Butter straight from the udder

Tricia was making butter earlier this week.  Usually we drink all the milk and make kefir and ice cream and use the cream for our coffee.  Real cream in coffee is fantastic.  Anyway, we also make butter as it is an easy process.  All you do is skim the cream off the top of the milk.  Put the cream into a quart jar and allow it to come to room temperature.  Put the cap on the jar and shake vigorously until the butter 'breaks', separating the butter from the buttermilk.  Pour off the buttermilk and then use a wooden spoon to squeeze off any excess buttermilk from the butter.  Salt the butter and mix it up.

We spoon the butter into round glass containers and either eat it or freeze it for later. Here is one of those containers of butter that Tricia made to show you the finished product:

Udder Butter

Did you know that butter will be a different color depending on what time of the year it is? Butter is somewhere between white and pale yellow during the Fall and Winter months when the cows are primarily eating hay.  In the Spring and Summer, when the cows are eating grass in the pasture, the butter is a rich yellow.  Tricia pulled one of the containers out of the freezer from the Spring to show you the comparison.  It is a striking contrast!

Winter butter versus Spring butter

What causes this?  Well, when cows are foraging on fresh grass, the cream will contain lots of beta carotene causing the butter to be yellow.  When the cows are on just hay or feed, the cream doesn't contain as much beta carotene and will be pale yellow.  Some dairies add color to their butter to give it a yellow color, because their cows are not on grass.  We don't add any color to our butter.  The rich yellow on the right is 100% natural.

Our cows aren't kept in a small confined area like a feedlot.  They have a nice area that they can roam around in and do what cows do - mainly eat grass and poop! They think Our Maker's Acres Family Farm is Heaven.  They give us good dairy products that we enjoy - like butter.  The pale yellow butter shown pictured above on the left is still delicious.  It's just not as full of beta carotene as the one on the right is.  

It also goes to show that there is a time and season for everything  People have tried to short circuit the seasons and have added artificial coloring to some butter so that it is always golden yellow.  In nature this simply isn't the case.  It is late January now and there is hardly a blade of green grass in the pasture.  It won't be long before the clover begins popping up, followed by the bahia and bermuda grass, transforming our dull, brown pasture into a lush verdant one, which will transform our pale white butter into golden yellow butter.