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Homemade butter


Morten

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Yesterday i gave homemade butter a try - It surprised me how easy it was.

Cream in blender (dont have a mixer og foodprocessor so), let it run until the cream breaks up into buttermilk and cream. Then all that is left is to wash it, so it get rid of the last fluids in it, and to salt it.

It tasted great on a no knead bread:) Have anyone some good ideas to enchance the flavour of the cream before turning it into butter?

butter03.jpg

The butter just after the cream broke.

butter05.jpg

Working the last of the buttermilk out of the butter

butter09.jpg

Fresh bread from the oven and homemade butter - that made my evening:)

Edited by Morten (log)
http://www.grydeskeen.dk - a danish foodblog :)
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Looks divine. There is nothing more wonderful than warm fresh bread with cold butter.

Would you please be a bit more specific than 'cream'? Was it heavy cream? Thanks. :smile:

Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

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I've made butter in my KitchenAid stand mixer, using the usual heavy cream picked up in the grocery store. Just use the flat beater, throw a towel over the top of the mixer to drape around the bowl (otherwise you'll spatter all over the place), beat on high til the solids separate from the liquid. There are a number of youtube videos you can take a look at too, if you want to see it in action.

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Unpasteurized cream is just starting to pop up on shelves here, at $12/pint :blink:

(Not having tasted it) I find it hard to think of an application that would be worth such an expense. If there is, it might be butter.

 

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you don't have to salt it either, I don't (nor do I ever buy salted butter, salt was added as preservative in the past and is no longer needed.). I don't do it often, you can buy really good butter by now, but it's a fun project. Makes more sense with really good cream of course.

A fun project to do with kids: fill the cream into a jar with a screw top (plastic is better in case they drop it) and have them shake it shake it shake it. First nothing seems to happen, then it gets oddly silent in there and suddenly you feel something heavy clunking around. Be prepared to do most of the shaking yourself :biggrin:

I would only go through the process for butter to use as is on fresh baked bread as the OP, I'd not do this for butter I intend to cook with though. Not worth the trouble IMO.

If you can find fresh cream directly from a farm go for it, it's interesting to see how the butter changes with the seasons and the diet of the cows.

"And don't forget music - music in the kitchen is an essential ingredient!"

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When I was a kid, we bought homemade butter from a small dairy farm nearby. It was shaped in a big round clump and wrapped in foil. It was one of the best things I had ever tasted, the farmer used soured cream to make butter. I guess that's the more traditional butter, since you collected cream from your cows, stored it in the milkhouse for a few days until you had enough to make alot of butter. During the storage, the cream slightly soured. That tang is what is missing in commercial butter, I've yet to find even an artisnal butter that tastes like that. We would literally carve slices off the round and make butter sandwiches, it was that good. Has anyone tried to make homemade butter with soured cream? I don't think it was salted, since the slight sourness added so much flavor.

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You are in Denmark so should have better sources for milk/cream than most people do in the US.

I regularly make butter using "Manufacturers Cream" which is extra-heavy cream that is NOT ultra-pasteurized.

The butter I prepare is "cultured" butter and involves heating the cream to 180° F. (82°C) allowing it to cool to about 80° F, then adding 1/4 cup of buttermilk per 1/2 gallon of cream then and holding it at about 75 degrees for 12-24 hours (depends on the ambient temperature- takes longer in cool weather and also in rainy weather) until it "clabbers" (it will have a slightly sour odor) - at which point the cream is churned until the butter separates from the liquid.

The souring or culturing process is what yields the richer flavor.

I drain the butter, saving the liquid, using butter muslin - not the cheesecloth you find at markets.

http://www.cheesemaking.com/store/p/71-Butter-Muslin-for-Draining-Soft-Cheese.html?feed=froogle

This has the advantage of being reusable and is totally lint-free - no tiny bits of cotton in the butter!

This site has another pictorial and uses yogurt instead of buttermilk. http://blog.cooklikeyourgrandmother.com/2008/06/how-to-make-cultured-butter-and.html

If you really get into it and want to get a real churn - the best price is from http://www.homesteadersupply.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=20

Lehman's also carries a couple but are priced a bit higher.

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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Every once in a while I get the urge to try using my "freeze the bowl type" ice cream maker to make butter. I plan to refrigerate the bowl and try it someday. Any opinions?

tracey

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Every once in a while I get the urge to try using my "freeze the bowl type" ice cream maker to make butter. I plan to refrigerate the bowl and try it someday. Any opinions?

tracey

Nope. But I would be interested in hearing the results.

Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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Every once in a while I get the urge to try using my "freeze the bowl type" ice cream maker to make butter. I plan to refrigerate the bowl and try it someday. Any opinions?

'Fraid I doubt it'll do the trick.

You need to beat the cream until it separates.

Ice cream makers are generally rather gentle.

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch ... you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan

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Yesterday i gave homemade butter a try - It surprised me how easy it was.

Cream in blender (dont have a mixer og foodprocessor so), let it run until the cream breaks up into buttermilk and cream. Then all that is left is to wash it, so it get rid of the last fluids in it, and to salt it.

It tasted great on a no knead bread:) Have anyone some good ideas to enchance the flavour of the cream before turning it into butter?

...

