Feeding Children

For those of us with kids, feeding them may be the most insistent demand we face. The regularity of cooking meals can seem relentless, and the pressure to put good food on the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner can make us feel inadequate. But the fact that feeding a family feels difficult does not reflect on us. It doesn’t feel hard because we’re limited; it feels hard because it is hard. The task is intrinsically challenging and is, at times, a struggle for every one of us. I have built my personal and professional life around food, yet there are still days when I want to hide as dinner time nears.

When kids are at an age or phase that makes them more selective about what they eat, the task looms still larger. It’s demoralizing to shop for food, cook it, and then watch it be pushed away; and it’s disheartening to finally find nourishing food our kids will eat, and then have it wiped off their list because friends say it’s uncool.

Finding the fortitude to face this challenge squarely and to meet its demands creatively takes energy, especially when the food industry spends millions selling us quick and cheap “solutions.” Time is the great commodity, after all. We might resist giving up what precious little we have when our efforts are unappreciated or rejected. “Not worth it,” our small internal voice may say.

After spending more than three decades feeding my own kids, who range in age from 16 to 31, there are still questions I wonder about:

• What is nourishment really? When I was growing up, my grandparents lived an hour away. Whenever I visited, they had a ramekin-filled treat waiting for me: either jello with sliced bananas or chocolate pudding. I enjoyed them equally, and despite their few nutrients, they nourished me. Even now, I have one of the ramekins on my desk holding odds and ends and within close view. My attachment to this memory makes me wonder what actually constitutes nourishment. Maybe a loving attitude and loving gestures, and a feeling of having been considered are among the most important nutrients we offer. It could be that even jello, when served with love, can help sustain a child by passing on the caring that went into its making. In the ideal, I wonder if food needs to express both good intentions and love to nourish us on the deepest level.

• What is our responsibility? How much looking away when our children are not eating well is okay, and how much is an abdication of our responsibility? When is giving into their demands for what their friends eat all right and when is it simply surrender? And when is it okay to care a little less when the caring becomes too difficult, or when our ideals and efforts are rejected too many times? As parents, the responsibility for making healthful foods available to our children probably falls to us; if we don’t do it, who will? But, after that, I wonder if we may need to let go and give children room to express their preferences, respecting the normal push-pulls of early childhood and later peer group pressures that affect what kids eat. Maybe our most important responsibility is to focus on eating well ourselves, on embodying the ideal, and trust that with exposure and gentle guidance, what our children eat will work itself out in time.

• How much choice do we offer? The answer to this question probably needs to change over the years and with each child. It may be that our role is to arrange our tables so that kids can reach for and select whatever they need for their growth and nourishment. This would mean filling our tables with healthful options that increase as children grow and then any choice is all right. We decide what to offer and they choose what to eat. Young children might eat only salad one day and soup another, but over a week or so they would likely get the balance of nutrients they need.

It is because I still have questions, and because I still wonder at the challenge of it all after decades of dishing up food for children, that I can offer this: If feeding a family is a struggle for you, know that it is for most of us. We press on on, not because it is easy but because we all must eat. When we eat well, our bodies are nourished. When we eat as a family, we are all kept circling in the same orbit. It’s not only the food that makes this happen. It’s the food and the talk. The food and the laughter. The food and the encouragement and validation that get served up day after day. Each one of us, no matter how big or small, deserves a place around the table. To make room is empowering and deems each of us worthy. And making room now is important because the really dependent days of children are few and fleeting. Sports and music lessons and clubs soon narrow our window of opportunity.

In the end, the best way to feed a family may be to care and prepare, and then let go, just as we do when a holiday approaches. Think about how we work to complete all we can ahead of time. We take care of the details that will make the holiday memorable, and then we let go and allow it to unfold, enjoying the experience no matter what happens because we know that we can control our own contribution—what we give to the experience—but we cannot control the outcome. Family meals work the same way.

Our role may be to put in energy at a level that we enjoy and can sustain. When we can’t cook ourselves, we can find sources of good clean food and buy it, and we can try to find pleasure in the process. Without being negative or overly-controlling, we can also set standards that we believe are necessary and true. I am certain of this: If we can find a way to enjoy the time we spend in the kitchen, and if we can keep the struggle away from mealtime, our children will come to appreciate the foods we serve.

In the end, the foods children eat or reject (their autonomy) and what we want them to eat (our agenda) are less important than our willingness to keep at the task, eating well ourselves, offering food joyfully, and letting go of the rest.

Copyright, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul

3 Steps to Making Cultured Butter

Years ago, I set out to make whipped cream but let the process go a little too far. The cream turned into butter, though I didn’t realize at the time that butter is what I had, and this mistake offered me a new ability and an enduring gift.

