Making Butter Redux

When David’s parents first got married, they worked and lived on a dairy farm in eastern Washington.  They were pretty much swimming in cream so they got a Dazey Churn to turn their share of cream into butter.  They haven’t had use for it for awhile, so they gave it to us!  Here’s what it looks like:

It says “Dazey Churn No 60 Patented February 14 1922″ on it.  We sure like homemade butter and have done it before, but we were excited to make butter with an antique butter churn.

The Dazey will hold a lot more cream than we wanted to buy but it worked just fine with only 2 pints of cream.  Making butter is pleasingly mechanical process and its fun to do it with such a straightforward machine – two gears, a handle and some paddles.

So we poured in the cream:

And started churning:

Then David and I took over the churning.  It took about 30 minutes start to finish to make butter, though that’s because we had help.  Without help, it probably would have taken 15 minutes :).  Fortunately, if you’ve set out to make butter on an antique butter churn, you’re really not looking for speed.

If you’re trying this, you basically  have to churn it through the whipped cream stage and keep going.  It’ll seem like its not going to happen, but then it will turn into little globules floating in liquid and you’ll keep going.  Then all of the sudden, all the fat comes together and you have a solid piece of butter and a bunch of buttermilk in the jar.  Its actually pretty cool for a Thursday afternoon.  Maybe not for a Saturday night but take what you can get.

Anyway, it has a handy strainer on the top which we used to pour out the buttermilk.  I’d always read about cowboys coming in and taking a big drink of buttermilk, and this has to be what they were drinking versus cultured buttermilk.  This was pretty light and tasted creamy, but all the fat was pulled out of it.  We made pancakes with it the next morning.

Then we washed the butter to get the rest of the buttermilk out of it by stirring it in a separate bowl with wooden spoons.  We added a splash of water and kept working it, pouring out the water and adding a new splash, until the water ran clear around the butter.

And then we were done!  Eating warm bread and butter commenced immediately.