Making Butter

My husband made a wonderful brunch for Mother’s Day – yeast waffles, whip cream, strawberries, eggs, sausage and asparagus.  Yum!  He’s so good. 

I picked up some fresh cream yesterday at Whole Foods from a local dairy (exciting!) and so I made fresh butter for breakfast too.  You know, just because we didn’t have enough to eat already :)

Anyway, there are a lot of tutorials on the web for making butter and I’m here to say that it is really, really easy and the result is really, really good.  Basically, you put heavy cream in your stand mixer, beat it past whip cream and all the sudden, it turns into butter and buttermilk.  It took maybe 2 minutes to turn the cream into butter.  After the separation occurs, you drain off the buttermilk, then rinse the butter in cool water, stirring with a spoon, drain, and then repeat until the water drains  clear.  From what I understand, its not critical to get the water out, but the more water/buttermilk  you remove, the longer the butter will last.  Once the water was clear, I added 2 pinches of salt, stirred it all up and it was done!   Its very easy to do and the result is quite good.  Try it out for yourself, its easy!

Trickling Spring Dairy cream

Here’s the cream just starting out

Here’s what it looks like just past whipped cream.  Kind of grainy balls of butter – I was surprised it was so yellow!

Here’s the butter and buttermilk before straining out the buttermilk

And here’s the final product.  The whole thing took less than 10 minutes and that was with me trying to figure things out.  Who knew?