I finally made it to the Butter Museum today that's been taunting me since I first arrived. They run a weekly butter making demonstration on Saturdays at noon. On top of being an excellent demonstration to attend I can also definitively say that I have never once known nor thought so much about butter before in my life.

The butter making began with churning a small container of creme, the fatty part of milk that was originally scooped off large pots as it separated in a process that could potentially take days. Luckily, we only had to make a third gallon or so and could easily control the temperature. After some time churning, the butter almost instantly changed form, coagulating into a wet butter mass in a sea of buttermilk. Fresh buttermilk in fact tastes like milk and butter, neither being flavors that I particularly enjoy, and stays with you for the next hour.

The picture shows the next step in the butter process. The coagulated butter is drained and washed with water repeatedly, leaving behind pitchers of more and more diluted buttermilk. After washing and squeezing the butter with paddles to remove as much excess watery buttermilk as possible, I finally got to try the fresh butter on some soda bread. Excellent texture, mild flavor (unlike the buttermilk), perfectly complementary, and worth running across the city for.

Irish butter, specifically from Cork and Kerry County, was world famous in the early 1800s, being shipped all the way to the Americas and even Australia using high percentages of salt (~30%) as a preservative. Across the street from the museum is the old center of the southern Ireland butter trade, a grand circular structure since destroyed in a fire and now acting as a performance hall. This butter market linked farmers with merchants through standardizing quality and price. Its downfall was a consequence of the invention and introduction of steam powered mechanical churning machine which led to consolidated creameries.

Other historical fun facts I learned include the widespread norm for old Irish kings to plan cattle raids in a culture that strongly tied personal worth and triumph to ownership of dairy cows. And the preservation of butter underground within decomposition limiting bogs. Unfortunately for my modern palate, this butter was often strongly flavored with garlic because it would go rancid!