Sonoma chef offers creative takes on butter

Prepare to have your mind blown by butter.

We’re not talking ordinary run-of-the mill butter. Think candy-bar butter. Jelly-Belly butter. Butters made with chile crisp and mango chutney.

These butters, and many more, are the brainchild of Sheana Davis, the Sonoma Valley chef, cheesemaker and now, buttermonger, which also happens to be the title of her new cookbook. Butter is also the subject of a series of cooking classes she’s hosting at her warehouse space on Eighth Street in Sonoma and at pop-ups around the town of Sonoma and beyond.

Her butter-making classes aren’t the “shake-a-Mason-jar-until-your-arms-are-about-to-fall-off” variety from pioneer days in elementary school. Far from it.

Davis, her husband, Ben Sessions, and assistant Lulu Barroso lead classes that use food processors to quickly take quarts of fresh Clover cream on the journey from liquid to whipped cream to a really thick whipped cream similar to mascarpone and then, at last, to butter (with tasting stops along the way, of course), so participants can get to the really good part: making their own dairy-fat dreams come true.

“I want you to use the spices in your kitchen cabinet or the jelly you have and make what you enjoy,” Davis said.

A lifelong Sonoma resident, Davis has been making cheese and teaching cheesemaking classes at Epicurean Connection for years. Butter always has been a part of her business. Now she’s finally highlighted her love for cheese’s creamy cousin with “Buttermonger,” a cookbook she collaborated on with her daughter, Karina, who lives in Santa Cruz.

Like so many recent cookbooks, the project is a product of the pandemic. The two worked on it together for a year, mostly during Sunday chats on Zoom when the pandemic kept them physically apart.

“It was a way to hang out,” Karina said. “She’s always worked in the food world, so we’ve always hung out in a kitchen. This was a way to connect over food with the hope of offering something to the community afterwards.”

Although the pandemic gave Davis the time to make the book happen, it’s a project she’s been working on, subconsciously perhaps, for most of her life.

“I went to go to dairy school (at Santa Rosa Junior College) and that program had been canceled at the JC when I went, so I morphed into culinary arts,” she said. “Most of my projects were about butter and cheese. I did my graduate project on compound butters.”

Her history with butter goes back even further than that. When she was in high school, she’d hop on a bus to Glen Ellen, where she worked for M.F.K. Fisher, the legendary food writer who made her final home at what is now Bouverie Preserve.

Davis did culinary odds and ends for Fisher, like wrapping bouquet garnis and learning to peel and perfectly poach asparagus before tying the spears into bundles with chives. As a typical teenager, Davis thought that task was a drag. Now she recalls her lack of appreciation with a wicked sense of humor.

“I had no clue who she was,” Davis said, emphasizing there was no Google back in the ’80s. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have been a lot less surly. I’m like, ‘Seriously? You want me to tie a bow with a chive?’”

Scouting for inspiration

Davis and Fisher would take walks on the property to pick sorrel to make a compound butter with the leafy, somewhat sour herb, an experience Davis recounts in the cookbook.

While Davis has been making compound butters her entire career, her leap into novelty butters began last year when divine inspiration hit during Girl Scout cookie season.

“It really started out as somewhat of a dare,” she said. “We had the pile of cookies, and I was like, ‘I think I’m going to try making a cookie butter.’ I made butter with every cookie and paired them with wine at La Prenda (Winery).”

The butters were a huge hit at the winery. She’s since experimented with candy-bar butters, including a butter made with Junior Mints and a Violet Crumble butter in which the chocolate-dipped honeycomb adds fun texture.

“It turned out divine,” she said about the Junior Mint butter. “My husband’s like, ‘Please don’t make that and bring it home.’”

Davis also has been making butters with Jelly Belly candies, which she’ll offer at a free tasting on April 22 at Tiddle E. Winks Vintage 5 & Dime near the Sonoma Plaza. When she told the Jelly Belly company about her creations, they offered to send their dancing Jelly Belly mascot for the event.

Of course, living in Wine Country means Davis creates plenty of gourmet and seasonal butters, too. Her pinot noir-cherry butter is one of her most popular flavors. She uses it to sear strips of filet mignon, which she piles, still rare, on a brioche roll. It’s “deliciousness” and “heaven,” she said.

One of her favorite recent creations for a catering event was a butter she made with duck rillete and blackberry-pomegranate jam, which she served on walnut crostini. Pass the baguette!

Keeping it real

Davis has developed compound butters for restaurants and wineries around the country, including for Napa’s Bread & Butter Wines in what is perhaps the most synergistic marketing match of all time.

Bread & Butter distributes their wines widely to mass retailers from Sonoma to Schenectady (that’s New York), which drove Davis to do research at Target and Walmart stores to see how people shopped for bread, so she could make recipes for Bread & Butter that would have wide appeal.

“We wanted to pick a bread that’s universal across the country and available to every consumer,” she said. That took all the great local breads in Sonoma County out of the running. “We used Dave’s (Killer) Bread, Hawaiian rolls, potato bread, sourdough bread. My favorite was crushed pineapple butter served on a Hawaiian roll, with the option to add a slice of ham, and it’s delicious.”

She even knocked on a neighbor’s door to see what was in his fridge, all in the name of research, not nosiness, to learn what less-food-focused people have to work with if they want to make their own butters.

“I don’t want to be pretentious,” Davis said. “I want it to be approachable and have fun.”

Davis also wants to make sure her butter-making classes are accessible to as many people as possible, not just well-heeled tourists looking to fill time between wine tastings. She’s offering an upcoming class at the Sonoma Community Center that’s a fraction of the cost of her normal classes, with proceeds going back to the center’s culinary programs.

She also makes sure women seeking help from the YWCA can attend her classes for free, and she recently hosted the LGBTQ teen art club and helped them make butter that they decorated with edible glitter and flowers.

At the end of each class, participants have a couple butters to take home and ideas to use them. Davis is a big proponent of using compound butters to saute proteins, like the chicken she cooked in mango-chutney butter and served over rice and vegetables for a quick, flavorful lunch.

In an effort to be a zero-waste enterprise, Davis often sells her excess whey from cheesemaking to the Clif company, and they use it to make protein bars.

Similarly, the buttermilk left behind in the butter-making process can be used to make pancakes or biscuits or brine chicken.

Davis makes butter at home, too. A quart of cream quickly becomes a canvas for any craving she might have. A constant staple is a lemon-pepper butter.

“That’s my on-the-road butter, because I can always find lemons and pepper,” she said.

Like many of us, Davis relies on toast as a quick morning staple. For that there’s cinnamon butter to spread on raisin bread, or another obsession:

“Lemon-curd butter is on my toast. It’s like a fluffy lemon dream.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.