“Say Cheese!” Butter Making inside an Italian Latteria

I am so excited to be sharing this!

A few days ago I met Mr Luigino again, “Il Casaro”, the dairy man and I spent a morning with him in the “latteria”, the dairy of the local village, watching how cheese, cream, butter and ricotta are made using traditional methods.

It was the first time I could actually go inside a local village dairy and see every step of cheese making, it was absolutely fascinating! And the best bit is when you taste the fresh product; freshly made butter and cream are just incredible..not to mention the ricotta.. they have such a deep almost breathtaking flavour.

Latterie are unfortunately slowly disappearing. Up to 30 years ago every village used to have one. Now very few have. Latterie produce what these days we call “slow food”. Cheese and other dairy products are made using traditional and slow methods and they are then sold to the local people of the village and towns nearby, sometimes to shops.

Because of this they will never make large profits and their purpose is to offer the community high quality food,  which is not mass produced and most importantly at zero miles.

Big industries produce large amounts of cheese and dairy products and as their only goal is to make a profit they often exploit animals to produce large amounts of milk very quickly; when profit is the only goal there is often an impact on the taste and the quality of the end product too. Latterie make cheese by collecting the milk from family run farms around them. They use slow and traditional methods and much of the work is done by hand.

Wherever you live I believe we should all, for as much as we can afford it, help in supporting local farms and learn to appreciate and understand good quality food again. This seems to have been lost in the last decades.

On this post I will be showing you what I have learnt about butter making and over the next few days it will be ricotta and then cheese.

Butter can be made in two different ways: by natural surface or by centrifugation of the milk. In the majority of latterie centrifugation is used.

We start off with fresh cream. The heated milk is extracted from the large pan

the cream is separated using centrifugal force through a very powerful machine that spins at an incredible 7000 rpm per minute.

If we disassemble the machine we can see it is made of many cylinders one on top of each other which spin very quickly and allow the separation of the cream separating the fat globules from the rest of the milk suspension and various impurities.

The cream is left overnight and the following morning it is beaten vigorously in a churning cylinder which thickens it up and transforms it into butter.

Butter is then shaped using this traditional wooden butter maker

It is pressed in

It is levelled and cut

And done! The butter we love is ready!

It then needs to be packaged

And sealed

What a cute looking label 🙂

Fabulous work guys! Please let me come to help and not just watch next time! I would enjoy this!

And next time I will show you how ricotta is made!

A huge thanks for time, enthusiasm and generosity goes to:

Latteria di Turrida

CASEIFICIO CARLINI GIOBATTA
Via Montello, 7
33039 Turrida di Sedegliano (UD) -Italy

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