makin butter

makin butter

I was looking for fun places to eat on one of my favorite websites, Chowhound.com, and I had never noticed how well built and jam packed that site is. Lots and lots of fun cooking tips in video form. Everything  from the “no duh” to the “no way”. One of them was a really basic but totally amazing thing… making butter from heavy whipping cream.

Now some people who grew up on ‘the farm’ or just had some cool teacher along the way have done this before, but lots of people like me have heard that this is possible, but have never done this. Well, I am here to tell you kids that it is possible. All you need is some room temp heavy whipping cream, a good size jar with a tight fitting lid, some elbow grease, and 30 minutes of your precious time, and you’ve got yourself a big wad of unsalted creamy butter!

10 minutes into shaking

10 minutes into shaking

10 minutes in it’s basically unsweetened whipcream.

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after 30+ minutes of shaking

and after 30 or so minutes… BUTTER!

and a bonus…

butter milk

buttermilk

Buttermilk!

Churning physically agitates the cream until it ruptures the fragile membranes surrounding the milk fat. Once broken, the fat droplets can join with each other and form clumps of fat, or butter grains.

As churning continues, larger clusters of fat collect until they begin to form a network with the air bubbles that are generated by the churning; this traps the liquid and produces a foam. As the fat clumps increase in size, there are also fewer to enclose the air cells. So the bubbles pop, run together, and the foam begins to leak. (per the wikipedia “butter churning” entry)

Basically what happens is you shake the cream so hard, it separates into the fatty stuff and the milky stuff, butter(fat) and butter milk (the rest). SO COOL.

Make some butter today!