How to Make Butter

Due to some seasonal changes here on the farm, we had a boatload of extra cream. I volunteered to make it into butter, because butter is awesome. Also because I haven't had "our" butter in over a year and I really miss the golden color.

If you've got the right cream (like I had!) making butter is so easy. It involves 3 steps.

1. Beat/mix/whip cream it at the highest possible speed without making a mess.  Use a Kitchen Aid. Or, on a more massive scale, an industrial size Hobart mixer. With my massive batches I drape a bath towel over the massive mixer for maximum speed. Keep it mixing until there is a distinct splashing sound. Buttermilk! Mine takes less than 10 minutes- yours will probably take way longer than that.*



Step 1, completed.

2. Drain out the buttermilk and pour cold water into the butter globules. Squeeze it in between your fingers and mash it around like playdoh. Or, if you forgot to wash your hands, use a spatula or something to push it around the bowl (or just wash your hands). This "rinses" the buttermilk out of the butter fat. Butter will go rancid faster if there is buttermilk left in it.


With the leftover buttermilk, you can make biscuits or use in baking or any number of cool things I have yet to find out. Buttermilk has a greyish color, like this:

Rinse it three or four times, or however many times it takes for the cold water to run clear.

3. Pack it all into a mold. Or if you're making it on a massive scale like me, just form it into balls, cover with plastic wrap and pop in the freezer.



* I use an extremely hard-to-find cream. The milk comes from grass-fed cows, which gives my butter its bright yellow color. Fresh-from-the-cow warm milk gets separated into cream and skim milk by a special piece of equipment that uses spinning disks to separate skim milk and heavier cream by weight. The cream is separated twice to produce a "double cream", which is available in the UK but not in the US. The closest to double cream here in the states would be heavy cream or whipping cream, but it is not the same as double cream and nowhere near the thickness of double cream from our farm.

Because of this I cannot guarantee that your butter will be as easy to make or taste as good as mine, but there are plenty of other people that make butter without my fancypants cream.

If you find a good source of cream, let me know!