Make It From Scratch Monday: Butter

{Making Butter} from Fresh Raw Cream

Since we don't have our own milking cow {yet}, we found a sweet family who sells fresh milk & cream near our home.  We had fun this weekend making our own butter.  The kids really enjoyed watching the process.  It is so yummy!  I found a great tutorial and thought I would share.

This milk is as fresh as you can get, we pick it up the day after it’s milked, it’s unpasteurized and unhomogenized. Since it’s not homogenized the cream rises to the top, it’s also called cream line milk. If you look closely you can see the cream line in the milk on the right.

Making butter is super easy, all you need is cream and a jar or you can make it in the mixer or the blender. You can simply shake the cream in a jar until it’s butter, or use your mixer on a low to medium speed.  It really doesn’t take long, between 10-20 minutes depending on the cream, temperature and how good of a shaker you are.  Fill your jar 25-50% full of cream, I try to keep mine around 40%. The more cream you have in the jar the longer it takes to form butter because there’s less movement of the cream. If it’s too warm the butter will be kind of a whipped butter and it will be more difficult to rinse and knead later on.

While mixing you’ll notice the cream turn from liquid to whipped cream. It will become harder and harder to shake (if using the jar method) as it gets thicker. Eventually you’ll notice that it will break, this happens when the butter separates from the buttermilk. You’ll definitely notice the difference in sound at this point. As you are shaking, notice the color of the cream as well, it will start to turn more and more yellow as the fat molecules group together.

It will now be easy to shake and you’ll notice the butter will start clumping together. I like to rinse mine when it forms marble sized pieces. Pour the buttermilk out of the jar, but keep the butter in. Make sure you keep your buttermilk, it makes great pancakes, muffins or biscuits. Add some water back into the jar and shake again, do this two or three times until the water is just about clear. Empty butter into a strainer to strain off water. Transfer the butter into a bowl and knead with a spoon until it form a ball, you’ll notice you’ll be working water out of the butter. If the butter is too soft put in the fridge to harden a bit before kneading.

You can add salt to your butter if you’d like.  Homemade butter is really tasty, it has a different taste than store bought butter. You can let the cream sour a bit before churning to make a cultured butter, this only works with raw cream though, you’ll have to add cultures to store bought cream if you want cultured butter. We were amazed at the color, the stuff I buy from the store is almost white, as you can see this is very very yellow. This is because the cows are pastured.

Have you ever made butter?? What did you think?