Raw CULTURED Butter

In the centre of Bungay in Suffolk stands the Buttercross, a large domed monument beneath the shade of which the dairy farmers of Bungay gathered to sell their prized butter. This was 300 years ago in the days when Suffolk was regarded as the “butter capital” of England. East Anglian butter was sought after by every foodie worth their weight in grouse and was exported in barrels as far as the West Indies (Defoe 1724).

Our Bungay Raw Butter is our own interpretation of the original Suffolk buttermaking method. It is made by hand on our farm in the traditional way, by souring the cream using a cocktail of lactic bacteria, before churning and hand-paddlingIt is the closest thing to the original Suffolk butter. We use the milk warm from milking and our grass-fed cows are an ancient breed, Montbeliarde, hand- picked by Jonny from small farms in the Jura region of France. They only give a small amount of milk but it is rich and high in protein, producing beautifully creamy and complex flavours. A true farmhouse butter.

I love Bungay Butter…it’s unbelievably delicious. It delivers everything that’s denied to us in a tub of bog-standard supermarket butter.

Emma Bridgewater / The Telegraph, Feb 2021
The Archers

What is our secret?

Most cheese and dairy produce is made away from the farm. It’s actually surprisingly rare to find a business today that controls the whole process from start to finish. Here are our 3 secrets:

Control

We grow our own forage and grazing right here in the surrounding landscape. We care for every cow in our herd as an individual and we care for our precious milk from the moment it leaves the cow.  What we take from the land we then put back again. We call this circular farming.

Proximity

Within minutes of the morning milking, our fresh milk is already in the making rooms just a few metres away. Within hours it is being made into cheese and butter. Our milk doesn’t spend time being transported meaning our produce retains all the incredible characteristics of our fresh milk.

Gentleness

Our unique set up allows our milk to be gently gravity fed from the milking parlour into the making rooms next door. We choose to make our produce by hand, avoiding the use of big industrial dairy equipment. No piece of machinery can imitate the gentleness of a true artisan, who really cares.

The making of Bungay Butter

Our farmhouse butter is painstakingly made in the traditional way. Follow Head butter maker Shaun through a day in the life of our Bungay Butter and see for yourself why we’re proud to call it “hand crafted”.

1
After leaving the cows teats, the still-warm milk passes through a cream separator. Using centrifugal force, the process allows the creamy part of the milk to gravitate through a pipe and into buckets.
2
We carefully check the thickness of the cream during the separation process. It’s really important to be accurate at this stage, to make sure we have a consistent product at the end of the process.
3

As the raw cream fills the buckets, we add carefully chosen lactic bacteria to each bucket. These live cultures quickly get to work acidifying the cream.

4

The following day we test the cream with a pH reader to check the precise acidity level, before putting the cream in the chiller at a very low temperature. This chill time activates the build up of butter crystals in the cream.

5
We leave the cream to rest for a few days, to allow the live cultures to work their magic, then we begin the butter churning stage. We pour the buckets of cultured cream into our butter churn.
6

We carefully check the thickness of the cream once more and take temperature checks to be sure the cream is in the perfect condition for churning.

7

After a few minutes of churning, the cream starts to become whipped.

8
After a little more churning, small balls of butter begin to form.
9

At this stage, the cream has separated into solids (small balls of butter) and liquids (buttermilk).

10

We drain the buttermilk from the churn and bottle it for sale. It makes a fabulous ingredient for baking and cooking.

11
Now we add iced water to the churn to wash any remaining buttermilk from the butter balls and firm up the butter.
12

We then begin the process of kneading the butter to remove most of the moisture.

13
We mix in the finest sea salt from our shores, to make our salted butter.
14
After a further 3 days of maturing and chilling, we finally shape our butter by moulding and cutting it.
15

Each portion of butter is beautifully hand wrapped and finally placed into little boxes to keep them safe and secure.