Have you made your own butter--if not, you really need to give it a try ! (more . . . )

M

mistral

Well-known member
The recipe at the link below was used when I made some butter last week . This homemade butter has the BEST taste of any cow's butter I have had for a long time. It is delicious scarfed in thick slabs on good bread. I must freeze the rest as I have already used at least 1/2 lb, just on bread and butter. Dang, it is REALLY good, has a wonderful butter fragrance.

I used Trader Joe's Organic (pasteurized) heavy cream, 2 pints worth.

Instead of yogurt I used Trader Joe's low-fat cultured buttermilk, 2 tablespoons.

The cream sat out overnight to ripen as our kitchen was quite cool at the time; it went for about 12-14 hours and was pleasantly sour. I proceeded to beat the cream in my Kitchenaid. The butter came quickly.

The hardest thing about making this recipe was washing the butter, and then squeezing all the excess clean water out of the butter. These actions will give you some real arm fatigue, for sure, but every effort and minute I spent was well worth it.

Making butter was always something I had thought about doing and I am glad I finally tried it. This will be repeated in the future.

BTW, my quart of organic heavy cream yielded just under 1 pound of butter and about 1-1/2 cups REAL butter milk, which was delicious and made some totally b******' buttermilk biscuits--and I drank the rest. (oops, dated myself there!)

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-butter-and-cultured-butter-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-194372

 
What a fun project that would be to do with an older child, or grandchild,

I wish our grand kids lived closer. With the prepared foods section growing each time I enter the grocery store, I feel an increased obligation to teach the next generation where our food really comes from.

 
We've done it with grandkids at the beach tossing the quart jar around the kitchen.

DD did it in a churn at a local historic site where she was the interim curator. It IS good stuff.

 
Oh yes.

Nothing finer. Back in the olden days, we'd skim the cream off the warm milk fresh from the cow. And cultured definitely tastes better. On the farm we soured the cream by letting it sit out before churning to get the nice rich flavor, but that's difficult to do with today's commerical pasteurized and homogenized product, so adding the buttermilk is definitely the way to go.

My favorite restaurant here in Cincinnati (Orchids at the Palm Court) makes their own butter and they use that same ratio of cream to buttermilk.

 
Many times- here is a squeezing tip Mistral

I use cheesecloth and put into a potato ricer in small batches to squeeze out the liquid. It works great!

 
You should send that tip to The Kitchen crew, they are always looking for multiple uses for kitchen

tools which are made specifically for one thing.

 
Oh, that is a good tip! I need to see if I can dig up a ricer around here. . .

I "squoze" in a cold, wet, clean "tea towel", but the ricer would save a bunch of hand strength! And you could then chill the butter and cloth, then cut into chunks and re-squeeze for maximum water removal.

There was still water visibl in my butter, but it tastes just FINE! smileys/smile.gif

 
Ha, that was what we made when I was a child, before we started mixing the yellow coloring into the

white lardy stuff that was the first oleo margarine. One thing that makes it easier to "wash" the butter is a butter paddle, I remember it as a quite wide wooden spatula type thingy. I don't remember it being hard to get the water out, it separates pretty easily from the butter, or at least it did back then when the cream was from raw milk. Like the milk, the taste could vary depending upon the time of year and what the cows were eating.

 
My mom made a lot of our butter back when I was growing up. Grandad had a dairy herd so there was

always surplus milk & cream. (To this day I have to have heavy cream on my oatmeal, or it simply doesn't taste right to me. Sigh.)

You have reminded me of my grandmother's butter maker (a Lehman) and also my mom's electric pasteurizing appliance. The butter maker sort of looked like the one at the link below.

I just sent a text to my brother in northern Indiana (I'm in southern IN). Craig still has Mom's pasteurizer on the home place, but doesn't know where the butter maker is. Wow, I haven't thought about making butter or pasteurizing milk in YEARS. (We kids used to drink milk straight from the cow! We would be in big trouble for doing that if Mom found out, but Gramps would never tell on us. ha! ) Ah, mistral, you have brought back some good memories!

https://www.lehmans.com/p-4462-lehmans-dazey-butter-churn.aspx?partner_id=bcngoog&gclid=CPDowaaqyMsCFZE0aQodBpoB4A

 
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