Featuring Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter
By Ari Weinzweig
Author Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote, “When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.” For me, regardless of how well my writing work is going, I just head over to the Roadhouse, where they bake remarkable Buttermilk Biscuits every single day. I had one the other evening, which reminded me just how darned delicious they really are. I uncharacteristically consumed the entire biscuit in a matter of minutes.
We’ve been making biscuits at the Roadhouse daily since we opened back in the fall of 2003. They were always good. But a little over a year ago, they got significantly better still when we started making them with Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter. Wow! If you’re entertaining over the holiday weekend (or any time), a dozen Buttermilk Biscuits that you pick up the day of your event are almost sure to be a big hit!
It’s all about the butter!
It’s been about three years now since we made the move to add the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter to the Bakehouse bread service at the Roadhouse. The commercial butter we’d been serving up until that point had been a relatively peripheral product for us. Now, the cultured butter has become a signature offering with glowing reviews. The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is a game changer—I actually added a few paragraphs to the “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy” pamphlet in the final weeks of production just to highlight how good it is. We have had it on our counter at home regularly for many months now. I’m pretty confident that if you try it (be sure it’s at room temperature), you will be doing the same for your house as well!
What makes Vermont Creamery butter so good!
Credit for the butter goes to Allison Hooper, longtime industry colleague and friend, who, along with her business partner Bob Reese, started Vermont Creamery back in 1984. Working in the small town of Websterville, the pair pushed from the beginning to make the kind of cheese and butter that Allison had experienced when she’d interned in France a few years earlier. I asked Allison for the back story on the butter:
The butter was developed early on, in the early ’90s. The story is that the farm that I worked on in Brittany had Jersey cows. They were separating cream, and they were selling butter and crème fraiche at the local market. It was so delicious!!! I wanted to make that butter here. Bob and I found a used churn outside a dairy barn and we bought it. We figured out how to use it, and we started making butter. I found this pretty famous French chef in New York, and I decided to take a chance and send him some butter. He called me back, and he was so excited. He said, “This is exactly what the great French chefs in New York are all looking for. It’s the butter of our childhood!” The chefs there loved it, and they really helped us get it off the ground. The chefs knew! They say we make the best butter in the country, and to this day, that’s what we’re known for.
The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is made with cream from nearby St. Albans Cooperative. Cream is cultured overnight and then churned into butter. All, and au natural! The butter is 86% butter fat. And like I said, you really can taste the difference! The American standard for butter is 80%. Even most fancy European butters are 82 or 83%. The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is 86%. And it is so darned delicious!
How to enjoy our Roadhouse biscuits.
In the spirit of what Anne Morrow Lindbergh said above, the Buttermilk Biscuits have been so good they’ve got me thinking I might well want to write a bit of poetry about them. After all, Carl Sandburg, the classic poet of my hometown of Chicago, once wrote, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” We’ll have to go to the market for the flowers, but the Roadhouse has the biscuits, either in house with your meal, to take away and eat in the car at the Roadshow drive-through, or to buy by the box to take home to entertain with.
At the Roadhouse, you can gild the butter-rich biscuits by spreading more of the same on top just before you eat them! And/or jam and/or honey or sorghum syrup or whatever strikes your culinary fancy.