If you don't culture the cream (as per Andiesenji's post) you make 'sweet cream butter' which is very, errrr, 'creamy'... !

But thst might be exactly what you were wanting for patisserie purposes, as one suggestion.

And some people revel in that creamy, rather than buttery, taste.

The 'washing' process's effectiveness determines how the butter matures.

Unless you are very rigorous with the washing, you'll get some milky bits left in the butter, and as that 'cultures', the flavour of the butter will change over a very few days (even in the fridge), going "off" much faster than commercial butters.

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch ... you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan

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The effort involved in washing butter can be reduced somewhat by using butter paddles. The process as I do it is illustrated here:http://www.positron.org/food/butter/

You can buy a set here: http:http://www.lehmans.com/store/Kitchen___The_Home_Dairy___Making_Butter___Grooved_Butter_Paddles___BP1 (get the large ones) or you can get a single curved one or any wide wooden paddle/spatula and work the butter on a cutting board.

The business ends have to be soaked in ice water before using - the butter is squished against the side of the bowl to express most of the liquid then about half a cup scooped out and mashed between the two paddles (or on the board if using the single curved one) rolled up between the two paddles and squeezed again and again until no more liquid is expressed.

Then pick up some more and continue until all the solids have been worked free of liquid.

You can shape portions of the butter into balls and roll between the paddles to for a cross-hatch design on the surface - or you can buy butter molds from Lehmans or if you have silicone chocolate molds, you can use them if you want something fancy.

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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You can shape portions of the butter into balls and roll between the paddles to for a cross-hatch design on the surface - or you can buy butter molds from Lehmans or if you have silicone chocolate molds, you can use them if you want something fancy.

When I was a little girl, my Aunt Eileen made butter balls with a cross hatch design on them. I was enchanted by the process and loved to go to her house to watch her make the butter balls. :wub:

Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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  • 1 year later...

I tried to do this the other day with my daughter. I dropped the cream into my Kitcheaid and turned it on. It never came together. Even after 20 minutes I still had just cream sloshing around in the bowl. I've made butter before and never had this problem.

The only thing I could think of was that maybe the carageenan levels were too high in this particular cream. Any ideas on what may have happened?

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I've heard of this happening before, though I don't make butter often enough to have experienced it myself. IIRC, there are a couple of possible culprits: stabilizers (like the carageenan you mention), homogenization and high-temp pasteurization. I don't think we ever tracked down the problem definitively, so I'm not sure what mechanisms are involved. Whenever I want to make butter, I go with cream that has had as little done to it as possible, which usually means organic around here.

Matthew Kayahara

Kayahara.ca

@mtkayahara

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I tried to do this the other day with my daughter. I dropped the cream into my Kitcheaid and turned it on. It never came together. Even after 20 minutes I still had just cream sloshing around in the bowl. I've made butter before and never had this problem.

The only thing I could think of was that maybe the carageenan levels were too high in this particular cream. Any ideas on what may have happened?

Could the cream you got hold of be specially intended for coffee? I've never heard of stabilizers being present in other sorts of cream (I just took a look at the supermarket cream we have in the fridge, and it contains only cream [38% fat]; I always have to be careful to not turn it into butter when I'm whipping it). Although it may not be the only culprit, it seems to me that carageenan would definitely interfere with breaking, since that's part of the reason it's there. Carageenan is also a thickener, which suggest that the fat level is fairly low, making it less than ideal for butter production.

Michaela, aka "Mjx"
Manager, eG Forums
mscioscia@egstaff.org

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I tried to do this the other day with my daughter. I dropped the cream into my Kitcheaid and turned it on. It never came together. Even after 20 minutes I still had just cream sloshing around in the bowl. I've made butter before and never had this problem.

The only thing I could think of was that maybe the carageenan levels were too high in this particular cream. Any ideas on what may have happened?

Could the cream you got hold of be specially intended for coffee? I've never heard of stabilizers being present in other sorts of cream (I just took a look at the supermarket cream we have in the fridge, and it contains only cream [38% fat]; I always have to be careful to not turn it into butter when I'm whipping it). Although it may not be the only culprit, it seems to me that carageenan would definitely interfere with breaking, since that's part of the reason it's there. Carageenan is also a thickener, which suggest that the fat level is fairly low, making it less than ideal for butter production.

Almost all supermarket heavy cream has carageenan in it where I live. I intentionally looked for cream without it but it was nowhere to be found (even in the "gourmet" stores).

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. . . .

Almost all supermarket heavy cream has carageenan in it where I live. I intentionally looked for cream without it but it was nowhere to be found (even in the "gourmet" stores).

That's amazing, at least to me. You'd think they'd have at least one version that was unadulterated. You might have luck finding pure cream at a health food store or farmer's market.

Michaela, aka "Mjx"
Manager, eG Forums
mscioscia@egstaff.org

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. . . .

Almost all supermarket heavy cream has carageenan in it where I live. I intentionally looked for cream without it but it was nowhere to be found (even in the "gourmet" stores).

That's amazing, at least to me. You'd think they'd have at least one version that was unadulterated. You might have luck finding pure cream at a health food store or farmer's market.

I feel certain they'd have it at Whole Foods but that's not that close to my home. It was really just a science demonstration for my daughter anyway.

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