FEATURES
Sweet Cream Success

by Richard Triumpho

Making the most at Animal Farm

Diane St. Clair’s eight Jersey cows are dry during the hot summer months, when pasture quality declines and fly nuisance is highest. The cows calve at the end of August and early September, when pastures improve in growth. Therefore, St. Clair only makes butter from September through May. Photos by Richard Triumpho.

Diane St. Clair of Animal Farm (www.animalfarmvt.com) in Orwell, Vt., makes farmstead butter with a golden color so sun-drenched that it makes the buttercups in her Vermont fields envious. What makes her handmade, cultured butter so special is her herd of eight Jersey cows. Lightning, Lulu, Keller, Doce, Stella, Hopi, Chino and Dyedee graze on St. Clair’s pastures of native grasses, clover and herbs, producing milk with more butterfat than any other dairy breed. Owner St. Clair milks them herself in a building that was once a horse barn.

At dawn, and again at twilight, St. Clair leads the Jerseys from the pasture to their comfort stalls. The cows munch grain while she milks them one at a time into the stainless steel pail of a milking machine. The cows let down their milk, as much as 50 pounds apiece daily, to the gentle murmuring of the milking pulsator.

Diane St. Clair chose the name Animal Farm on a whim, because her farm is located near the village of Orwell, Vt., and George Orwell wrote the 1945 best-selling novel “Animal Farm.” The “Animal Farm” logo is used on Diane St. Clair’s packages.

“I grew up in Maryland. Although I lived in the city, I wasn’t totally new to farming. I actually did work on a dairy farm as a young girl, and I had horses most of my life,” St. Clair said

She went to college, got a master’s degree in public health and worked in public health in New York City for many years. About 20 years ago she moved to Vermont and worked in public health in Burlington for another six years. Eventually she found what she was looking for in Orwell: this small farm with a barn for her team of draft horses. She called it Animal Farm, after the 1945 best-selling satire by British author Eric Blair, who used the pseudonym George Orwell.

Now that she owned a farmstead with 32 acres of pasture and hay fields, St. Clair thought to herself, “I’ve always loved cows. I should get a family cow.” She bought a Jersey cow from a neighbor. Then the cow had a heifer calf. “You’re not a one-cow person for very long,” St. Clair said.

Diane St. Clair gathers butter with an ice cream scoop and puts the butter rounds in plastic freezer bags.

Before long, St. Clair discovered she had more milk than her family could consume, so she began experimenting with making farmstead butter. By definition, farmstead butter is artisan butter that is made from the producer’s own cows. There are other places in the U.S. that make European-style cultured butter, but they buy their milk, so they are actually factories, not farmsteads.

When St. Clair started, she went online to search for out-of-print books from the late 1800s on homestead butter making. “I found four of them,” she says. “They all tell about how butter was made on the farm, and the temperature cream has to be, and what causes flavors in butter.”

St. Clair realized that with two cows milking she would have butter to sell, but first she had to get her facility, a small room off her farm kitchen, inspected and obtain a Vermont license to operate a creamery. One important requirement was a pasteurizer.

Diane St. Clair washes the butter under cold water to remove all the buttermilk.

“When I started doing this eight years ago, I had a very difficult time trying to locate a small pasteurizer,” St. Clair says. “The smallest commercial one was 15 gallons.” Since her two cows were giving a total of about 10 gallons of milk a day of 5 percent butterfat, when the cream rose to the top there was only a half-gallon of cream to skim off. “When you’re making butter, you can’t hold cream longer than three days,” she points out. In three days she would still have less than 2 gallons of cream; too small of a volume for a 15-gallon pasteurizer. Undaunted, St. Clair knew she would come up with a way to build a small unit that would comply with pasteurized milk ordnance (PMO) regulations.

St. Clair found a welding friend who rose to the challenge. To be PMO legal, a pasteurizer must have three thermometers: a recording thermometer that shows time and temperature; an indicating thermometer; and an air space thermometer. The milk or cream must also be agitated during the pasteurizing process. “My friend took a 2-gallon pot and welded all these openings on the lid—one for the recording thermometer, another for the agitator (with its small electric motor on top) and so on. For the air space heater, I had a teakettle with a rubber hose from the spout to a hole in the lid of the pot. He welded the whole thing for $200. It was ingenious. It was fantastic,” she says. “But, the recording thermometer by itself was another $1,000.

“Now I’ve graduated from that to this 15-gallon pasteurizer that cost $15,000!” St. Clair says of the stainless steel unit that sits in one corner of her brand-new creamery. The building, about 14 feet square, is adjacent to the barn and contains refrigerators, sinks and all her butter-making equipment.

In her return to the farmstead way of making butter, St. Clair uses as little mechanization as possible, so there is no cream separator in her facility. Instead, after the cream rises to the top overnight, she skims it off by hand to keep the fat globules intact. The cream is pasteurized, cultured with St. Clair’s own buttermilk, and then churned in small batches in glass churns, each with a capacity of 2 gallons. When the butter forms, St. Clair strains the buttermilk away and washes the butter in cold water. Then she takes a lump of butter and kneads it by hand on a marble slab to remove the last drops of buttermilk and water. Using an ice cream scoop, she packs scoops of golden butter in ziplock plastic bags, storing the butter in a refrigerator until shipping it out every Tuesday. Her butter sells for $18 a pound.

Diane St. Clair puts the butter in a sieve while she washes the buttermilk away with running cold water.

At the beginning of her venture, St. Clair sold her butter at the farmers’ market in nearby Middlebury. Then celebrity chef Thomas Keller tasted the butter and was so captivated by its delicate flavor that he asked to buy all that she could produce.

St. Clair ships the butter in insulated Styrofoam boxes, with ice bags to keep it cold. One box goes by second-day air to the French Laundry, Keller’s renowned restaurant in the Napa Valley; another box goes overnight to Keller’s New York City restaurant, Per Se, in the Time-Warner Center. A third box ships overnight to a Boston restaurant.

Eight years ago, when St. Clair contemplated producing a farmstead product from the milk of her first two Jersey cows, the thought of creating world-class butter must have seemed like castles in the air. But, as a certain fellow from Concord, Mass., wrote more than 100 years ago, that’s where castles belong; all you need to do is build your foundations under them.

The author is a freelance contributor based in St. Johnsville, N.Y. Comment or question? Visit www.farmingforumsite.com and join in the discussions.