The Art Of Butter

Butter.

Soft. Creamy. Slowly slipping sideways on a slice of fresh bread. Oozing it’s melty goodness as you take a bite. Salty and sweet all at the same time. Perfect.

If you have jumped on the raw milk revolution, you’ve got plenty of delicious cream just sitting around waiting to be used up. What better, more worthy recipe could you choose than butter.

I skim some cream off of every ½ gallon jar of milk I open (with a turkey baster!) and, after using it in my morning coffee, I always have some left. This morning, eager to try my hand at butter making, I poured about a pint of fresh cream into my mixer and turned it on. (A quart of cream will net you about a pound of butter.)

Unfortunately, I learned a little late that you should start this process with warm (room temperature) cream. Mine was cold, straight from the refrigerator, so this whole process took me about 45 minutes. I’m guessing that it should only really be ten minutes or so if you start out right.

With my whisk on my stand mixer, I let the cream become whipped. Then, while the mixer was running, I looked up more information about making butter. All right. I know I should have done that before I turned the mixer on, but I learned a lot while my cream warmed up enough to separate.

As I checked in on my cream I noticed a few stages that you can look for as you make your butter. First, it looked like whipped cream (because that’s what it was. And yes. I tasted it. And it was GOOD!). Then it started to collapse in on itself. Next it began to look like it was curdling. And finally, they curds meshed together into two or three big balls of butter, floating on a little lake of whey.

See, with warm cream, the fat can squeeze together until every fat molecule is touching another fat molecule and all the whey, or butter milk, is squished out.

So now, I have some buttermilk with which I will make pancakes in the morning, and I have some beautiful butter, which I salted.

Now, I did not take this next step because the amount of butter I made was not enough to worry about it needing to keep very long, but if you want your butter to last more than a couple of days, you’ll need to kneed some cold fresh water through it to remove every bit of butter milk that might remain. (You’ll know it’s gone when your water comes out clear). The buttermilk sours quickly and ruins your butter in you don’t take this step.

You can do this in a regular bowl with a hand held whisk, or you can put your cream in a mason jar and shake it like crazy for about 6 or 7 minutes. Or, you can give that mason jar to your kids and let them roll it around the floor to each other for the same amount of time. Just make sure your cream is warm and the agitation will do the rest.

Enjoy, friends. This recipe is truly delicious and worth the work!