Olivia Morrison is giving Tasmanians a culinary trip down memory lane with her new cultured butter company, Tasmanian Butter Co.
From the outside, Olivia’s double-storey brick home is no different from the houses surrounding it in a narrow and busy Trevallyn street in Northern Tasmania.
Tucked away in the garage however, is a newly constructed butter factory; humble like its owner.
As we enter the small white room that was an old laundry just months ago, Olivia hands me a hair net and some blue shoe covers.
The cold, hospital-grade space is offset by Olivia’s warmth. On one bench sit four buckets of fermenting cream that will be turned into delicious slabs of cultured butter in the days to come.
Over the whirring of machinery, Olivia recounts the 14-month-long journey of setting up Tasmanian Butter Co.
“Up until now I’ve been working in IT,” she says.
“I didn’t feel like I could sit in front of a computer forever and this is something I’ve always been interested in, plus we live in Tasmania so there’s lots of good food around.”
The transition between the two careers involved hours of researching, learning, picking other producers’ brains and experimenting.
“I’d hate to think how many kilos of butter we made over the 14 months trying to get it right,” she says.
“We experimented with using different local creams and fermenting the cream at different temperatures. We found that the lower the temperature, the longer the cream takes to ferment and therefore it develops really nice rich, buttery flavours.”
Having the time to experiment like this, Olivia says, is a luxury that many commercial producers don’t have because it costs money.
The best combination is a temperature-controlled 22-degree ferment lasting 24 hours, during which time the bacteria eat up all the lactose in the cream and produce lactic acid, giving Tasmanian Butter Co. its distinctive tangy flavour.
“I’ll check the PH of this batch of cream tomorrow to make sure it’s done its thing and then I’ll pop it in the refrigerator and churn it in my mixer, 20 litres at a time,” Olivia explains.
“Then we’ll hand-press the buttermilk out and salt it, then it goes back in the churn and we’ll knead it again and then package it, so it takes a bit of time,” she laughs.
Olivia and her husband Rob have sold their butter at the Launceston Harvest Market since early July and the customer response has been overwhelming.
“People say it’s the best butter in the world and that it reminds them of when they were a kid and they used to make butter at home,” she says, with a hint of disbelief in her voice.
“It tastes the same because if you have a house cow and you’re getting your own cream, the bacteria in the environment is the same bacteria that we use, so naturally it cultures and then the butter is churned.
“So the taste that you would have been getting back then is sort of like what you’re getting with our butter. You’re having the milk pasteurised, which is getting rid of everything and then we add the bacteria back in.”
In preparation for their first market day, Olivia made a 50kg batch and they went through nearly a whole kilo just in samples.
Since then, she has been making a double batch to match the demand of their customers, but it’s still not quite enough.
“I don’t actually know how much more I could make,” she says, looking around in dismay, “If the business got any bigger, I probably couldn’t make it here.”
Having an in-house factory is important, because Olivia has to check the cream’s fermentation process every six hours.
“I kind of just want to keep it how it is, selling to local providores and markets,” she says placing a tray of freshly packaged butter for tomorrow’s market in the fridge.
Market day is not simply about exchanging shiny gold-wrapped slabs for money, but also encouraging closer relationships between consumers and producers, she says.
After growing tired of the big supermarket monopoly and their treatment of producers, Olivia has been sourcing all her food from local farmer’s markets, grocers and small businesses for over two years.
For Olivia, making butter from locally-sourced cream and Tasmanian sea salt to sell at markets is only natural. “It’s nice to know where your food comes from and how it’s produced.”
This article was first published in Lume Magazine, February 2017.
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