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To Make Salt Butter Fresh

A butter made by churning fresh milk with salt butter and annatto, then washing and salting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Make Salt Butter Fresh

Ingredients

Directions

Make the butter

  1. Place 4 pounds of salt butter in a churn with 4 quarts of fresh milk and a little annatto.

  2. Churn the mixture together for about 1 hour.

  3. Remove the butter and wash it in water.

Finish

  1. Add the customary amount of coarse sea salt to taste.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Salt butter
Provides the fat base and most of the rich flavor of the finished butter.
Fresh milk
Supplies water and milk solids that churn together with the butter fat.
Annatto
Adds a yellow color to the butter.

The step that matters

Churn the mixture together for about 1 hour. Churning agitates the cream until fat globules clump together and separate from the liquid. Stopping too early leaves the butter soft and unformed, while churning too long can make it grainy or greasy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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