Name: To Make Salt Butter Fresh
Ingredients: 4 pounds salt butter; 4 quarts new milk; a small portion of annatto (arnotto); coarse sea salt (to taste)

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

4 pounds salt butter
4 quarts new milk
a small portion of annatto (arnotto)
coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Make the butter

Put the salt butter into a churn.
Add the new milk and annatto.
Churn together for about an hour.

Finish the butter

Remove the butter and wash it in water.
Add the customary quantity of salt.

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.

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 rich flavor that the finished butter is built on.
New milk: Supplies water and milk solids; churning separates its fat into the butter.
Annatto: Adds a yellow-orange color to the butter.

“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.