Bread and Butter

After searching for a year or more, we finally subscribed to an Ohio "herd share" in order to be able to have raw milk (thank you, Paula and Kim!).  We now own a small portion of the cows on Log Cabin Farm run by the Yoders in Apple Creek from whom we get milk, cream, and yogourt.

We mainly wanted the milk so that we could make cultured butter after reading about it in a NY Times article.  We left our first gallon of milk out on the counter overnight to let the cream rise to the top, then realized that the cream had already been skimmed off.  Oops.  Milk turned a little sour,  not so good for drinking but just fine for making bread, and it led us to discover a fantastic and ridiculously fast and easy soda bread recipe in our "Forgotten Skills" cookbook.

The following week we ordered a pint of cream.  It was unbelievably thick and luscious, so much so that when we made butter, there was absolutely no buttermilk and no kneading required.  It was delicious.

We ordered another pint this week but this cream was a little more liquidy (is that a word?).  We put it in the food processor and "churned" it for maybe 3 minutes.  Voila! a big lump of butter in a puddle of buttermilk.  We kneaded the butter to get all the milk out, which took about 10 minutes.

It was fun to do by hand but it's easy to see why butter paddles might be useful.  Unfortunately, we forgot to add salt so we had to knead it a second time.

In the end, we had a crusty but light-crumbed soda bread, about a pound of the best-tasting butter ever, and a small glass of buttermilk.  What a breakfast!

Next stop:  an antique store to find butter molds!  But note the pretty butter dish that we recently inherited from Dominique's mother.

Improvements:  a tad less salt.

Culinary disasters

Commencement weekend is generally going great, helped in large measure by some very nice guests.  But both Dom and I have had some big failures in the kitchen.

For whatever reason, Dom's quiche yesterday morning simply did not want to come out of the pan.  He's made how many quiches?  But even though it wasn't picture perfect, it was presentable and tasted great.

Mine, on the other hand, was a true disaster.  One of our guests didn't tolerate gluten, so I decided to try my hand at a quick bread made from brown rice flour and potato flour.  As usual, I forgot to read the directions all the way through, so although I mixed up the wet and dry ingredients separately the night before to save time, I didn't take into account the 10 minutes it had to sit before being taken out of the pan, much less the 30 minutes it needed to cool before cutting.  Plus it needed to bake 45 minutes or more.  The "or more" was the key.

The cooling part ending up not mattering very much, because in turning it out of the pan the bread fell completely apart.  Part of the problem was that it probably didn't bake long enough; part of it was that I didn't realize how fragile a bread without gluten actually is.  The upshot was that it stayed in the kitchen, and my attempt at being a super-host failed spectacularly.  Sigh.

To be fair, it tasted pretty good and I think I know how to do it better next time, starting with making it the night before.  We bought some strawberries at the farmer's market this morning and I think it will make a great shortcake.