Written by adam on Mar 30, 2006

Making Your Own Butter

Filed Under: How To, Recipes
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(scroll down for the recipe)

On episode 23 of the Men in Aprons Show, TheWife and I made our own butter. Honestly, it's not all that difficult a thing to do. All it takes is milk or cream, a container, and a little bit of elbow grease. OK, maybe a little bit more than elbow grease; you might spend 15 or 20 minutes shaking a 6 oz. container.

A Brief History of Butter
Much like a lot of good foods in the world, it is believed that butter was discovered by accident. Historians think that early nomads discovered butter by accidentally sloshing around cattle or goat milk a little too much on their travels. It would seem that Grok, the caveman, filled up his milkskins but failed to tie them down securely to the donkey. All the sloshing from the road caused the milk fat to separate from the liquid, thus creating butter.

What is Butter, exactly
Butter is essentially the fat from milk separated from the liquid. We obtain butter by churning or agitating milk until the fats separate into a clump, leaving behind a thin, whitish liquid called buttermilk. In giant commerical dairies, butter is obtained through giant centrefuges that can handle hundreds of gallons of milk at a time. But if you think about it, the process is just agitation, something that can be done anywhere with any sort of container capable of agitating.

Let me just break it down into simple terms. When you agitate milk, you are bashing the fat molecules together over and over. If you do this enough, they start to stick together. Keep doing this long enough and the fat will stick itself into a giant mass of fat, thus separating itself out of the milk liquid.

If you look at sites like this one, you'll notice all these fancy steps from ripening to aging to butterfat draining and washing. That's a very interesting page of information, but to the home butter maker, all that it just not necessary. So here is the way to make great butter at home in your own kitchen. You can then tell Land O Lakes to shove it.

How To Make Your Own Butter

You will need
- 1 Stage 3 empty jar baby food jar
- 1 pint of heavy cream
- Your arm

Make sure the jar is clean. You might want to chill the jar in the fridge for an hour before hand to help with coagulation.

Fill the jar about two-thirds full with the cream. Shake in a steady motion for about 10 to 15 minutes. The cream will go from liquidy to frothy to very thick and then all of a sudden it will separate and you'll hear a sloshy sound and feel a solid mass of fat lumping around in the jar.

Open the jar, then strain out the milky white liquid. What's left is butter. No joke, you can spread this on your toast directly.