Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #8–Butter paddles.

Does anybody recognize what these are? Does anybody know how to use butter paddles? Neither I nor my brothers have any idea why my parents had butter paddles. We don’t know when they got them, or where. We don’t recall them ever being used. When we were divvying up my parents’ kitchen goods, they were in a box at the back of a top shelf that hadn’t been looked at in a very long time, along with the aspic cutters. I was the only one who knew what they even were, and that’s because I had recently been making butter, and so I ended up with them. It’s not inconceivable that my parents used those butter paddles at some point. My mom was a good baker, and my dad was an adventurous cook (sometimes a little too adventurous).

The Chef’s story…

It’s December, and our does have been milking now for nine months, and while their production is down, their milk is incredibly rich. Some of them are putting over ten percent fat into their milk, which is on par with the half-and-half in the grocery store. If I don’t have the time to make cheese, this rich milk will sit in the refrigerator in tote for a couple of days. Over this time, cream will come to the top. This stuff is so thick that, when chilled, it can be sliced better than it can be poured.

With cream, I can make ghee. In all the online how-to’s, cream gets poured into a beater, and after several minutes of vigorous action, grains of fat start to coalesce and the liquid thins. If I try this with my does’ cream, I get something more like whipped cheese. The December cream is so rich that I have to thin it with almost an equal amount of milk to make a smooth liquid. When I put this into a stand mixer, the fat coalesces within a minute. I pour off the thin liquid that the fat leaves behind, and rinse it with cold water until the runoff is clear. The result is a blob of fat, soft, pure white, with a somewhat grainy texture.

Were I making butter, I would spend the next hour kneading and rinsing and paddling the fat blob. This is precisely where the butter paddles come into play, their grooved surfaces allowing the watery buttermilk to drain away as I squeeze it out. The ten-dollar word for this process is “malaxage,” and it just goes on forever, batting a lump of wet butter around until it slowly becomes dry.

However, I’ve decided to make ghee, so the nascent fat blob stays wet and is visibly sweating drops of moisture as I drop it into a pot on the stovetop and turn it to medium hot. The soft, white paste melts into a liquid that looks like diluted milk—cloudy, pale white, with dime-sized droplets of clear melted fat floating on top. It comes to a gentle boil, and stays boiling and visually unchanged for the better part of a half hour, after which something remarkable happens. What was cloudy, white, and opaque rapidly becomes crystal clear and a pale buff color. There are some large crumbs of solid matter, which appear to be the focus of all the boiling, and a little scum around the sides of the pot. In a few minutes, the boiling slows and stops. The crumbs, caramelized to a brown color, sink to the bottom of the pot.

The liquid is crystal clear and a pale golden color, and a heavenly smell fills the air. This wonderful substance is decanted through a fine filter, sealed up, and allowed to cool. It will solidify overnight, and when I pick it up in the morning it is ghee. This is, to a cook, wonderful stuff. It is shelf stable, has a very high smoke point for frying, and an indescribably wonderful flavor. Pie crusts made with ghee…I swoon.

The Chemist

Ten years since I last used the knowledge professionally, I can describe every step in the above process in terms of chemistry and physical chemistry. To me, it’s like a novel. Different molecules have different characters. Some are active and vigorous, others stolid; importantly, for the drama, some form friendships, some hate each other, and others diplomatically engage with everybody. From the chemist’s point of view, the goal is to play these character traits against each other to unmix a mixture, and arrive at pure components.

Milk and cream are both water-based solutions, but cream is much richer in fat. Fats are less dense than water, so fats in milk float (or, for a lipocentric view, water is less dense than fat, so milk in fat sinks). So, I let gravity do its thing, and I can pull off most of the fatty cream and use the skimmed milk for cheese or other products.

Cream is really interesting. It’s a water-based solution, but nearly half of it is fat. Ordinarily, fat can’t be mixed with water. The secret of cream is that no fat molecules actually come in contact with any water molecules. Microscopic globules of fat are surrounded by a thin skin of protein molecules, like little balloons. The inner surface of these balloons’ skins is oily and happily socializes with fat; the outer surface of these balloons’ skins is wet, and likes to hang out with water.

Beating the cream smashes these balloons into each other hard enough that the impact can burst the balloons (I had to thin the cream so that the globules could move around more, and get a running start for their impacts). The fat molecules, without their protective skins and surrounded by hostile water molecules, coalesce to try to minimize interaction with water; the lucky fat molecules inside the blob are completely safe, and as the blob grows bigger, the proportion of fat molecules exposed to fat-hating water gets smaller. Continued beating results in one giant fat globule. It’s like the cream solution has turned inside-out: instead of a water-based solution with the fat in protective protein pockets, it is now a blob of fat, with pockets of water and protein.