Sweet cream butter like the kind I got after over-beating whipped cream comes from churning or agitating ordinary heavy cream. European-style cultured butter is different; it’s churned from heavy cream that has been treated with live bacterial cultures, the same way yogurt is. The extra step of culturing cream before churning creates a more lavish butter with complex flavors and a longer shelf life.

You will love making cultured butter and, as a bonus, having the traditional thick buttermilk that is its by-product. These are foods that surpass anything you can buy in a store.

Step 1: Gather ingredients

The following ingredients will give you 1–1/2 pounds cultured butter and 3 to 5 cups buttermilk:

2 quarts heavy cream
1/8 teaspoon mesophilic butter culture. (You can purchase culture here: Get Culture. Be sure to freeze it upon arrival.)
1–1/2 to 2 teaspoons flaked, non-iodized salt, optional

Step 2: Culture the cream

1.     Pour the cream into a heavy pot — I use stainless steel or enameled cast iron— and gently warm it to 80 degrees. This is the temperature that best encourages the growth of bacterial cultures that add flavor to butter. Cream heats quickly, so keep a close eye on the thermometer.

2.     Remove the pot from the heat, and then remove the culture from the freezer. Pour the quantity of culture needed onto your measuring spoon. (Do not dip the spoon into the culture, as this may contaminate the entire package.) Sprinkle the culture over the cream and, to avoid it degrading, immediately return the package of culture to the freezer. Let the culture sit on top of the cream for about 2 minutes, then stir it in until it’s well mixed.

3.     Cover the cultured cream and keep it at as close to 80 degrees as possible. You can culture the cream for as few as 8 hours, but 24–36 hours will give you a finer end result. After culturing, move the cream to the refrigerator and let it cool for at least several hours. If you like, you can refrigerate the cream for up to a week before making butter.

The culture you use to make your butter will affect the flavor and personality of the finished product and, other than the cream you start with, it is what will give your butter its defining characteristics.

Step 3: Make butter

1.     Remove the cream from the refrigerator and let it warm to 65 degrees. Cream that is much colder will not efficiently turn to butter when you mix it, and cream that is too warm is hard to handle after it turns into butter.

2.     When the cream warms to 65 degrees, pour it into the bowl of a stand mixer and, using a paddle attachment (the whisk beats in too much air), start mixing the cream on low. If you have a splatter shield, you will be glad for using it. As the cream starts to thicken, continue increasing the speed until you are mixing the cream on high. (Do not walk away during this step; I have spent many hours scraping butter off the ceiling when a batch has turned to butter more quickly than I expected it to.)

3.     Within 5 to 10 minutes, the cream will begin its transformation into butter. At this point, gradually lower the speed of the mixer and watch carefully. As soon as you see traces of buttermilk in the bowl, along with small pieces of newly created butter, turn the mixer as low as it will go to avoid serious splattering. Stop the mixer 2 to 3 times to strain the buttermilk into a jar, and continue this process of mixing and straining until most of the buttermilk is released and your bowl contains a large round of fresh butter. Refrigerate the buttermilk.

4.     Leaving the butter in the bowl, add about 2 cups of cold water. In warm months, you may want to refrigerate or add ice to the water you use for this step. Using your hands or a wooden spoon, press and squeeze the butter to release any remaining buttermilk into the water. Pour off the water and discard it, repeating this process several times until the water pours off mostly clear.

5.     If you want salted butter, this is the time to knead in 1–1/2 to 2 teaspoons of salt, or to taste. If not, simply press the butter into a bowl or molds and store it in or out of the refrigerator.

You are now a butter maker! You can stop reading here, but continue on if you want to learn more about storing butter, and better understand the artisanal aspects of butter making, including starting with raw (unpasteurized) cream.

Notes on storing butter and buttermilk

Once made, you can either refrigerate butter or keep it on the countertop where, because it is cultured, it will remain spreadable and keep for several months. Buttermilk, when refrigerated, keeps for about 1-1/2 weeks. You can store butter in the freezer nearly indefinitely, but most frozen food diminishes considerably after about a year.

Note that light degrades fats and butter picks up odors, both of which should impact your choice of storage container. For the refrigerator or freezer, a glass or ceramic container works best. When storing butter outside the refrigerator, protecting it from light preserves its flavor and keeps it fresher longer. Room-temperature butter should be slightly cool, soft but not melty.

Notes on perfecting the process

Using cultured versus sweet cream butter. Adding a culture to cream before turning it into butter imparts depth and complexity by adding bacteria that promote thickness as well as acid development; the latter lowers the pH, which thickens and stabilizes the butter and extends its shelf life. Sweet cream, or uncultured butter, has a simpler flavor and lasts only as long as the cream would have lasted before churning. The sweet buttermilk that is its by-product is nonacidic. So, unlike cultured buttermilk, it cannot be paired with baking soda to leaven baked goods. To use sweet cream buttermilk in baking, substitute 3/4 to 1 teaspoon baking powder for every 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda called for in the recipe.

