casein/lactose intolerance: how to do aged butter with an amazing blue cheese flavour - add fun to diet if milk-product intolerant or eating ketogenic

[Lolinda]

I am intolerant to casein and lactose. Any milk product causes bad reactions in me except cultured butter (that butter with the slightly sour taste. Most butter sold in Europe is cultured. I heard elsewhere you need to search for that).

Now, how to enjoy a marvellous blue cheese flavour inspite of all these intolerances?
This post is not about any health improvement, but about a little happiness in life inspite of being sick. Yes, one can go to culinary heights of top restaurants (named below) using simple means at home, accidently discovered. Enjoy

Essence:

• I simply left 4 blocks of cultured butter in one of my fridges for 3 months. 2 of these blocks spontaneously developed this deli taste.
• I do not think this much time is needed if one inoculates the butter.
• To spread the taste, I inoculated now further blocks of butter using the two blocks that have the blue cheese taste.
• I think of buying some flavourful fermented cheese varieties and inoculate further pieces of butter using these.
• Penicillium funghi and certain bacteria do this fermentation for the blue cheese taste. As they must feed on something, I fathom these microbes will have further reduced the lactose and casein contents. ➞ Good for me . I wish I had data on this!!

Details - being a researcher I love to document things in painstaking detail so anyone can reproduce:

• The label of the butter states per 100g: 0.5g milk sugar; 0.5g protein, 82g fat.
• The temperature in this fridge was quite warm at 10°C. This might have been the essential point for success as a blue cheese artisan describes the details. He recommends 13°C (the temperature of a wine cooler) as the ideal growth temperature. (Apart from that, he also stresses moisture. Butter has around 15% water. He further mentions pinching air holes for oxygen flow. Maybe this can speed up my process in the future)
• The best before date of the butter is 1 month. So the butter is now 2 months over that.
• The butter blocks were wrapped in some thin foil (looks like aluminium foil with plastic on the inside). This is how they were sold and this is the way most butters are sold here.
• This wrapping is not vacuum sealed, it will correspond to "partial vacuum" (see below).
• Surprisingly, the butter did not go rancid, except for a very thin dark-yellow discoloration on some parts of the surface where the foil wrapping can be opened, thus some minute amounts of oxygen will have sneaked in. I did not feel any rancid flavour, to which I am extremely sensitive. See below for details on rancidity.
• I am intolerant to all probiotics, but this aged butter did not cause any probs, inspite of obviously being fermented.
• As I am "intolerant to everything", I was utmost careful to make sure that I do not suffer harm: first only a pinch, then two pinches, ... until I arrived at 50g today. No detrimental effects whatsoever.

I am so happy to have brought back some flavour into my life... I loved tasty blue cheese when I was healthy!! Happy memories of my past come back...

(Back to present-day reality: my aged butter is not so photogenic like this Roquefort. No blue spots, but looks almost like ordinary butter)

Now I asked myself: Did I get insane or do other people do this too??
Leaving the 4 blocks of butter in the fridge for months was an unintended side effect of an experiment to switch entirely to olive oil and coconut fat (which failed for me). But yes, there are scientific experimenters, traditional food eaters in Marocco and renowned NY chefs who age butter on purpose...

• A fancy butter aging experiment exploring variousest conditions for 45 days. Note that the partial vacuum + darkness got the blue cheese flavour. They did not get the aroma. Interestingly, my conditions got the aroma, too. Maybe this is due to the differences that my butter was aged much longer or that it was cooled?
• In Morocco, highly-prized ‘smen’—or as it is sneeringly called in French, beurre rance—is made by mixing normal butter with herb-infused water (often with oregano), leaving it overnight, straining, and then aging for anywhere between a couple of months and several decades. It has a texture similar to that of normal butter but tastes like a spicy blue-cheese or Parmesan rind. The oft-recounted story is that families would make a batch of smen on the day their daughter was born, and only open it to stir through the ceremonial couscous on the day of her wedding
• Looking for more contemporary examples, since starting the project I found that Zak Pelaccio from Restaurant Fish and Game in the Hudson Valley, NY, ages butter brushed with local whiskey and wrapped in horseradish or turmeric leaves, so it takes on a gaminess and sherry-like nuttiness, and then whips it with fresh yoghurt. Furthermore, Matt Lightner from Atera in New York ages butter made from cream cultured with cheese rind for a week at room temperature.

I always check if there is a health risk. So is there maybe more than that tiny rancidity I saw as discoloration on the surface?

• Most importantly:
  We corroborated these results with TBARS tests that showed only very tiny levels of oxidation products for chilled and frozen samples of both the cultured and uncultured butters (TBARS tests are a simple way to measure oxidation products).
  -- So, I will not do what they did in some of their other experiments, to age butter w/o refrigeration, but will continue doing things in my 10°C fridge.
• found a 2011 study by sensory scientists at UC Davis [1] that found that 44% of tasters preferred olive oils with some degree of rancidity, and, furthermore, that one of the compounds found most prominently in rancid butter—butyric acid—is also found in significant amounts in sheep and buffalo milk, and a wide range of cheeses, including Roquefort, Limburger and Gruyère [2].

Have fun inspite of being sick
.... And please leave a post on this thread if you have made some good or bad experiences!! I am utmost curious...

PS: Butter is one of my staples. I am on a very low carb diet, thus eating fats instead of carbs as energy source. In case you are interested, very low carb got me out of a full score ME in 2 weeks. But I need to stick to it as I was so far unable to resolve the underlying issue, which will be something in the small intestine. My colon and the bugs therein are tested healthy. When eating carbs, I have measurements pointing to small intestine probs and I feel badly sick and features of ME reappear.