Making Butter

One of the benefits of having milk cows is all the other dairy products that you can make besides the delicious milk.  We've shown how we make kefir in a previous post.  Today I'll show you the art of making BUTTER.  Butter gets a bad rap for being unhealthy.  Hogwash.  Malarkey.  There are good fats and bad fats.  Butter is a good fat and is GOOD for you!

Butter, the way we make it, has an extensive list of ingredients.  It consists of:

• Cream
• Salt

What?  No preservatives?  No.  What about artificial coloring?  Nada.  Hydrogenated oil?  Zilch.  High fructose corn syrup?  Gosh, I hate to disappoint you.  Just pure butter made from Daisy's high-butterfat content Jersey raw milk.

It does take a little work.  My parents gave us this family heirloom - an old hand-cranked butter churn.  We've used it and it works great.  Honestly, I don't want to break it, though.


Note the wooden paddles

We generally make our butter in small batches.  Therefore we use this even more primitive method:


Shake it up!

Here's what you do:  skim the cream off of your milk, filling a jar about 1/2 full with cream.  You don't want to fill it any higher than that as you need enough space to shake it.  We add a kefir cube to the cream to culture it.  When we make kefir we freeze some of it in ice cube trays.  The kefir cube cultures the cream and gives the butter and buttermilk a rich flavor and fills it with beneficial bacteria that is good for you.  We leave the jar of cream out at room temperature for 8 or 10 hours.  Then we simply shake it.  We pause to open the jar to let out the gases driven out of the solution by the agitation and then continue.


Letting out some gas.  Sorry, I couldn't resist

If your cream is at room temperature, it takes all of about 7 minutes to make butter.  You can feel when it "breaks" by the different feel the jar gets when shaking it.  If you stop right before this point, you can see the little butter globules forming.  Keep on shaking it and it will turn from a liquid to solid.  You've got butter!  Pour off the liquid. This is buttermilk.  You will want to save this!
 

Pouring off the buttermilk

Once you've poured all the buttermilk off the butter, we put the butter on a plate.  It is still full of buttermilk so you want to get a wooden spoon and squeeze all the remaining buttermilk off and into your jar.

Draining the rest of the buttermilk off the buttermilk

Keep folding the butter and squeezing it over and over.


Butterfingers

Finally, the butter will firm up and will yield no more buttermilk.

And here is the buttermilk that we will save to use a little later.


Buttermilk

We add a little salt to the butter.


Salted Raw Butter

Now just fold the salt into the butter so it is mixed up real good.


Folding in the salt

Finally, I use the wooden spoon to "square off" the butter so it is shaped in a big block.

Here is the finished product: Homemade Raw Butter from Daisy.  I weighed it and it made a half pound of butter.  We'll just put it in the fridge until we're ready to enjoy it.


Homemade Raw Butter

Now it's time to eat.  Tricia made some scrambled eggs gathered from our hens, buttermilk and some blueberries from our bushes we had frozen this Spring to make homemade buttermilk blueberry biscuits.  We put a few pats of fresh butter on the hot biscuits and we'll sit down to enjoy a delicious country breakfast.  Bon Appetit.


Enjoying a fantastic breakfast

I also wanted to show you our butter bell.  I was reading about this contraption and had to have one.  It was thought to be from France in the Middle Ages prior to refrigeration.  The way you use it is you fill the crock 1/3 of the way with water.  Then you fill the bowl with fresh butter, turn it upside down, and submerge the butter in the water.  It creates a air-tight, water-tight seal that keeps your butter fresh, soft and spreadable at room temperature for several weeks without spoiling.


The butter bell

Here is a picture of how it looks once you submerge the butter in the water and set it out for storage.

Finally, here is a butter mold that we purchased at an antique store here in town.  What you do with this is you put the plunger back in the box mold, turn it over and pack the butter in the mold.  Then you use the plunger to push the perfectly square block of butter out for storage.


Butter mold

We make butter, wrap it in wax paper and freeze it for use later.  We love our fresh raw butter!