What started out as a busman’s holiday—I needed to develop a cake recipe over a break in New Hampshire last summer—turned into a life-changing adventure. I happened upon Kate’s Real Buttermilk and discovered the magic this old-fashioned substance conjures in baked goods. The commercial stuff sold in most supermarkets as buttermilk? Read the labels—it’s not the liquid that remains after transforming cream into butter. Instead, it’s cultured skim milk with all kinds of thickeners added to stabilize and keep it from separating.
"When you churn cream, the fat globules in the cream collide and the membranes surrounding the globules get stripped off. Those membranes go into the buttermilk, and they contain phospholipids that provide the emulsion stability you need to make a good cake," Robert Bradley, Ph.D., emeritus professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained when I described the night/day results I’d achieved with Kate’s.
Indeed, Kate's Buttermilk turned my yellow cake—Gourmet Live's first-birthday cake, in fact—into something so dreamy, I had to hunt down the source of this incredible product. That led me directly to Daniel Patry, founder of Kate’s Homemade Butter in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. And as I learned, you can't talk buttermilk without talking butter.
Patry has been making slow-churned butter in small batches for more than 30 years—initially as a hobby, which in 1981 spawned a start-up—in what was originally the garage of his home. For decades, Patry focused on the butter, keeping only as much of the leftover buttermilk as his wife might want for baking. But over time, this entrepreneur recognized a business opportunity in a by-product too good to discard. When Patry’s youngest son, Lucas, joined the family business in 2005, fresh from two years on an Alpine farm making cheese and butter, the two of them developed and fine-tuned the buttermilk, culturing it to give it body and a refreshing flavor—tasty enough to drink—plus a longer shelf life. “When we stir up the tank once the culture is set, it has such a nice aroma,” waxes Patry. “Oh, it’s beautiful. I love the stuff.”
Even though the culturing process is simple in concept, Patry details a series of steps as well as precautions taken to prevent bacterial contamination. “You’ve got to be 100 percent clean,” he notes, to meet stringent sanitary standards. When asked why other dairies don’t bottle and sell their real buttermilk, Patry contends, “I don’t think they want the headache. It’s a lot easier to dump skim milk in a tank and culture it than it is to do what we do.”
Patry is no less finicky about his butter. Kate’s doesn’t hold its product longer than two weeks, whereas large commercial dairies may store their butter in freezers for months, then run it through machines to soften and repackage it. “Take a piece of our butter,” says Patry proudly, “and let it melt in your mouth, and you will see that you get a nice, clean taste—no grease, no aftertaste. If you eat some of theirs, you’ll get a greasy taste.” Butter, being neutral, easily absorbs flavors around it. That’s why Kate’s has traditionally wrapped its product in foil—and, in a recent innovation, plastic tubs. Multiple tests within the industry have proven that foil is better than wax parchment paper at protecting butter, but it’s expensive, so many dairies stick with paper. Not Patry. And the awards won by his butter (2006, 2008) and buttermilk (2009) at the important World Dairy Expo are a testament to his standards.
Cows and cream are in Patry’s genes. His grandfather and uncle were dairy farmers in Minot, Maine, about 40 miles northwest of Portland, and Patry worked at his uncle’s side in his youth. That’s how he first learned to make butter, a hobby he continued until launching Kate’s Homemade Butter, named for a niece whose likeness continues to adorn their packaging. Truly a cottage industry, Kate’s was first staffed by Patry’s wife, Karen, and mother-in-law, while Patry kept his day job at nearby Oakhurst Dairy. Patry would haul home gallons of Oakhurst cream for the daily butter production. The handcut and handwrapped 1-pound blocks would go back with Patry to Oakhurst the next morning, for distribution within the state. Back then, the profits were literally butter money for his wife and mother-in-law—not enough to support the family.
Today, the family business churns 1,000 gallons of cream at a time—that’s still considered small-batch—into approximately 4,000 pounds of butter and about 500 gallons of buttermilk and then distributes the products itself. The buttermilk is sold as far south as Georgia and as far west as Chicago, where another shipper ferries it to Las Vegas restaurants. Growth is on the horizon, as the Patrys ready an 18,000-square-foot production facility in nearby Arundel.
According to the family story, when Patry decided to bring the buttermilk to market in 2008, he mused that the day might even come when demand for the buttermilk would drive the making of the butter. “It’s so unique,” says Patry of the buttermilk. “I wish I could have recorded all the calls I’ve gotten from people who just made a cake with it, or fried chicken or whatever, and they just couldn’t believe it would make that much difference.”
Just as I was convinced by my experience with Kate’s when developing my cake recipe this summer, Agnes Devereux, owner of the Village Tea Room in New Paltz, New York, swears by it for her own chocolate buttermilk cake. It’s been on her menu since she opened up shop in 2004, she tells me, but two years ago she discovered Kate’s Real Buttermilk and instantly tasted how much fudgier her cake was when made with the real deal. Up in Kate’s country, James Beard Award–winning chef Sam Hayward of Portland, Maine’s Fore Street swears by Kate’s “unbelievable” buttermilk at the restaurant and at home. “It’s got a very different taste. When you make a sherbet, which we do, with the real buttermilk, it’s such an incredible product—the flavors are just out of this world, and the layers of flavors and nuance and subtlety are incredible.… I swear there’s a different enzymatic quality to the milk because of what it does, especially to baked goods.“
Patry works 20-hour days, so when I finally tracked him down by phone, he was at the airport en route to Aruba for a well-earned vacation with his wife. My profuse apologies for the intrusion got the response of a true entrepreneur: “I have no problem talking to someone on my vacation,” Patry said. “I tell my wife, I like my vacation, but I miss my work, too. It’s a job, but it isn’t a job.” Sounds familiar, I thought—kind of like my lucky baking project and buttermilk awakening in New Hampshire last summer.…
Kemp Minifie was wrapped up in all aspects of food at Gourmet magazine for 32 years, and is now part of the Gourmet Live team. For more tried and tested tips and tricks, check out her Kemp’s Kitchen column on the Gourmet Live blog.