Choosing a culture. The culture you use to make your butter will affect the flavor and personality of the finished product and, other than the cream you start with, it is what will give your butter its defining characteristics. This makes it especially important to learn about or sample several cultures from a supplier before settling on one for long-term use.

Handling the culture. Purchased culture should always be stored in the freezer, where it should stay until the moment you are ready to use it. Shake the container well, pour the amount of culture needed onto your measuring spoon, and then immediately put the culture back into the freezer. I have learned the hard way not to dip the spoon into the culture or leave the packet sitting at room temperature, as either could contaminate it.

Crème fraîche. At the end of culturing, before making butter, what you have is Crème fraîche. This is cream that is thickened and given a tart, buttery flavor by the cultures added for butter making. Less sour than sour cream, you can use it the way the French do as a substitute. Crème fraîche also works as a base for sauce because it doesn’t curdle; or you can serve it over fresh fruit or add it to soup or mashed potatoes.

Scaling up the recipe. If you want to scale this recipe up to make more butter and buttermilk, continue to use 1/8 teaspoon culture for quantities of cream under 2 gallons (8 quarts). For 2 to 5 gallons of cream (8 to 20 quarts), increase the quantity of culture to 1/4 teaspoon.

Churning butter by hand. It’s possible to make butter without a stand mixer, though it will take more time and muscle. Start with a glass jar one- third filled with cream that is about 65 degrees. Shake the jar, watching for butter to form and buttermilk to separate. You may need to shake for quite some time before this happens. When you are sure you have butter, stop shaking, drain off the buttermilk, and rinse the butter as described in the recipe.

Adjusting the salt. If you begin making butter with more or less cream than is called for in this recipe and you want to make salted butter, use a quantity of salt that equals 1 to 2 percent of the finished butter weight, measured in grams (my own preference is for 1 percent). It’s best to use a flaked, non-iodized salt or cheese salt since granular salt crystals can get “caught” in the butter and fail to dissolve. Sea salt may work, although organisms in the salt can have a negative impact on flavor. Experimentation will be your best guide.

Making butter from raw (unpasteurized) cream

Before dairy was industrialized, fresh milk from the evening milking was commonly left out overnight for the cream to rise. Left at room temperature, the milk and cream became populated with with microorganisms that soured it slightly and created cultured, or clabbered, cream. This tangy mixture formed the basis of butter making.

Later, pasteurization was introduced, a process that prevented milk and cream from souring naturally. As a result, sweet cream butter came to dominate the market.

Since in most parts of the country unpasteurized raw cream is legal and available, we have the option of making butter the old-fashioned way. Culturing raw cream is easy to do, with or without a commercial culture, because raw cream is biologically active and full of beneficial bacteria that ferment and sour cream naturally if left at room temperature.

To use a purchased culture, follow the instructions above. To culture raw cream without a purchased culture, remove the cream from the refrigerator, pour it into a bowl or jar (I use a half-gallon glass canning jar), and cover it with a double layer of cheesecloth. If your kitchen is especially cool, you may want to heat the cream to 80 degrees. Otherwise, you can let it warm naturally.

Allow the cream to rest at room temperature for at least 6 hours or up to 24 hours, depending on how ripe you want the cream to be. If your kitchen is very warm, you may want to place the bowl or jar of cream in a container full of cool water to keep it from getting much warmer than 80 degrees.

You can use the cream for butter making at any stage of fermentation. When you are pleased with its flavor, cover the cream with an airtight lid and move it to the refrigerator, where you can store it for days or up to a week. As it ripens, the smell and taste should continue to be pleasing and become more interesting. The longer you ripen the cream before churning, the more intensely flavored your butter will be. Although I have never had this happen, if your cream curdles or smells or tastes “off,” discard it and begin again.

What’s nice about relying on the wild cultures in your own environment is that it’s easy and economical. The results, however, can be unpredictable. When you use wild cultures, you cannot be sure what qualities your butter will possess because the bacteria within your environment change all the time. So you might like the results one week, and not like them as well the next. I have also found that the buttermilk I get when I rely on wild cultures is thin and watery compared to the thick, rich buttermilk that commercial cultures give me. One is not necessarily better than the other, but my own preference is for a full-bodied buttermilk, and in my kitchen I have needed commercial cultures to create it.

You may want to think of it this way: Within your home environment, you have everything you need to culture raw cream before churning it into butter, just as people have had for all time. What purchased commercial cultures do for you is help you control the ripening process, allowing you to choose the qualities you want to impart and ensuring which beneficial microorganisms dominate.

Handcrafting any food is art as much as science; there is no precise formula. So the best approach may be to experiment to find the method you like best.

Copyright, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul