Butter is easy to make in small quantities, and a lot of fun. We bought some double cream a few days ago (you can't make butter with really fresh cream), then poured it into a huge jam jar and took turns shaking it. Don't fill your jam jar - it needs lots of room to "slosh" so you should have it less than half full.It can take any time between 10-30 minutes to become butter so it's better if you have lots of people willing to take turns shaking the jar. After a while the cream stops going "slosh slosh" and becomes silent. At this stage you have whipped cream. Keep shaking. Some time after that it suddenly goes "thud thud". Now you have a pat of butter in a puddle of buttermilk and you can stop shaking.
There's more work to be done. The buttermilk will turn your butter rancid quickly unless you can separate it all away from the butter. So pour the puddle of buttermilk into a cup and save it, but there is more buttermilk trapped inside the butter, like a sponge. Fill the jam jar with clean water, slosh it around, then pour the water away. Keep doing this until you have washed the butter clean. Now turn your pat of butter onto a wooden board and squeeze it with your hands to get the trapped buttermilk out. When you have pure butter you can stop.
You can use the buttermilk to make soda bread or scones and then spread the butter on them. If you have any home made jam as well, you're in for a feast.
9 comments:
It's like magic, isn't it - I remember a family member making butter from some left over cream when I was a child, and my wife has done it from the settled out cream that sits on the top of the unhomogenised milk we buy at the farm shop (you only get about a teaspoon of butter, but it's still fantastic!)
i tried this with the kids a a month or so ago.... after about 3 hours we still didn't have any butter! what did i do wrong!!
i'll try again but i think the bugger and off figure in the girls opinion...
em
Flutterby - was your cream too fresh? Was your cream too cold or too warm (you want it at about room temperature but less than butter melting point)? Did your cream have room in the jar to slosh? Was it real double cream, not single cream or Elmlea or anything else? Those are the only controllable variables I know of. But it's a notoriously fickle process and our forebears had all sorts of myths to explain why butter sometimes refused to "come". For example they thought menstruating women must not touch the churn or the butter wouldn't come. They also thought that a witch in the vicinity could steal your butter before you had even made it by cursing your cream and preventing the butter from coming. Any woman who reliably churned butter easily would do well not to brag about it for fear of being accused of witchery. And they also had rhymes and charms to sing whilst churning which were said to make the butter come. Do try again. You probably just had a bad day. We made ours today in about ten minutes.
i'm guessing the cream was too fresh! definitely fresh double cream, it may also have been too cold so i'll change that too next time - hopefully i'll convince the girls to give it a go with me!
thanks for tips
This is a fantastic recipe to use buttermilk for. The recipe says use berries but it works with any fruit and is an excellent summer pudding.
http://www.cooksrecipes.com/dessert/berry-puzzle-pudding-recipe.html
And it is good exercise too! :)
what a great activity to do with the kids!! Great post.
This sounds like a fun experiment! I'd love to try it.
I taught my kiddos to make this this past year too!
We always made butter while the adults were cooking Tahnksgiving dinner. It's a great way to keep the kids busy.
You can also pour your butter into a cheesecloth and squeeze the extra milk out of it.
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