Another Lesson In "Back to Basics" - Home Made Butter

For me, butter has always come in a square pat from the supermarket refrigerator. However, since I have been getting back to making things from scratch (like my bread, home made yoghurt, cream cheese and ricotta) I decided that I'd try my hand at making my own butter.

I use a lot of butter in cooking and our family doesn't use margarine on our bread, we use "the real deal" (butter). I realise that butter when from the fridge is very hard and doesn't spread onto bread very well so I will share a little secret with you, take it out of the fridge! I alway have a few tablespoons in a dish in the cupboard at room temp. It doesn't go off as you'll use it regularly enough and each time you use up the room temp stuff, fill the dish up with a bit more butter from the fridge. 

Butter is soooooo much better for us to consume than margarine as butter is simply cream and salt. Have you looked at the ingredients on the margarine containers? It's disgusting and here is a very interesting article to prove my point.Vegetable oils, which are commonly used to create softened (spreadable) butter in my opinion should also be banned (don't get me started as there are soooo many reasons.) 

Anyhoo, back to the butter experiment. Basically I whacked cream into my kitchen aid and out came butter!

 To be more specific:

Good quality cream is all you need (and salt if you want). Start by tipping the cream into a bowl and beat (or use a machine and let it beat it!) Slowly your cream turns whipped, then into a scrambled egg like consistency and then into butter.

 The butter separates from the butter milk which you drain off (to use later for such things as scones and pancakes - yum!)

When you've drained off as much buttermilk as possible you need to squeeze and rinse the butter under cold water until all the buttermilk has been removed. A final weigh reveals that I have made nearly 800g of butter from 2 litres of cream. At $6.50 for the cream that's a huge saving on what I would usually pay for a pat of good quality butter (which I pay nearly $8 for 500g).

 I pressed the butter into a lined baking tin and put into the fridge to harden before slicing up into smaller amounts. I froze some and kept some in the fridge. Safe to say I won't need to buy any butter for a while!

My little "underfoot helper"!

It took about half an hour from start to finish and I won't lie, it was a pretty messy business. I'd still do it again in future because it was cheaper than buying store bought butter and I can remove the salt which store bought always contains. Oh and most importantly, it tastes great! Yippeeee!