BakeandCut

Butter Shock

Today I was making butter like I always do before I make bread.

When I first started making butter, I always used a commonly available cream. It was and is what is available from most major food retailers.

And it was also the easiest for the Mycook Premium and Thermomix to processes. See my recipe. And yes I own a Thermomix, I traded up to a Mycook Premium.

Anyway a few months ago I switched from using dairy farmers cream for making butter to Tilba cream, which is a local cream to the Sapphire Coast region.
Read about the growers

I get mine from local suppliers.

Now this cream is an excellent full fat cream and it quite difficult to make back into butter. You have to re-add the water to back to it. Whereas the commonly available seems to be nothing but water. When you use the 2 side by side, you will know what I am talking about.

Over Christmas, I was worried I was going to run out of cream, so I picked up a carton of dairy farmers.

Today I turned them both into butter and I was absolutely shocked by the difference in the end result. You would think cream is cream. Oh no, it is not.

It was in the butter that I saw the difference in the farming practices and how different it affects the animals and the end result.

I know I will never buy that brand of cream again.

You can see the colour difference and texture between the two.

You can be the judge from the photos, the Local Tilba cream is rich and yellow and has colour and taste, whereas the mass produced cream is sick and anaemic.

We all know that the more colourful the food, the better is for us.

Many years ago me and my husband went to a very big dairy farm out west. I was absolutely shocked by what I saw, remember I grew up on a farm and in a farming community. We got our cows milk from a neighbour who was a dairy farmer, but their cows lived outside.

This is their life,common place for many cattle

I had never seen milking cows treated this way. They lived under a roof, in smalls pens on concrete. They never saw an open paddock, or ever had the pleasure of eating grass. And just how they were treated like an object was a new concept to me. And it is one I am not keen on.

Hence why I am happy to switch to a local cream. I stopped drinking cow’s milk many years ago and have only reintroduced it. I only buy the local Tilba milk and have had no reactions to it, but anything from Australia’s major supermarket retailers, I am sick as. I was telling another local lady this and she said she had the same thing with her son, major problems with dairy, but yet he can handle the local milk with no problems.

Coincidence or not?

I know what I will be buying, and that will be organic grass fed milk, cream, and cheese from now on. And if I can not afford it, I will go without, it would not be the first time.

I am not anti-dairy farming, farmers have to make a living. But at what cost, and you choose where and who gets your dollar.

Mine is going back to our local.

I am going to let the photos do the talking. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.