I want people to have that experience of a great tasting Australian butter that's full
of tang and creaminess. Hi I'm Pierre from Pepisea Handmade Cultured Butter. Cultured
Butter is where you get fresh cream from the farm. You culture it with a lactic culture
and let it ferment. So this is the cultured cream. This has been fermenting for 15 hours
and it's got a lactic culture in there that basically eats up all the sugar in the cream
and the bacteria can grow. This process between 15 to 20 hours depending on the cream and we use
a very very nice farm cream for this particular butter. The butter all came about because of my
passion for cream. I work with a lot of cream products, custards and mousses and just playing with
cream all day long got me interested in how how cream can be stored how you can prolong the life
of cream and then the obvious answer was butter that's the only way to do it. We wanted something
very unique and drawing from my childhood watching my grandfather spread butter like cheese on his
bread. I always thought of that he used to call me peppy and it just made sense at the time when
we made the butter to call it peppy. Pepisea's butter. It's unique because there's not a lot
of people in Australia that are making cultured butter. There are a handful of people making
cultured butter and what's really unique is that it's all handmade which I don't believe there's
many companies out there doing that. So basically after turning the butter then we strain it and we
get all that buttermilk out. It's a very messy process but that's the joy. So after we put it
in here we let it strain and then we wash the butter. We wash the butter with pure water and let
all the buttermilk out of it because the buttermilk we believe, well I believe, paints the flavour of
the butter. And then this buttermilk we sell it off to the markets and people buy it to make pancakes
out of it. And then once this process is strained then we pretty much hand work the butter and need
it. So we knead the butter on a table and so it becomes butter. As you can see it all starts to
sink together but it's full of buttermilk at the moment. You can sort of see that running out. So
we want to get all that out. Butter generally enhances the flavour of food but when you use
the cultured butter for your cooking it gives it a great flavour. Those characteristics of a
cultured butter like the hanginess, the creaminess really transfer into the food you're cooking.
The best way to store it is leave it in the fridge in the oil or you can take it out of the
oil, put it on a butter dish and then gladruth it. That's the best way to do it. Cultured fresh
butter generally lasts for three months or 90 days. But it does tend to oxidise if light comes
onto it or it's not sealed properly.
Perpese is cultured salted butter. It's salted with two salts, Australian salts. Olsen's dairy
salt and the other one is the Murray River Basin pink salt which is a finishing salt. So when
we need our butter we need it with the Olsen's dairy salt and then to finish it off we pat on
the Murray River Basin pink salt. After the butter's worked and needed we weigh it and then we
roll it up and then it goes straight into these moulds and we actually hand wrap the butter and
we press it by hand. It's quite a unique way of doing it. My dad made me these moulds at his
workshop. There's probably a machine that would do this for me about a thousand a minute or
something but anyway this is how we do it. This is definitely a labour of love. We artisan products,
you work 12 hours a day, quite low pay. You've got to get a lot of people interested in your
product to buy it to make any money out of it. But what gets me up in the morning is definitely
getting in there and smelling those beautiful cultured creams and churning it, watching the
cream change from white to yellow and you know playing with the butter itself actually.
The highlight is making an amazing butter that people actually like. I'm humbled by the fact
that people say hey your butter tastes amazing. Pepe Sayer is an alter ego. Pepe Sayer is a connoisseur
of fine food. He was named after me as Pepe was my nickname as a child.
