Transcript:

Butter MakingmusicThis time of year is the traditional season for butter making, a craft which may actually benefit from a lack of technology. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. ambience: Butter Churn"Springtime is the very best time of year for all dairy products. In the spring, the animals are expecting to give birth. The result is that the quality of milk, the flavor of milk, the hardness of the fat, everything is optimum in Spring." Jonathan White is the cheesemaker at Egg Farm Dairy in Peekskill, New York. We're listening to his churn beating cream to separate it into butter. And as you'd expect, the type of cream you put into the churn determines the kind of butter that you get out."In almost every century, the way butter was made on the farm was the same. The milk was allowed to sit at room temperature, which was generally cool, which means by the time the cream made it to the churn, the cream had soured. The result is that most of the cream that was churned for butter was cultured cream, cultured by the healthful, naturally occurring bacteria that are present in all milk."But most of the butter you buy in supermarkets today isn't made from cultured cream. It's churned from the more modern sweet cream."Sweet cream is cream that, once it's been collected from the milk, it's then kept cold to keep the cream from souring. Which means of course that it's a late twentieth century phenomenon, because before refrigeration there was basically no such thing as sweet cream. It's what 99.999 percent of the butter today is made from."But according to Mr. White, sweet cream doesn't necessarily mean sweet butter. He says that by refrigerating their cream, butter makers are actually lowering the quality of their product."The truth is that cultured cream produces butter that's sweeter, with a lot more butter aroma and a lot more butter flavor. The souring of the cream actually intensifies the sweetness of the butter."I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.