Sweet cream and cultured butter from Mila: flavourful butter made the traditional way

It is the mountain-fresh milk from alpine dairies in South Tyrol from which it is made that gives Mila Butter its freshness and homemade flavour. Its method of production – which uses tried-and-true, time-honoured techniques – also plays a major role. Butter is, generally speaking, the most versatile dairy product in the kitchen. Its potential uses are innumerable: eating it as a spread, utilizing it for baking or roasting, or letting it serve as a base for sauces. Margarine and other substitute spreads cannot compare with the delicate, natural taste of fresh butter. Butter consists of at least 82% butterfat and up to 16% water – the proportions can vary. There is a fundamental distinction between sweet cream and cultured butter, which have very different production processes.

Fresh cream is the starting point for making sweet cream butter. Because it doesn’t readily coagulate, sweet cream butter is a good binding agent for sauces in addition to its noted value in baking. It has a rather mild and creamy taste. The process of churning ripened cream, on the other hand, yields what is called cultured butter.

In olden days on mountain farms and seasonal alpine pastures called Almen, it was virtually impossible to prevent cream from going sour because there was no adequate means of refrigeration. The souring of dairy products does not, by any means, render them less enjoyable, but rather imparts a fuller flavour. Today, butter makers add lactic acid bacteria to the cream to make cultured butter. Its taste is both tart and fresh, and it has a unique aroma. However, lactic acid bacteria is not necessary for making buttermilk – which is made by churning cultured butter – because the residual liquid has already been soured.

The carotenoids found in grass are responsible for Mila butter’s traditionally light yellow colour. This yellowish colour – also found in carrots – is fat-soluble and thus deposits itself into the milkfat used to make butter. In unprocessed butter, the gradation of the yellow hue varies according to the season and the available feed.