Homemade Butter Recipe

Easy Do-it-yourself Butter in Easy to Follow Steps

Apr 2, 2008 Jenny Rose Ryan

Make your own butter in four easy steps.

Homemade butter is not only fresh and tasty, it's also surprisingly simple to make. Countless recipes benefit from the tiny bit of time it takes to whip up your own butter.

Ingredients and Tools:

Heavy cream
three bowls
a strainer or cheesecloth
a spatula
a hand or stand mixer
about five minutes of real work time.

Directions

First, pour the heavy cream into a high-sided bowl and allow to warm to room temperature. This should take anywhere from an hour to six hours, depending on how much cream you've got.
Next, start mixing the cream. Pause now and again to push any splatter back into the base of the bowl. Mix on high, watching as the cream moves from a liquid to a whipped consistency bearing small peaks. Scrape down the bowl's sides again. Keep mixing as the soft peaks become stiff peaks and scrape the bowl again.
Soon, these stiff peaks will begin to clump into granular or cornmeal-like shapes. Keep mixing and occasionally scraping the bowl's sides. As these clumps grow larger, the cream's color will change from off-white to light yellow. Keep mixing!
These clumps will grow larger, slightly more yellow, and soon be surrounded by the cream's liquid. In commercial butter production, where the milk is soured to encourage clumping, this liquid is the tangy buttermilk of baking. In this case, the "buttermilk" is more like regular milk and can be reserved for future recipes, or for coffee cream.
Once the liquid pools in the bowl's base, stop mixing. The butter and "buttermilk" should be distinct and separate. If not, mix a little longer to fling out more of the "buttermilk".
Pour the whole mess into a strainer or cheesecloth perched over a clean bowl. Transfer the butter to a new bowl and fill this bowl with clean, cold water -- massaging the butter as you rinse a few times -- until the water runs clear.
Gather your fresh butter into a blob and place on parchment paper. Mold this clump into whatever shape you like, roll, and freeze or refrigerate to harden.

Fresh butter makes baking a dream and is fantastic on pancakes. Not only is it tasty, but it's also a great way to save cream from expiration. It's also an ideal homage to homesteaders and pioneers -- though certainly less a chore today than it was a hundred years ago. Now, we have refrigeration. And mixers.

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