Madeleine Butter make a range of cultured butters, including salted, unsalted, smoked salt and seaweed. Cultured butter is created by fermenting the cream before churning it to create the butter (read more about cultured butter). Starting with grass-fed, Jersey-cow cream from Gippsland, they ferment, churn, ‘malax’ and then shape each individual portion by hand.

‘Malaxing’ is done using a ‘malaxar’, a historic machine which separates the buttermilk from the butter. A malaxer fundamentally comprises a flat table and a corrugated rolling pin and the butter is kneaded, massaged and folded as it passes under the pin. Using a malaxer is labour intensive and time consuming, so most dairies don’t use one – they instead squeeze their butter within a churn. Madeleine Butter believes, however, that the hands-on practice of a malaxer produces superior flavours and texture. Because malaxers are now only available as antiques, Madeleine Butter have built their own. Read more about malaxers.

Founder Jack Gaffney is inspired by historic and contemporary butter making techniques and the complex and diverse small-batch butters of France. Having fallen in love with butter, he moved to Brittany to study his passion, before returning to Melbourne to set up Madeleine Butter.