How To Make Butter
Commercial butter makers often add water to their butter to dilute it to the legal minimum fat content (80% in the USA). Thankfully, you can totally learn how to make butter at home, even if you don’t keep your own dairy animals. Full disclosure: I still do purchase store bought butter on occasion. I don’t always have enough cream from my cow to keep my family in butter all year long. So, if you are buying butter from the store, don’t lose heart-it’s still better than margarine!
There are two main varieties of butter: sweet cream and cultured. Sweet cream butter is simply butter made from fresh cream. This is the slightly easier option-although cultured butter really isn’t that much harder. Cultured butter is made from cream that has been allowed to ripen first. Both options yield delicious results, but many butter connoisseurs prefer the slightly tangy depth of flavor that cultured butter brings to the table.
Plus, you get the added bonus of good bacteria and cultures when you eat it-Think probiotic butter. Since we have a milk cow, I usually have raw cream available. Well sorta… When I share milk with the calf, Oakley tends to save back the cream for her baby, so I don’t get much. As you know, I’m a huge fan of raw dairy, so naturally, I’m going to use raw cream for my butter whenever possible. However, if you don’t have access to raw milk, you can learn how to make butter from pasteurized cream instead.
Just try to select regular pasteurized cream if you can-avoid ultra-pasteurized (UHT) cream, since it has been heated severely, ruining much of the flavor. If it’s your only option, it’s doable, but not optimal. Regular pasteurized cream, or vat-pasteurized cream, will suit you better if you can find it. You don’t have to have any sort of special equipment to make butter-cream can be transformed simply by putting it in a mason jar with a lid and shaking the dickens out of it.
If you plan on making butter on a regular basis AND you want to maintain your sanity, you definitely want to use some sort of kitchen appliance to help you out. My weapon of choice is a food processor. I have this one, and I like it because I haven’t been able to kill it yet… I had a cheaper model for a while, but it died… Death by butter-making. Yeah, it was brutal. Other options are a stand mixer (I have this one and adore it) or even a blender.
My biggest beef with my stand mixer is that it has the tendency to fling cream all over my kitchen when I make butter… So you may want to cover it with a towel or a piece of plastic wrap. There are plenty of different styles of butter churns available as well, including electric models.
But due to the space constraints in my tiny kitchen, I have to have appliances that serve more than one purpose. And my food processor fits the bill. 1 quart heavy cream (Or more. Heck, use a gallon of cream if ya want! Pull the cream out of the fridge a couple hours before you plan on making butter. Room temperature cream seems to turn into butter much faster for me than cold cream. Place the cream into the processor or blender and turn it on. It’s important not to fill it past the “full” line.
Otherwise, it’ll slosh and you’ll have a huge mess. Trust me, I pushed the limits of the full line once, and the full line won. The cream will go through several different stages before finally turning into butter. And then it turns into whipped cream. And then into chunky whipped cream.
And finally, it will “break.” This is when the yellow butterfat separates from the buttermilk. It looks like this. Strain the buttermilk from the butterfat, and save it back for making delicious pancakes, waffles, or buttermilk biscuits. You now need to wash the butter to remove as much of the buttermilk as possible-this will help it to not spoil as quickly. Place the butter into a bowl, and add in several cups of cold water. Use a wooden spoon to gently press the butter particles together and encourage them to stick together.
