Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter takes ’em to new heights
By Ari Weinzweig
The big day is almost here! May 14 is National Buttermilk Biscuit Day! And to add to the good energy, the big news around ZCoB parts right now is that the Roadhouse’s long-loved Buttermilk Biscuits, made from scratch every day, just got even better!
It’s all about the butter!
It’s been two years since we added the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter to the 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!
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.
What makes Vermont Creamery butter so good!
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 Culture Butter is 86%. And it is so darned delicious!
The Roadhouse has been making its ever-popular Buttermilk Biscuits for decades now. As of last week, we began baking them with this spectacular butter. What has been really wonderful for many years is now noticeably better still. The aroma of the biscuit is amazing—bigger, beckoning you in to take a bite, or two or three. A small luxury to bring a little cultured, buttery, culinary joy to your day! They’re 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.” At the Roadhouse, you can gild the butter-rich biscuits by spreading more of the same cultured butter on top just before you eat them! Grab a biscuit (or two) when you drive through the Roadshow. And/or, buy a dozen in the morning to bring home for brunch!