ARTISAN SALTED BUTTER — handmade salted cultured cream butter from Ploughgate Creamery in Vermont — One 1lb block

Artisan Salted Butter 
Ploughgate Creamery, Vermont 
1 pound block 

Ploughgate Creamery's butter is made from fresh Vermont cream sourced from the Monument Dairy at Bragg Farm in Weybridge, Vermont and brought to us by our friends at Saxelby Cheesemongers!

The cream is cultured for 24 hours before being churned, giving the butter a distinct tangy and nutty flavor. The butter is then kneaded by hand to expel more moisture and to work in flakes of sea salt that burst with flavor when the butter hits your palate. The sweetness of the cream shines through, creating an elegant and balanced salted butter that is among the best we've ever tasted!

Each block of salted butter weighs 1lb.

What is cultured butter?
In short, it's butter made in the European style by adding live active cultures to cream before churning, similar to cheese or yogurt.

Cultured butter is tangier and richer than your everyday stick butter, with a taste reminiscent of cheese. That’s because cultured butter and cheese share a critical first step – the addition of beneficial live bacteria (the ‘culture’ in cultured butter). All Ploughgate Creamery butter begins as pasteurized cream from 4th generation local farm Monument Farms Dairy.

How is Ploughgate butter made? 
To begin the butter-making process, Marisa adds active cultures to the cream and lets it sit for 24 hours. This imparts complexity to the aroma, flavor, and texture of the finished product. After two days it’s time to churn. Gratefully the days of hand churning are long gone, and Marisa’s industrial churn does the work of separating the pale yellow butterfat from the frothy buttermilk. A drain on the underbelly of the churn releases the buttermilk into a five-gallon bucket. A mason jar’s worth is saved to make salad dressings; the rest is fed to Marisa’s pigs. Finally Marisa folds in sea salt by hand before wrapping the butter into tidy one-pound packages. The end result is nutty, grassy, and sweet – simply divine.

More about Ploughgate Creamery: 
Thanks to an incredible program by the Vermont Land Trust in which young farmers compete to win the right to purchase a farm that has been conserved with the purpose of keeping the land for agriculture, butter maker Marisa Mauro was able to purchase the historic Bragg Farm in 2013 and has been crafting small-batch, cultured butter since 2014.