The chemist’s next goal is to drive all the water and protein away from this fat. A step in this direction is kneading and rinsing. The kneading, with butter paddles, squishes water out of the blob, and it can drain away. Rinsing the blob with cold water, paradoxically, will also remove water from the blob. The blob still contains proteins, from all those balloon skins, and these proteins want to associate with water; in the crowd of fat molecules, the proteins shield themselves with a bodyguard of water molecules. But this is a scary situation for our proteins! Water is getting scarce, and those fat molecules are starting to crowd in. By rinsing, I am offering those proteins and their protective water molecules asylum with their own kind, and they will happily flee the fat blob and join the watery stream—and so our fat becomes butter.

But, butter is relatively impure and still contains some proteins and water. I would like to completely remove these components. I start by melting the blob. It still has a significant amount of water in it; the bubbles that previously held fat in a watery environment have been turned inside out, and hold watery milk in a fatty environment. These bubbles scatter light, so the melted blob is cloudy and opaque. As this is heated above boiling, the water turns into a gas and boils off, and what was once part of my does’ milk is now part of the air I breathe. Those proteins that had been holding on to the water are forlorn; insoluble in fat, and subject to intense heat, they brown and coagulate into chunks that sink.

As the last water joins the air and the last protein falls to the bottom of the pot, only fat remains—pure, beautiful, and transparent, lightly colored and scented from reactions between traces of milk sugar and amino acids, the same reactions that give toast and cooked meat their color. Filtering and cooling gives me ghee, very nearly pure dairy fat. According to my kitchen scale, 46% of the cream I started with is this pure dairy fat (For comparison, “heavy” whipping cream is rather less than 36% fat). There is no protein or aqueous matter to oxidize, so it will last a year without going rancid. The fat molecules are long and saturated, so the ghee can be heated to very high heat without smoking.

The Alchemist

Given my parentage, it’s no surprise that I grew up with children’s science books that mocked alchemists. I remember one had a woodcut showing an alchemist surreptitiously adding gold coins to a reaction that he was performing for a king. Magic, transmutation, the philosophers’ stone—these were things to be mocked, and the only value of the alchemists’ work was technical, preserving the understanding of alembics and stills and the like. Lately, though, thanks to an exhibit at the Getty Center and some reading, I’ve come to a bit more nuanced understanding of the the efforts of alchemists.

From modern science’s point of view, alchemy is silly. There’s no ‘panacea,’ to give eternal life, no Philosophers’ Stone to changes base metal to gold. But alchemy was primarily a spiritual practice, applying medieval theology to the material world; it’s a category error to think of it as a science, in modern terms. Just as the spirit could be chained to this fallen world by the “dirty” body, the essence of gold was trapped in base metals. The alchemist was doing spiritual work by the chemical processes of refining. Transmutation was an allegory for the human condition and aspiration for salvation, an attempt to find human meaning in the behavior of matter.

And so making ghee is an alchemical process. The cream, which contains the pure soul of the milk, rises away from the earthly restraints and wants to ascend towards heaven. I can skim it off, severing some of the ties to the impure body. Some theologians tell us that suffering of the body can help the spirit to reject the body. So I beat the cream, and it begins to reject those remaining impurities. It is a hard process, but so is spiritual purification. Just as immersion the mikveh (ritual bath; or baptism, or immersion in the Ganges) can wash away sins from the newborn soul, so can rinsing the nascent butter with pure water remove trace impurities. The final purification can be achieved by continued physical suffering (malaxage), and through a trial by fire. The soul of the milk enters the pot cloudy and opaque, but the trial of heat drives the last of the earthy impurities away—either into the air, or as something that looks like dirt—and what is left is clear, pure, heavenly gold. This essence, this soul, has magical properties, resisting infernal heat unchanged, and does not decay like ordinary flesh.

Me

Freshly made ghee, still liquid and golden, is magic whether I look at it as chef, chemist, or mystic. It can transport me—to India, in a spice-perfumed butter, or to Nirvana, in a pie crust. Ghee is no less magic even though I know the chemistry that makes it, all the way from air to finished product. My parents absolutely set me on a path to that understanding. I am also grateful that my dad had some adventurousness about food, a willingness to try new processes, and that made it OK for me to explore the world from the kitchen.

However, the mystical magic of ghee, a spiritual story of transmutation and purification, is not something that my parents gave me, directly. I value this understanding: while it doesn’t help me understand why an emulsion breaks, it does make me feel better—about the animals, my relationship with them, the work they do, and the work that I do. I don’t think my parents would particularly care for ghee-making as a spiritual allegory, any more than they cared for alchemy. But, despite how they raised me, my mind is also comfortable working in that allegorical, symbolic, morally and spiritually colored mode. The important thing is, they knew that about me, accepted it, and nurtured it. The fact that they were tolerant of that aspect of my personality, and nurtured it despite not really understanding it, is something I am grateful for—along with a nice pair of butter paddles.