Bungay Butter is a raw, cultured butter. It is our own interpretation of the original Suffolk butter, which became world-famous over 300 years ago. It is handmade right here on our farm in the traditional way, by souring the cream using lactic bacteria, before churning and adding British sea salt.
It is nutty, sharp and complex - a true farmhouse butter.
- Emma Bridgewater -
Shhh... don't tell anyone. There's a reason our products are some of the finest in the world and it has nothing to do with fancy tech or good marketing. It's simply that everything we do is right here on our farm. We have control over every step, from soil to finished product. Every process feeds the next. We call this circular farming.
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.
Learn more about Fen Farm Dairy, our family farm and the home of Bungay Butter.
Have Fen Farm Dairy products delivered to your door at your chosen frequency and get a members-only discount of 20% off our website prices, always.
What’s that monument on the front of our Bungay 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.
Bungay Butter is our way of attempting to restore the name of Suffolk Butter. It is made to an ancient recipe, with our 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.
Step-by-careful-step
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After a few minutes of churning, the cream starts to become whipped.
After a little more churning, small balls of butter begin to form.
At this stage, the cream has separated into solids (small balls of butter) and liquids (buttermilk).
We drain the buttermilk from the churn and bottle it for sale. It makes a fabulous ingredient for baking and cooking.
Now we add iced water to the churn to wash any remaining buttermilk from the butter balls and firm up the butter.
We then begin the process of kneading the butter to remove most of the moisture.
We mix in the finest sea salt from our shores, to make our salted butter.
After a further 3 days of maturing and chilling, we finally shape our butter by moulding and cutting it.
Each portion of butter is beautifully hand wrapped and finally placed into little boxes to keep them safe and secure.