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"I love Bungay Butter…it’s unbelievably delicious. It delivers everything that’s denied to us in a tub of bog-standard supermarket butter"
Why does it taste so good?
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-paddling. It 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.
Most dairy produce is made away from the farm. It’s surprisingly rare to find a business today that controls the whole process from start to finish.
These are our 3 secrets:
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.
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.
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.
"Could quite happily eat this straight from it's golden wrapper"
Who loves Bungay Butter?
Baron Bigod can be found on the menus of top restuarants and chefs around the country and has graced the tables of great British institutions and Royal events.
The story of butter
What’s that monument on the front of our Bungay Raw Butter boxes? It’s a good story actually. Pull up a cushion…
It’s a buttercross. Historically, buttercrosses were beautiful vaulted structures, beneath which local farmers would congregate to sell their wares, including butter and cheese. You see, around 300 years ago, Suffolk was famous for its butter.
Every foodie worth their weight in grouse was eating Suffolk butter. It was sold into the finest houses in London and shipped in barrels to the West Indies. But the Suffolk farmers had a problem. They had no way to use the skimmed milk left over after buttermaking, so they began to make a hard skimmed milk cheese, to recoup some cash from the waste milk.
The cheese was named the Suffolk Bang. Legend has it that this was the worst cheese ever made in the history of British cheese. It was so bad that poems were written about it. Allegedly it was “so hard that you could roll cannons on it” and “dogs would bark at it but would not dare bite it”. It was sold to the British Navy because the weavils couldn’t get into it, but the sailors threatened mutiny rather than eat the awful Suffolk Bang. Eventually, the Suffolk farmers were ordered by the government to stop making it, as it was giving the nation a bad name. And so, Suffolk cheese production ceased and with it, butter production folded too.
The famous suffolk Butter was lost to the years and never a scrape of butter was to be found under the buttercross for close to 300 years… until now. Our Bungay Butter is our way of attempting to restore the name of Suffolk Butter. It is made to an ancient recipe, with raw cultured cream. As far as we know, this is very close to the way it would have been made in the heyday of Suffolk butter production, 300 years ago.
Making 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.
Baron Bigod Fritters with Apple and Fig Chutney by Fox & Goose chef Paul Yaxley
The Fox & Goose in Fressingfield has been consistently serving up some of the finest food in our region for as long as we can remember. We asked owner and head chef Paul Yaxley to share with us his favourite.
Baron Bigod, Curried Apple & Date Chutney Rarebit by Fork Deli’s Justin Kett
Award-winning Suffolk chef Justin Kett opened Fork Deli in Hadleigh just over 2 years ago. We are proud to stock some of Fork’s delicious chutneys and sauces in our all-new milk shed here at the farm.
Crumpet and Baron Bigod Pancetta Parcels by Crumpetorium
This is a really quick and easy recipe from Norfolk’s artisan crumpetiers, Crumpetorium. It’s perfect for a tasty lunch, or could be served up as part of a dinner meal by adding in your favourite side.
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