How 350 Tons Of Traditional French Butter Is Made Every Year | Big Batches | Insider Food

Since 1927, Maison Bordier in Saint-Malo, France, has been handcrafting these specialty batters using local ingredients and centuries-old techniques. With a small staff, the workshop shapes up to 20,000 mini batters a day and sells 350 tons of batter a year to 30 countries. Today, Vincent Philippe, a 20-year employee, leads the daily operations. We visited the workshop at Maison Bordier to see how this batter is made in such big batches. Making the batter begins off-site. To make a metric ton of batter, Vincent fills the churn with 2,400 liters of cream. As the churn spins, the fat collides and sticks together, forming butter grains. After 30 minutes of spinning, the churn is opened and inspected. Vincent then cleans the butter grains with the filtered buttermilk, and the churn is left to run for another 15 to 30 minutes until all of the grains become a single mound of batter. But before the batter can be kneaded, it's left to rest for a couple of days to develop flavor. At the Maison du Beurre, or batter house, 50-kilogram blocks of batter are unwrapped and sliced into smaller pieces. The batter is kneaded with a wooden roller on a rotating table, using a 19th-century technique known as malaxage. This removes the excess buttermilk and creates a silky-smooth texture. It was introduced into the process by Maison Bordier's founder, Jean-Yves Bordier. We work on a wooden platform and cylinder that is a material that is easy to recover in nature, but we work on a very, very hard, exotic wood, and it won't stick to the butter. So when it goes between the two, it will crush it, it will soften it, and it's really the advantage of being able to work it by hand. And Thomas, on the malaxer, on his working day, At larger workshops, centrifuges are typically used to remove the remaining buttermilk, but here it is done entirely by hand. This process requires so much skill that Bordier requires people to apprentice for a year. So we will really adapt to each malaxage. We are lucky. So to understand today's butter, we have to go back to last week. What was the cow eating? What kind of weather was it? How did it feel? And we will have butter that will evolve as the seasons go on. You have to learn it in a year, because you have to at least go through all the seasons to understand how it reacts between winter, spring, summer and autumn. The knowledge. The final step is adding fine salt. The first reaction that the salt will trigger is that we will have the moisture that will come out of the butter. So you see, our butter, very, very quickly today, will cry. That is to say that the salt will bring around it During this process, the butter will lose one to two liters of water. When the butter has reached the right level of flexibility, it's shaped into a block, cut and checked for color. To check the color of our butter, we're going to make a cut inside the block and we're going to look if we don't have soft butter that hasn't received the salt well. So here I'm making a cut in the block to check for color, that there are no strata, lighter yellow, ivory yellow, which would correspond to being the soft butter, the soft butter that comes from the cube. And we check in several cuts if we don't have grains, and if you want to realize that we're not used to it. When the butter reaches the ideal consistency, it's ready to be shaped. The kneaded butter is placed into this machine, called the pusher. The pusher squeezes the butter through a cylinder and onto a table, where it's sliced with a guitar string cutter nicknamed Marie Antoinette. The cut butter is shaped with titanium paddles by a team that works up to 5 tons of butter a day. Over the course of a week, we're going to serve 300 to 400 restaurateurs in bulk. And it's going to go to 30 countries around the world. We're going to be able to make creameries, but we're also going to make mini table butters for the restaurant, where the customer will choose the salt content. Another signature of Bordier is its use of stamps. We're also going to work on ultra-personalised butters, by stamping our butters with the logo of a restaurant. Here you can see our B, the B of Maison Bordier. The stamp will be made by a craftsman and sculpted by someone who has a training in fine arts. All stamps are made manually, in a wooden frame so that they don't stick to the butter. Bordier makes around 13 different butter recipes throughout the year. We're going to have seasonal butters, especially for the summer. The butter we'll have this summer is a recipe we made with tomato and basil. We're also working on specific butter recipes for one or two customers, and we're going to adapt the measurements to the widest possible range. Some of the most popular flavors Bordier makes are seaweed butter, smoked salt butter, vanilla butter, and espelette pepper butter. But, true to form, each of these butters can be slightly adapted depending on the request. Here we have a customer who asked for a butter with espelette pepper with a specific amount of espelette pepper, for example. After tasting, we'll look for spices and here you can see this beautiful granulated color. The espelette pepper gives the color, the taste, the smell. There's no aroma, no color, just butter and espelette pepper. Maison Bordier has also been busy creating new recipes, like this buckwheat-infused butter. We're working on Breton cereals par excellence, and we're working on a cereal that we've roasted. Now that our butter is salted, we're going to sprinkle the buckwheat in this butter, and the buckwheat will infuse and the roasting of the buckwheat will really give all the flavor to our butter. As soon as it is placed on the butter, you already have the impression of being in a creperie in Brittany, because you can already smell the buckwheat, and it's a butter that will be very interesting in terms of cooking. Behind this passion is the previous owner, Jean-Yves, who retired a few years ago. And while he may no longer work in the shop, his philosophy for making a top-tier product remains a powerful tenet. It keeps us in good shape. It's true that when I started working with Jean-Yves Bordier, I was 22 years old, and I spent more time with him than with my own family. So we have relationships already at that time, as we can say, where it's familial, where advice can be taken as advice from a father, from an uncle, from a trainer, from a master of apprenticeship. And at the end of the day, it's the pleasure that customers get buying the butter that motivates Bordier to continue. What I really like is to see the smile on the customer's face or receive the butter. It's exceptional, it's tailor-made, where we respond to the customer's expectations by making specific recipes.