I Made Butter!

I don't remember where I originally came across it, but I ran across a link to making butter, and that just sounded like the coolest thing. What can I say, I'm easy to please.

What I originally read was this:

• Take a mason jar and some heavy cream. Doesn't matter what size jar or how much cream, but obviously you'll get more butter with more cream.
  
• Fill the mason jar halfway with the cream.
  
• Shake shake shake!

Now, butter is a by product of seperated cream. You seperate the curds from the whey. In shaking the jar (this whole process may take somewhere from 15-25 minutes) you'll first create whipped cream, but if you continue shaking you'll feel the change as the cream gets chunky and starts to seperate. Keep shaking until you've got a big glob of butter smacking around inside your jar. Voilá! Butter!

Anyway, I was so excited to do this. I didn't realize that making butter was so easy! And then I learned. I could make butter in under 5 minutes.

It starts with two things:


Cream and your Cuisinart.

Just pour your cream, that you've let come to room temperature, in your Cuisinart and let it go to work! (You can also do this with a mixer, but it may take a tad longer and also not as cool and just stepping back and watching the magic happen. But if you don't have a Cuisinart, a mixer will do just fine.)




As I read in another blog, you watch your cream spin and it almost instantly becomes whipped cream, and then it's like it all deflates and you've got this wierd runny stuff spinning around, but persevere! It will all come together!

After you let it spin for a few minutes (we gave it 6 minutes because we weren't sure if it had completely finished or not, but I don't think it really needed that much time) stop the Cuisinart and you should see that you've got butter and a liquid, buttermilk! Pour off as much buttermilk as you can and set this aside for your own use. I hear it makes great biscuits and pancakes! This is not like the buttermilk you buy in stores, however, because you did not culture your cream. More on this later.


Now you need to "wash" your butter to get out all that buttermilk. With a Cuisinart, this is really easy. Just pour a small amount of *ice water* through the opening on the top while it's running and it will mix its way in and through the butter.


Now you need to work out all the water you just put in. I'm going to invest in some cheesecloth (which really isn't that expensive, but I have yet to get some even though I often wish I had some, and this time just settled it) which I think would be the easiest way, but you can also just use a spatula, like I did. Using your spatula, work out all the water you can, or if you're using cheesecloth, just wring out your butter. Put your butter back in the bowl, or leave it there if you never took it out, and repeat the ice water process. You want to repeat these two steps until the water goes from milky white to clear.

Two things:

• The point of removing the buttermilk is that it will go rancid faster if you do not. So, you want to make sure to get out all that you can.
  
• The point of the *ice water* is that this helps to keep your butter solid. Now, I didn't have any ice water and the coldest of my filtered tap water was not very cold, so through all the washings the butter got warmer and softer. I finally gave up on the washing because of a time constraint and I realized that I didn't think I'd ever get the water clear because the butter would just keep sloughing off in the water. So I look forward to trying this again, with ice water.

I expect that with cheesecloth to wring out the butter and ice water to help solidify it, this will be a lot easier.

Now you have butter! And, with your handy dandy Cuisinart, you can just throw in whatever mixings to the butter right there if you want to make some savory or flavored butter.


As for culturing, this is easy and is supposed to greatly help the flavor. You just add a small amount (1/3 cup to 4 cups of heavy cream) of whole-milk yogurt, crème fraîche, or buttermilk (without gums or stabilizers) to the cream and let it sit out for 12-36 hours, or until the cream has thickened and tastes slightly tangy.

I read about making cultured butter here.

If you give this a try, let me know how it goes!