Butter .. the best you will ever eat!

I know I have posted about butter before but today I made about a pound of fresh butter and had it on toast with lunch and it was the freshest and best butter ever.  I thought I might share the pictures with you in case you are curious about making fresh butter yourself.

First of all, start with the best ingredients!  Fresh cream.. organic if possible.  I found a good price on 2 pints of Friendly Farms Whipping Cream (that brand uses no artificial growth hormones - sold at Aldi's).

Pour the cream in a big bowl.  I love using the KitchenAid because I am lazy enough to just love to watch it do all the work for me.  Even with the KitchenAid doing all the work, this process took about 1/2 an hour so prepare for a little time in the kitchen monitoring the progress of your butter.

I chose the bigger beater and not the wire whisk just due to the fact that I thought the butter, when formed would be harder to clean from inside the whisk.

Turn the beaters on slowly at first, increasing the speed as you can.  If you start off too quickly, you will splash whipped cream all over your kitchen (ask me, I know this).  So start slowly and get to whipping that cream.  It will soon become thicker and turn into whipped cream (as it thickens, you can increase the speed of the mixer).

 It continues to thicken and turn into whipped cream.  Keep beating... turning up the speed as you can so that you can finish the process... getting to the butter part is pretty exciting!

Here is the exciting part... about 15 minutes into the poor KitchenAid's workout...  I noticed the beater working harder and look what I found in that bowl:

That, my friends, is the BEST glob of butter you will ever taste!!  Right down there in the bottom of that bowl, floating in BUTTERMILK!!  It is almost done!

Drain the buttermilk into a jar and save it to bake with... yummy!

 Drain off the buttermilk to cook with and store it in the refrigerator.  I want to add a caveat here that although this milky delicious butter-by-product is called buttermilk, it is NOT cultured buttermilk.  You cannot use this liquid to make more buttermilk and it is a different consistency and taste than the cultured buttermilk you buy in the store.  It is thin and milky and not tangy and fermented.

So what to do with that glob of butter that you rescue from the milky buttermilk?  Put the solid in a bowl and kind of smash salt into it. Salted butter is the norm and probably what you are used to tasting on your toast.  Butter does not need to be salted but it will taste bland without it.. so I salted the butter with about 1 tsp of salt and mixed it into the solid butter really thoroughly by smashing it over and over against the side of the bowl with a spatula... kind of... until the spatula broke pretty early on in the process.

I am SO hard on kitchen utensils.

So how do I smash the butter?  It was pretty hard.. I used a metal spoon and bent it... so then I had this bright idea.  I have an antique butter paddle in my collection of antiques.  After much soul searching, I got that wooden paddle off of the shelf  and washed it, figuring it had survived for 200 years and probably spent it's first 100 years actually "paddling" butter so it was probably ok to use a 200 year old wooden paddle on my clean modern butter.

That paddle worked wonders!  No wonder they used wooden butter paddles!  They are very durable and I pressed and pressed my butter, mixing the salt into it good and draining a little more of the buttermilk off of it as I pressed and pressed.

When I felt like it had enough paddling, I transferred it to a glass bowl and quickly made some toast from the homemade sprouted wheat sourdough bread I baked last night to eat with my farm fresh eggs and organic cheese along with a few slices of uncured bacon.  I was in HEAVEN!!! 

Seriously now... do this with your children.  They will love watching cream turn to butter.  I thank my lucky stars that I have an opportunity to teach Journey these things and that I don't have to do it all like they did 200 years ago... I am in LOVE with my KitchenAid.  No hand churning for me!  But I am sad that after my 22 year old tasted the butter on her toast at lunch she asked me "If I buy the ingredients for you to make me some butter, will you?"  I answered "of course I will OR I will teach you to make it" and she replied "what do I need to buy?".  When I answered "just cream", she responded with "really?"  Such a sad statement to my mothering of her and to our modern world where children do not know how to make food nor even know what real food is.