make butter

I need to get around to doing this. My father bakes a lot of bread, so for fathers day I was going to give him homemade butter. I should do this on Tuesday when I am off work.

I got the recipe for making butter from raw cream in a magazine I am subscribed to (Mother Earth-I think that’s the title!). I can’t wait to make it and enjoy it…..:) Coming soon!

but I did it, so thats a good thing. oh and just so you know, you can’t make butter with half and half, tried and failed on that one

Made some butter with a food processor last night.

Added honey.

Am waiting for the bread to be toasted so I can have some toast with my homemade butter and my homemade jam :) :) :)

I’ve seen a couple different approaches. I think I’ll be culturing my butter. It’s gonna be tasty!

We were on some wilderness field trip and made butter in those tiny glass baby food jars. Seemed to take forever with my wimpy little girl muscles. I can’t recall how it tasted, just the work. :)

The cream I bought was maybe a little thick and I think I put too much in the jar… it just ended up looking heavily whipped. So I poured half into a pot for later use, added a bit of milk and started shaking again.

Wowowowoweeeeee!

It felt like it’d never do anything when suddenly there was a real magical moment – I wasn’t shaking a jar of cream any more… it was a jar of buttermilk with proto-butter in it. A bit more shaking and I had a lump of butter to extract. Amazing!

I actually have nothing to put my butter on, but tomorrow I’ll go to the health food shop for the NLP phone number and buy some gluten-free crackers to try my butter on.

What a great Thing. As hjahangiri said – expensive, but what a great bit of kitchen science!

You guys just reminded me that i made butter once when i was in primary school! what a fun day we had!!! and then we got to eat it on crackers :)

thanks for the memory!

I wouldn’t make it every day, but it takes no effort at all. I was surprised. Even shaking it in a jar, by hand, took little time. (Maybe it would have been harder in large batches – my eleven year old son made the equivalent of a stick of butter in a sport bottle, then I made more in a glass bowl with a hand mixer. I’m sure the food processor would make very short work of it! I drained and rinsed it, then formed it into rolls and wrapped it in plastic.

The nice thing about homemade butter is that there’s no salt added unless you add it – it’s great for cooking or baking or making flavored butters. I prefer lightly salted butter for most things, but it’s nice to have options.

I’m guesstimating that homemade butter (for most of us, those of us who get our whipping cream from the grocery store, anyway) is about twice the price of store-bought butter. But still, it’s yummy and it’s great kitchen science you can do with the kids.

Watch this for a good, kid-friendly explanation of what an “emulsion” is and what’s happening (scientifically) when you shake things up to make butter.

Last night my mom and I made butter using a food processor. We were following the instructions I found on this website: http://webexhibits.org/butter/making.html
It was interesting to see the process and I admit it wasn’t as much hard work as it would have been using a butter churn, but I mainly wanted to learn the process.