Wednesday, March 11, 2009

It's Like Buttah


Ok, for you that have never watched Saturday Night Live you may not get it. But we made our own butter tonight. It was fun, and OH SO easy!!! The picture shows you the Heavy whipping cream we started out with, and the by products that we ended up with, Butter (on the right) and Butter milk. I added about a tsp. of salt, because it was VERY bland without it.
We started out with a quart of heavy cream, and ended up with 17.05 ounces of butter. I am sorry I do not remember how much the cream was, but I think it was a little over $2. But it was very fun to do as a family. Here is what we did. I took the cream and brought it to room temperature. Then I put it in my blender on the lowest speed, this is very important other wise you end up with whipped cream, which is good, but not what we were going for here. That is another day, and another machine. So, we turned it on and waited. The online guide (we just googled how to make butter in the blender) said it could take from 10 minutes to 3 hours. I am not sure who it took 3 hours for, but ours took about 10-15 minutes. You can tell it is doing something when the level of your cream starts to drop. Then you can see that it is getting thicker, and then you see big clumps. After a little longer, we could really see the butter turning in the blender, so we stopped it. The online guide said you really had to watch it, because it could go from being really nice and soft and creamy, to hard in just a very short time. But this is the same guide that said it might take 3 hours, so just keep an eye on it to be safe. Then once you have mostly butter, we spooned it out with a slotted spoon into a metal bowl. The guide suggested a wooden bowl soaked in water so the butter would not stick to it, but I do not have any wooden bowls. Then we took a bamboo spoon and pushed it around to get the rest of the milk out of it. This is when I put the salt in. You can do it to your taste, but we only used a tsp.
I do not think that we will save any money on this, but it was a lot of fun to do. And it tastes really good. It is VERY creamy, and rich. We are going to make a buttermilk pie with the buttermilk we made. It tastes just like Whole milk, but it has little tiny bits of butter in it. My friends mom had the best recipe I have ever had in my life for buttermilk biscuits, I really need to get that from her. She would never give it out when we were kids. I need to go to Indiana, just to see her and get it. Wow, you know another thing this did for me tonight, it made me miss home and the simple way of life that we use to have when I was little before the hustle and bustle of computers, and all. But I sure would miss my computer, and the friends that I am able to keep in touch with on here. I hope you get a chance to go out and get some heavy whipping cream, those of you that are not Lactose and Casein intolerant, and try this fun family experiment. Stay safe and blessed.

2 comments:

Danielle said...

enjoy your butter-it sounds like fun, but since i'm one of those lactose free people i won't be doing this anytime soon-do they make loctose-free whipping cream in any of those crazy health stores? lol

FHL said...

J's been wanting to make butter again ever since they did it in Co-op...only I refused because I know that he'd want to shake it for one minute and make me do the other 14! This could be a great compromise!! :o)

I cannot believe my child got up at 4am!!! Insane little boy! So sorry!!!! I asked him how he knew the time (thinking he was exaggerating), nope he knew because he went to the kitchen and I quote, "I made a lot of trips to the kitchen to check the clock." Guess who took a two hour nap this afternoon.....