Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter takes ’em to new heights

The big news around ZCoB parts right now is that the Roadhouse’s long-loved Buttermilk Biscuits, made from scratch every day, just got even better!

It’s been two years since we added the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter to the bread service at the Roadhouse. The commercial butter we’d been serving up until that point had been a relatively peripheral product for us. Now, the cultured butter has become a signature offering with glowing reviews. The Vermont Creamery Cultured butter is a game changer—I actually added a few paragraphs to the “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy” pamphlet in the final weeks of production just to highlight how good it is. We have had it on our counter at home regularly for many months now. I’m pretty confident that if you try it (be sure it’s at room temperature), you will be doing the same for your house as well!

Credit for the butter goes to Allison Hooper, longtime industry colleague and friend, who, along with her business partner Bob Reese, started Vermont Creamery back in 1984. Working in the small town of Websterville, the pair pushed from the beginning to make the kind of cheese and butter that Allison had experienced when she’d interned in France a few years earlier. I asked Allison for the back story on the butter:

The butter was developed early on, in the early ’90s. The story is that the farm that I worked on in Brittany had Jersey cows. They were separating cream, and they were selling butter and crème fraiche at the local market. It was so delicious!!! I wanted to make that butter here. Bob and I found a used churn outside a dairy barn and we bought it. We figured out how to use it, and we started making butter. I found this pretty famous French chef in New York, and I decided to take a chance and send him some butter. He called me back, and he was so excited. He said, “This is exactly what the great French chefs in New York are all looking for. It’s the butter of our childhood!” The chefs there loved it, and they really helped us get it off the ground. The chefs knew! They say we make the best butter in the country, and to this day, that’s what we’re known for.

The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is made with cream from nearby St. Albans Cooperative. Cream is cultured overnight and then churned into butter. All, and au natural! The butter is 86% butter fat. And like I said, you really can taste the difference! The American standard for butter is 80%. Even most fancy European butters are 82 or 83%. The Vermont Creamery Culture Butter is 86%. And it is so darned delicious!

The Roadhouse has been making its ever-popular Buttermilk Biscuits for decades now. As of last week, we began baking them with this spectacular butter. What has been really wonderful for many years is now noticeably better still. The aroma of the biscuit is amazing—bigger, beckoning you in to take a bite, or two or three. A small luxury to bring a little cultured, buttery, culinary joy to your day! They’re so good they’ve got me thinking I might well want to write a bit of poetry about them. After all, Carl Sandburg, the classic poet of my hometown of Chicago, once wrote, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” At the Roadhouse, you can gild the butter-rich biscuits by spreading more of the same cultured butter on top just before you eat them! Grab a biscuit (or two) when you drive through the Roadshow. And/or, buy a dozen in the morning to bring home for brunch!

Reserve a table

A super-simple spring pleasure to put on your table at home today

One of my favorite parts of spring eating is this amazingly simple and super delicious little “appetizer.” It’s a coming together of fresh vegetables and fresh bread, great butter, and a small sprinkle of sea salt, that wakes up taste buds and, as per what I wrote about in “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” conveys the beauty of what’s possible when we put together really great ingredients.

Radishes, right now, are really good around Ann Arbor! Pink and white, small and large, long and round, with their greens still attached or without, they’re hot, spicy, refreshing, lively, and lovely. When you eat a freshly dug, heirloom radish it can easily become the highlight of your meal. While supermarket ones tend towards tastelessness, really great local radishes are alive, crunchy, and spicy—sometimes so much so that they start to seriously clear your sinuses the way good Dijon mustard can do. Which makes complete botanical sense because, although few Americans are aware of radishes’ roots, they’re in the same spicy plant family as mustard and turnips.

An Easy Appetizer with Radishes

Radishes that are that good are excellent on their own. But they’re also amazing in this classic-in-France-but-barely-known-over-here combination of radishes, bread, butter, and sea salt. Because it’s so simple, you only want to do this with really great ingredients. (A supermarket version of it, to be honest, wouldn’t be worth the time it took to slice the radishes.) To put the dish together, start by cutting some thickish slices of the Bakehouse’s dark-crusted Country Miche (preferably from the large, 2-kilo loaf), True North, or Farm bread. Spread the bread with some good butter, like the Vermont Creamery cultured butter that wins raves pretty much every few minutes when folks eat it on the Bakehouse Artisan Bread appetizer. Slice your radishes. Lay them onto the buttered bread. Sprinkle on a good bit of the super delicate crystals of fleur de sel, then eat. That’s all you have to do.

You get the crunch and the spice of the radishes, offset by the light, lactic, lively creaminess of the cultured butter, set off against the dark, wheatiness of the Country Miche, all enhanced by the sporadic delicately crunchy high notes of the salt crystals. If you put them out on a nice plate or tray, everyone at the table can assemble the ingredients in their own way, which I’d argue, is part of the artistry of it all.

Want to make this a bit fancier? Slice the radishes partway through, stuff them with softened butter, and then dip the open end into the salt. That way folks can pick them up, pop them into their mouths, and enjoy the contrast of textures and flavors.

Buy some better butter

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Add this new arrival from Western Wisconsin to the already long list of delicious butters we’ve got at the Zingerman’s Deli. This one comes from the Alcam Creamery in the town of Richland Center about an hour northwest of Madison. The creamery was started in 1946 by Cameron Peckham and is run by his son Gary.  The butter is still all hand rolled and paper wrapped in the old style which means that, even before you taste it, it definitely looks appealingly old-school!

More importantly it tastes great.  It’s got a very big flavor, one of the biggest I’ve had in a butter.  The whey cream makes a big difference—because the whey is taken off after the cheese curd has been set, all of the cultures and flavor development from the cheese will be carried out in the whey as well.  when the whey solids are formed (through slow cooking of the whey) they have a whole lot of flavor.   Ultimately, this is butter so tasty you could probably eat it by the piece sans bread.  In fact, I find myself putting it on bread in much bigger quantities than I normally would.  Less of a spread, more of a slice—in a good way, this may be the cheesiest butter you’ve tried.

No need, I don’t think to tell you what you can do with it.  Anything you do with butter .  .. will be better with better butter.   So whether  it’s this wonderful offering from western Wisconsin or the Kerrygold butter from Ireland or the cultured butter from our friends at Vermont butter and cheese, the main this is to eat it! cook with it!  Bake with it!  Roast with it!  Whatever you do, better butter will be sure to taste better!