Butter!

Totally on a whim, I made my own butter this week; and I seriously may never eat any store-bought butter ever again in my life. This stuff is phenomenal.

I started Tuesday with 2 quarts of delicious cream from the Evans Farm Creamery in Norwich. It's the first place I found that had low-temperature pasteurized, nothing-added cream - and this stuff was phenomenally rich and delicious. I don't know what the Evanses are doing, but their cows clearly are liking it.

.....never mind, let's just make whipped cream!

For culture, I put in about 1/3 cup of active culture, whole milk yogurt - again no additives.

I stirred these together, warmed the mixture up slightly on the stove (low heat, stirring frequently) to make sure the culture took, and then covered it with tin foil and let it sit almost 24 hours. It thickened up pretty nicely, and smelled just the faintest bit tangy.

Mixing in yogurt culture

Clabbered and ready to churn!

Lacking a churn, I decided my mixer would do just fine. I wasn't sure about splatter, so I only put about half the thickened cream in the mixer at a time (in retrospect, I probably could have fit it all ok). I put the mixer on the second slowest speed, and let it do its thing. In a few minutes it had thickened noticeably. About that point, I turned the mixer to the slowest speed.  The cream became yellow (why yellow?) and granular, and a little buttermilk became visible. Then - all of a sudden - the mixer was sloshing large grains of butter in a sea of buttermilk. It was really pretty neat.

Beginning to churn the clabbered cream.

Thickening

Grains of butter start to appear...

Things happen pretty fast at this point.

BUTTER!!

Butter/buttermilk break closeup

I strained the buttermilk out and transferred the butter to a bowl, then started washing the butter. To wash the butter, you add water to the butter bowl, and work the glob of butter in the water for a bit, then drain it. I repeated it a second time, and seemed to get all the buttermilk out (buttermilk left in is supposed to turn the butter rancid faster). After I drained the wash water, I worked the glob a bit more to press out water that was still mixed it. Then I added salt, at the terribly scientific rate of 1/8 teaspoon per perceived "1/4 lb stick volume equivalent". The salt was my standard iodized table salt. I worked it all through the butter, then portioned it out, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and put most of it in the freezer.

Unwashed butter

Washed butter, working in the salt

I don't have a scale handy, but it ended up to be a fair bit of butter. I do know that I ended up with 3 cups of the most delicious buttermilk, which my husband turned into delicious buttermilk pancakes this weekend. And, while super-fresh, the butter was practically world-changing. In preparation for this we splurged on two "fancy" loaves of bread from Wegman's, and the cultured butter on a slice of sourdough is practically a meal unto itself -I've never craved bread and butter before.

A diet of bread and butter never looked so good! (Even wrapped in plastic)

I did put most of the butter in the freezer for storage, though, and apparently that was a mistake. The cultured flavor intensified somewhat, which I like less well (still good, just a little bit too cheesy to be called "world-changing" butter). Next time, I'll make less and plan to keep it in the fridge and use it all within probably a month or so. I may also try a more "formal" culture next time - I found that Nancy's was a little sharp for my taste (as yogurt), and a more controlled inoculant might be the way to go. Also, next time I might do some sweet cream butter at the same time, because I'm not yet prepared for cultured butter with my maple syrup on my pancakes... on sourdough, though, this stuff still rocks.