Butterfingers! (How to Make Homemade Buttter Without a Churn)

To go along with our post RIGHT HERE about the butter bell, I figured it would be good to show how we make the butter to go in it.  First, we skim some cream off the top of the milk and put it in a wide mouth quart jar.  We set it out on the counter for a while so it gets to be room temperature.  I think this is the most important thing.  If the cream is room temperature, it 'breaks' into butter very quickly.  If the cream is cold, it takes a lot longer.

Make sure that the lid is on securely or you will have a mess on your hands.  Then simply shake.  You can hear the thick cream sloshing around in the jar.

All of a sudden, you'll feel things change in the jar as the cream 'breaks' and suddenly instead of cream in your jar, you have butter and buttermilk.  It is as simple as that.

I use a long wooden spoon to press the butter to squeeze the buttermilk out.  As the buttermilk is expressed, I pour it into a half pint jar.  This buttermilk will be used to make pancakes, waffles or biscuits.  You can see everything we used to make butter in the photo below.

Here is a close-up of the fresh, creamy, yellow butter that is ready to be spread on some homemade bread.  Homemade butter!  Doesn't get any fresher than this...

While it may make a bit of a mess, it is worth the trouble.

You can always lick the butter off your fingers.

Solving a Pet Peeve at Breakfast

Even though Luna lost her calf, it wasn't a total loss as she's now in milk.  We are milking her one time a day in the evenings when I get home from work.  So now we have an abundance of milk.  That is a good problem to have.  Tonight we had delicious homemade ice cream. 

One thing about having all this milk is that you also have a bunch of cream to skim off the top.  Tricia skimmed a bunch of cream and made some homemade butter.

Fresh milk to drink, butter to eat, and a by-product of butter-making - buttermilk.  We'll likely use this to make pancakes.

In order to store our homemade butter, Tricia pulled out the butter bell.  The butter bell is a contraption that solves and age-old problem for breakfast-eaters everywhere.  Don't you just hate it when you try to spread cold butter that you've just pulled out of the refrigerator onto a piece of toast or a pancake?

The rock-hard butter ends up tearing your toast as you try to spread it with your knife.  There is a better way!  With a butter bell, your butter remains at room temperature and is soft and creamy.

Tricia packed her homemade butter into the top portion of the butter bell.  The top portion is the lid and underneath the lid, inverted, is the bowl that holds all the butter.

Then water is poured into the bottom portion of the butter bell.

The lid/bowl full of butter is then inverted and placed into the bottom portion of the butter bell that holds the water.

The water acts as a seal, keeping out oxygen.  As long as you put fresh water in the butter bell every 3 days, you can keep butter in the butter bell sitting out on the counter at room temperature for 30 days.  And here's the best part - the butter will remain smooth and creamy and your toast will not be brutalized any longer.