freezer and didn’t want to add to it. That worked out really well.

Tip: don’t be like me. Have a plan for your buttermilk so it doesn’t fill your freezer!

These are the two pounds of Swedish. I hadn’t cut and wrapped them yet. In fact, I’d lost them in the fridge until I realized I didn’t take a picture of these for y’all., at which point they were found in the fridge after searching through both freezers unsuccessfully. They all basically look the same to me, but nevertheless.

Sour Cream

Our regular American sour cream culture had one pound done with it. By this time, beyond just being over it, I also was extremely aware of how outrageous the amount of butter in my house now is. Ditto buttermilk. So one pound only for each of the two American sour creams! This, and the mild sour cream below, both got a beautiful, pale pink salt from Kauai that my friend Sachie gave me when she got back from visiting family in Hawaii. Still not sure why I like to try to match supplementary ingredients to the culture I’m using, but here we are anyway!

This tastes like standard, cultured, grocery store butter. Child Tester said she did not care for this one, because although it had a bit of tang as well as a bit of sweetness, overall it was bland compared to the others. I agree with her, but I also see this a positive trait because it’s a lot more versatile across a multitude of possible uses. Ross seemed pleased with this batch but still wasn’t calling a favorite.

As you can see, I didn’t even wash the regular sour cream butter before I took the pic. That’s because I knew I was going to forget, due to the ridiculous number of tasks I decided to do at one time.

Mild Sour Cream

The mild sour cream also had one pound only done in it. These two American style soured creams were the end of this comparison journey, and I’ve got well over 20 pounds of butter in my freezer at this point. The madness had to stop!

CT felt this one was too yogurt-y and not sour enough for her. That said, she also found this one less bland than the regular sour cream. Ross continued along his path of refusing to pick a favorite, but said this one was “okay,” and I liked this one, despite it not being my favorite.

The mild! I forgot, as you can see, to take a picture before this was ready to go in the freezer, so this picture was the best I could do.