Smen – Moroccan Butter

Smen is Morocco’s funky fermented butter that lasts for years! Morocco doesn’t have much of a dairy tradition, but there’s one exception that dates back centuries: It’s called smen, and it’s a stinky, fermented butter made from sheep, goat, or cow milk.

Tucked away in the heart of the Fez medina, there’s a whole square dedicated to smen. Walk-in, and you immediately get a strong whiff of butter. Vendors in Qaat Smen, or Smen Square, are part of families who have been making it for centuries. More recently, they’ve added honey, olive oil, and khliyah — a rich, flavorful dried meat swimming in lard — to their wares. It’s sort of “preserved stuff” square at this point, but it was smen that started it all.

Like Indian ghee, smen evolved as a way to keep a tasty cooking fat around for a long time. But while ghee is clarified to remove the milk solids and moisture, smen is fermented — which gives it its funky, cheesy aroma.

Smen is sold widely in Morocco — including in mass-produced plastic containers in supermarkets. Moroccans use it in cooking (particularly for making couscous), spread it on bread, and even put it in coffee! Because it’s filling and energy-dense, it’s also much employed during Ramadan. Just like a fine wine that’s been allowed to age, smen is also used during special occasions, including weddings and funerals.

So how did the Moroccans decide to ferment their butter?

Before pasteurization became the widespread technique to keep milk fresh, most milk quickly turned sour. But the acidity that forms in sour milk actually protects the milk — and butter — from bad bacteria.

That lactic acid is the very thing that gives smen its blue cheese-like scent, and it’s what keeps it from going rancid.  The salt also preserves it, as does storing it in airtight containers. (There’s a legend that Berber tribesmen would bury a clay jar of the smen underground on the day of a daughter’s birth and unearth it for use on her wedding day.)

It is a simple process by putting milk in a goat hide and kneading it until it turns to butter. You then wash it and add salt. Then,

put it in a barrel and wait one or two years. The longer you let smen sit, the better — and the more expensive it gets (the average price is a few dollars for 5 ounces). The recipes for making smen vary from family to family, location to location, and cook to cook.

The smen that was a couple of years old tasted a lot like sharp blue cheese. But the older “vintage” (six years or more) was, surprisingly, much smoother, with less of an edge in the nose. Of course, butter that hasn’t fermented at all is smooth, but the old smen had a sophisticated, stinky smoothness.

Smen from Smen Square is assured to be free of artificial preservatives and made with pure milk, one of the reasons people still come here to buy it.

You can’t get the aged stuff at the supermarkets, and the mass-produced smen’s texture is a bit thinner and less rich – sort of like the stinky whipped margarine.

It is certainly a fascinating process to make smen!