Ohiofarmgirl's Adventures in The Good Land is largely a fish out of water tale about how I eventually found my footing on a small farm in an Amish town. We are a mostly organic, somewhat self sufficient, sustainable farm in Ohio. There's action and adventure and I'll always tell you the truth about farming.


Tuesday, May 14, 2013

How to Make Butter

The other morning I stumbled out into the kitchen to find my precious half gallon of cream sitting on the counter - not in the fridge. The cream had been sitting out all nite. It was only half used so someone around here, who is not me, was In Trouble. Dang.

Arty butter making picture.

So instead of getting mad I just got busy and made butter. Can you make butter at home? Sure! It's so easy peasy you might never buy regular butter again.  Why go thru "all that trouble" to make butter? Um... it's no trouble, it's fun, and you get a superior product.

All you need to make butter at home. Or a jar. You could use just a jar and shake it.

Most instructions say to let the cream come up to room temperature and since that was already done I just dumped the whole thing into my mixer with the balloon whisk attachment. Then I just turned it on low and walked away. But don't go too far! You need to watch or listen for it to be done.


Pretty soon you'll get whipped cream... then you are getting closer to butter...


You are even closer still when it starts to get grainy....

Done!

And then finally it "breaks" - this is when the butter fat all clumps together and the liquid separates. You can hear this happen - when the mixer starts to slosh around - so run right over and turn the speed way down.

I let it mix a minute more just until the butter all formed up on the whisk.

Pour off the "butter milk" and put the butter into a sieve so you can "wash" it with cold water. You want the water to run clear. This sounds weird but it totally works. Use a spoon to kind of squish the butter around to make sure all the liquid releases.

You get butter and butter milk (not the cultured kind) that can be used for cooking.

Then the only thing to do is get some radishes and dig in.

See? Making your own butter is easy and fun. You don't need special equipment - you can even just shake it in a jar (or get the kids to do it).

One thing to be on the look out for - check the label on your cream. Is it JUST cream - or are there stabilizers in it? Check the label to make sure it just has cream in it.

If you think it's weird that the cream in your coffee isn't just cream - remember that some folks still want the FDA to allow aspartame and other weird stuff to be added to dairy products WITHOUT LABELING IT. That's right - your kid's chocolate milk could be chock full of who knows what if this passes. Maybe you should run right over and tell them what you think.

So there you have it - how to make butter at home. It's fun and easy!

Happy Tuesday everyone! Did you find your cream sitting on your counter? Don't get mad just make some butter.

5 comments:

buddeshepherd said...

Your post struck me as funny. Something about lemons and lemonade. Only it would be if someone leaves the lemonade out you can make lemons, but that joke doesn't really work. Perhaps I should not post before I wake up. Perhaps I should get up earlier.
Perhaps it is all that radiation from Japan affecting me. Perhaps it is global warming. Perhaps I need more coffee. Perhaps I just don't want to plant corn today.

Unknown said...

great tutorial. I don't have a mixer, so I've used a jar in the past, but lately I've been too lazy and I've been using all the cream from our cow to make ice cream instead :) good point about the additives in cream, it drives me made if I ever have to buy cream, trying to find just cream and not thickeners and stabalisers. Just indicates to me that the cream is being made from inferior quality, nothing beats fresh cream from our cow!

Anonymous said...

Ahh! Love my Snowville! I was so excited when I finally got my stand mixer b/c I could make butter in no time!

Do you have their cookbook? It's full of lots of yummy yummy stuff.

-Kala

David said...

I've done this in a food processor - it took about 30 seconds. And the butter, mixed with garden herbs, formed into logs, wrapped and frozen were a treat for moths to come. There really is no comparison between this and store butter!

Ohiofarmgirl said...

Budd, i totally make lemons out of left out cream... hey...there could be a lemon pie in there somewhere... hum... and yeah i'm guessing the radiation is getting you. ;-)

thanks Liz! i love that you are making ice cream - yay! the more food we "make" the less i'm interested in store food, for sure.

hey Kala! YES i love the cookbook! i have some pages marked for things to try. we really love their products - what a great company!

yep, David, i saw that the food processor makes short work of this. what a great idea to make flavored butter - just the kind of thing you'd put on a pork chop just off the grill.. *dreams of pork chops....*
:-D

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