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makin butter
I was looking for fun places to eat on one of my favorite websites, Chowhound.com, and I had never noticed how well built and jam packed that site is. Lots and lots of fun cooking tips in video form. Everything from the “no duh” to the “no way”. One of them was a really basic but totally amazing thing… making butter from heavy whipping cream.
Now some people who grew up on ‘the farm’ or just had some cool teacher along the way have done this before, but lots of people like me have heard that this is possible, but have never done this. Well, I am here to tell you kids that it is possible. All you need is some room temp heavy whipping cream, a good size jar with a tight fitting lid, some elbow grease, and 30 minutes of your precious time, and you’ve got yourself a big wad of unsalted creamy butter!
10 minutes into shaking
10 minutes in it’s basically unsweetened whipcream.
after 30+ minutes of shaking
and after 30 or so minutes… BUTTER!
and a bonus…
buttermilk
Buttermilk!
Churning physically agitates the cream until it ruptures the fragile membranes surrounding the milk fat. Once broken, the fat droplets can join with each other and form clumps of fat, or butter grains.
As churning continues, larger clusters of fat collect until they begin to form a network with the air bubbles that are generated by the churning; this traps the liquid and produces a foam. As the fat clumps increase in size, there are also fewer to enclose the air cells. So the bubbles pop, run together, and the foam begins to leak. (per the wikipedia “butter churning” entry)
Basically what happens is you shake the cream so hard, it separates into the fatty stuff and the milky stuff, butter(fat) and butter milk (the rest). SO COOL.
Make some butter today!
Today is Thu Tran’s Birthday!!!!! Happy Birthday Thu!
Last night to celebrate Thu’s birthday we went to Fette Sau and ate our body weight in meat. After that we rolled over to Santos Party House to catch SHONEN KNIFE!! Here is a video I took on my phone [it's totally crappy].
Miho Hatori [from Cibo Matto and Gorillaz] and her new band opened up. They are called NEW OPTIMISM and the one and only Bad Brilliance got up onstage and danced with Miho and her hot male revue. Check it out!
Here is the cutest video from Shonen Knife’s new album, Super Group! Have a good birthday THU!
This is Antonio Velotta, and he is so funny and amazing. He is a very talented hair artist who cuts my hair and the hair of many many others.
He recently celebrated his 30th birthday at the McDonald’s at Time Square.
When he was 14 years old back in the nineties, he made these really wild videos with his little sister Cristina. Recently, I offered to edit them down for him for youtube. Here are a few:::
This last one is Antonio pretending to be Lorena Bobbitt. NSFW!! Play at your own risk!!
So online I stumbled upon Dr. Carl Winter’s website Food Safety Music. This guy is great! Essentially he does food safety themed covers a-la Weird Al.
The Elvis of Ecoli
With songs like “Who Left The Food Out”, “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters”, and my personal favorite ” I Will Survive”, where he basically breaks up with salmonella, this guy is a real class act.
Hey guys! Who wants to know what kind of food I’ve been eating? Well I don’t know, it’s the usual crap. BUT soon I WILL be eating the plentiful product of today’s pickling party with Peter van Hyning. Today we made dilly beans, pickled carrots, pickled garlic, and pickles. Justin Stewart was here too.
How today went, first I slept in and then Peter and Justin went to the store to buy the vegetables, garlic, and cans for pickling. In addition to finding the necessary pickling parts, they met a beautiful and enchanting pickling goddess. So lucky they were to bump into her before she left the city this very night to pickle and can at an enchanted and beautiful farm upstate. Justin got her number. She knows everything about pickling and canning and had some great recommendations for them about pickling today. I personally don’t know what those recommendations are, I’ve heard only of her beauty, not of her practical pickling knowledge.
Anyways, in the meantime I went to buy dill flowers at the farmers market and I filled out a survey on sexual assault in Williamsburg in exchange for a hotdog (a ho hum hotdog). I also got a shit ton of vinegar. Peter and I then went to a Polish deli to get some pickling spices. As far as i can tell the Polish pickling secret recipe is mustard seed, coriander, bay leaves, whole nutmegs, and crushed cinnamon sticks. We also tossed in the dill flowers, a clove of garlic, and some crushed red pepper. Right around this time Justin Stewart left. To contemplate the beauty of the picking goddess in the privacy of his own home, I assume. I had a lunch of canned fish and Peter ate cheese and crackers.
So when you pickle you have to boil everything except the food and spices. You boil the cans and the lids. You boil the water and the salt. You boil everything after it’s sealed. But never the vegetables or seasonings. It’s totally wild. It’s like opposite cooking. Another opposite thing we did was like Peter was talking out of his ass. How very BACKWARDS! fun! For dinner we made a tuna noodle casserole and Peter spent my money on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. Soon we’ll watch The Fireman’s Ball. I think it’s funny that the porno version would be The Fireman’s Balls.
(I’d also like to add that this was actually LAST week’s activity but I was missing my camera cord and we just can’t post a blog without a visual hm? What I’m getting at is that those pickles are f*cking delicious. So flavorful. Now for the pictures…)
