Of all the baking possible to do, cookies would be the easiest, and the fastest. Cookies consist of butter, flour, sugar, a bit of baking powder, plus stuff to make them taste different from each other like walnuts, chocolate chips, oatmeal, ginger, etc. They are so so simple. Ten minutes to mix them up, ten minutes to bake them. If you like cookies, geez, bake them yourselves. So much tastier than storebought and none of those chemicals and shit. Plus, butter. We latchkey children would make them for after school snacks.
Just for brags, I will say that the summer I was 17 I churned about 250 lbs of butter in a wooden churn, the tall kind with a plunger. Homestead butter is only made in summer, because grass butter is yellow and tastier than white winter hay butter, and then frozen in big bricks. I learned all about how to make butter, yep. Another skill I won’t be needing again.
I have gleaned from books that in abput the late 60s early 70s butter was very expensive so people turned to margarine. On The Great British Bake Off people have mentioned their recipes from grandma which used margarine instead of butter.
If this comes as a surprise to you, maybe check the ingredient labels in your cupboard or fridge. Food additives are really hard to avoid if you buy anything in a package. Even things like “Whole Chicken” often have flavorings added.
I buy very very few packaged foods compared to most people. I buy certified organic with few exceptions, most of those being local fresh produce, and I read labels . . . the cream caught me by surprise because organic milk and butter are just milk and butter, nothing else.
Maybe the one you buy, but not necessarily. Kirkland brand, for example, once included Refined Fish Oil in it’s organic milk (this seems to no longer be the case).
If you read the back of a carton of cream in the store, at least around here, in addition to “cream” you commonly find terms like monoglycerides, diglycerides, ploysorbate 80, and carrageenan. Which is fine (especially the carrageenan) if you’re intending to make a whipped cream topping out of it because all that stuff helps to make stiff, whipped peaks of whipped cream. Not so good for making butter. And in my local stores, that’s pretty much the only option - either “whipping cream” or half-n-half. Very difficult to impossible to find just cream.
Hmm, my supermarket sells light cream, heavy cream, and whipping cream. The whipping cream does have carrageenan, or other stabilizers. And I like that, because it allows me to make whipped cream that’s somewhat lighter than it is when I use heavy cream.
I assumed the heavy creams were just cream. But I was surprised to see that one of the three brands available at my local supermarket adds carrageenan to the heavy cream, too. The other two don’t, however.
I mostly DO use cream to make whipped cream, but if I ever decide to make butter, I will have to look carefully.
That stabilizer is basically a bit of seaweed. Most food additives are harmless and that one is too.
Costco Canada sells five pound boxes of name brand shortbread for just over twenty bucks Canuck. I figure each box uses 2.5 pounds of butter, so making it at home would cost something similar (but be better). This is half the price of many grocers.
I was going to say. I’ve made butter several times, but the only reason for me to do it is if I also culture it with some yogurt or buttermilk to make cultured butter. That said, it really doesn’t make much sense for me to do it given how much butter we use and how much cream costs when I get can a nice cultured President Brand or Vermont Creamery butter for like $3-$3.50 at the store (for 7 or 8 oz. I’m still kicking myself for not stocking up and freezing when the Vermont Creamery, 8 oz., was on sale for $2.50 each a couple months ago.)
It is kind of a fun thing to do when you have some idle time, or to show the kids how butter is made, but when a quart of cream is about $3-$4 and you make a pound of butter – you’re breaking even with the commercial non-cultured butters – Land O’ Lakes butter around here often goes for sale at $3/lb (like right now at the store I typically shop at.) and you’re saving a couple bucks at best per pound if you culture it. Granted, you do get real buttermilk along with that yield, so if you can put that to good use, you save more. Plus there’s some satisfaction to it, but not enough for me. If I had access to a good dairy farm to get some fresh cream, though, I’d consider doing it more often. But with commercial cream? The end product doesn’t taste much different.
Shortbread is one of those deceptively simple foods that seems like it would be easy (straightforward ingredients, seemingly forgiving recipe, nothing obviously technical) and somehow my shortbread just doesn’t taste quite right. (And I can no longer get shortbread from my sisters’ friends’ Scottish grandmother.)
It’s worth the imported from Scotland price until I can figure out where I’m going wrong.
It could be that you are overworking the dough. But my money is on the ingredient sources. The US allows additives to flour, the salt might be iodized, the sugar be from “Round-Up-Resistant beets”, etc. Such stuff can add up to a different flavor and texture.
Here’s my tips, from learning to use Grammie Piper’s bare-bones shortbread recipe that just had ingredients:
have the butter at room temperature;
be careful with the flour; don’t over-flour it. For example, the recipe I got handed down calls for two cups of flour; I’ve found that using just a bit less than 2 cups is better.
work it in your hands so the body heat starts to melt the butter; the mixture should be glistening a bit, not dry/floury.
watch it carefully in the oven; should be light golden and crusty, maybe just light brown on the edges; oven temps can vary, so the recipe’s temperature may not match your oven.
I’ve just checked a few common ones here in the UK, including the cheapest own-brand supermarket creams, and the entirety of their ingredients is cream. Not a single other ingredient.
You shouldn’t have to go organic for cream to be, well, cream.
These are good points. Adding stuff to shortbread can be good too. Speculaas icing, Heath toffee bits, crushed Crunchie and anything Reese’s is amazing. President’s Choice has a bergamot flavoured one also good but not sure how to do that.
US versus UK. I agree with you on this but our Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has often ruled in favor of big business.
Several years ago in California, I looked at the cream ingredients and found, no lie, skim milk. Mind you it wasn’t labeled as anything other than cream. Seeing that has made me look at many labels closely.
One brand of organic milk contains coconut something, I assume as a stabilizer. I can taste it.
Almost all of the wheat flour here, including organic, is “enriched” with vitamins whether we want it or not.
