Butter

So yesterday was another one of those days. You know, where you don't get a good night's sleep so you wake up cranky, to a cranky kid and it just snowballs from there. My baking/SAHM friend Michelle invited me over to make some butter. Just for fun. Seeing the need to get out of the house and have a little adult conversation, (you know, other than, "Stop that! That's the dog's food! Did you poop? What do you have in your mouth now?") I said an enthusiastic "sure!" and headed over.

I've joked more than once that I should learn how to make my own butter because I use so much of it. Actually I joke that a cow would have paid for itself by now, but you know, I love to bake and baking calls for butter. Michelle looked up how to make it and decided that she should try it out. It's ridiculously easy. So easy in fact, that you're going to laugh.

Here's the directions: Pour heavy whipping cream into a jar. Shake.

Yep. That's it. I mean there's some pointers along the way, but that's pretty much all you do. So here's how the shaking went...


What you need:

You need to leave some room for the cream to work it's magic. We ended up having to remove some of the cream part way through, so leave some more room than this. 

Shake for 20 minutes.

And this is what you get. It's done when the solid part (the butter) starts separating from the liquid (buttermilk). You strain the liquid out and you're left with butter.

Results: it was good and tasted like butter. It's not exactly cost effective though because the heavy cream is over $3 and it only makes about 1 sticks worth (maybe 2) of butter. I'm sure back in the good ole' days they didn't buy ultra-pasteurized heavy cream from the store and make it this way, so there's got to be a more cost effective way to do it. But this is fun as a learning lesson for kids and they can all take part in shaking the jar to make butter. 

Note: I'm reading this very interesting book called, The Feast Nearby by Robin Mather. (Find it on amazon here) It's all about eating locally on a budget and it's also super informative about food. I found out tidbits like ultra-pasteurized means that the milk is brought to a super high temp, causing the vitamins and all the good, natural things in milk to be depleted. They do it in certain products like heavy cream to extend it's shelf life because it doesn't sell as fast as regular milk. Trying to find local heavy cream that's not ultra-pasteurized is pretty difficult. For those of you living in the central florida area, I did find out that most of Publix's milk products are from local dairy farmers. Whoo hoo! All of their milk is rbST free (which means that the cows weren't given a horrible hormone to make them lactate at an unnatural rate) and that most of their dairy products are too. They said that in the hot summer months, when lactation in dairy cows is low, that they have to suppliment some of their milk from other suppliers out of state to make things like yogurt, ice cream and cheese so they can't guarantee that all of their dairy products are rbST free then. So, not 100%, but better than nothing. 

Happy eating!