Butter. Also: Buttermilk.

Last week, I made some Crème Fraiche. It was lovely. And, as is my wont, I bought far too much cream. The great thing about cream, aside from its general greatness, is that it's useful for many many things. The downside, aside from its caloric content, is that it doesn't last forever. Which is a shame, but what can you do?

I'll tell you what you can do: you can make butter. That is what you can do. There are three reasons to make butter. The first is because it lasts a lot longer than cream, so if you have leftover cream that you want to stabilize, turning it into butter will make it last for weeks or longer, well maintained.

The second reason is because, as with all of the basic ingredients that you make, it's terribly impressive for a dinner party to offhandedly mention that the butter that is being enjoyed on the dinner rolls was made fresh this morning in this very kitchen. You know, to show off.

The third reason to make butter is to get buttermilk. And I don't mean the nasty, cultured stuff you get at the store. Although it will culture given some time, the buttermilk fresh off the butter is sweet and dangerously tasty. If you've heard of people drinking buttermilk, this is almost certainly what they were drinking, at least if they enjoyed the experience. I don't know of any other way to get fresh buttermilk. It's worth trying.

The thing about making butter is that it is remarkably simple. You can make it with little more than a handy mason jar, although if you were making a large amount regularly without electricity, you might use any of a number of churning devices. For my butter making, I used the following:

That's everything: a mixer and some cream. It doesn't even really matter how much cream, but I used a bit more than a pint, because that's how much I had lying around. You'll note that I'm using the paddle attachment on the mixer, because I figured that cleaning butter out of a whisk attachment would be a pain. And, as making butter is terribly simple, there's no reason to go crazy with the contact points. Seriously, you could put cream in a mason jar, seal it, and shake it for a while, and eventually you'll have butter.

Starting off, we mix the cream, and it looks something like this while it's going:

Your target speed is as fast as you can go without splashing cream all over the kitchen. As it changes consistency, the speed you can run it at will change. We will be going through the whipped cream stages, so here's soft peaks:

And the stiff peaks:

Below is a useless stage between whipped cream and butter. If you're ever making whipped cream, and you get to this stage, just go ahead and finish it off into butter. Making your own butter is so much more impressive than whipping cream anyways. What's happening here, and what is the secret to making butter, is that the butter is crystalizing. Just like sugar and salt, the molecules in cream arrange themselves into a very stable structure. When you are making whipped cream, you are making a temporary structure. When you push it a bit farther, you form a very soft crystalline structure. But this is why butter is stable at room temperature and whipped cream will melt back into cream at room temperature.

Finally, when the stand mixer starts sounding like you have something close to solid sloshing around something liquid, then you've made butter. And the stuff it's sloshing around in? Buttermilk. Real, honestly tasty, not-at-all-sour buttermilk.

The hardest part of this entire process is separating the butter from the buttermilk. First, pour off all the buttermilk you can. For the love of all you hold dear, do *not* throw this out. Keep it, drink it, use it for biscuits, whatever. Trust me on this. Then take the butter in convenient handfuls and run it under a cold tap, squeezing until you've rinsed all of the buttermilk out of the butter. Keep doing this until all of your butter is clean. If you don't do this, and you don't use your butter quickly, your butter will go bad quickly, and you don't want that. Plus, your butter will squelch and ooze on your toast, and that's just weird.

After you are done rinsing, you'll have something like this:

For a pint of cream, I had nearly a pint of buttermilk, and about 7 ounces of butter. I think that's a pretty good yield.

What can you use this for? Come on, it's butter. Use it for butter. For the buttermilk, you can use it like regular milk, or you can use it in recipes that call for milk or buttermilk. As I mentioned before, it's uncultured, so it's not going to be tangy like the stuff you get in the store, but it will be rich and delicious. I can also say that I stored the container above in the fridge covered with plastic wrap, and later that evening the plastic wrap had ballooned up, meaning that there was definitely some fermentation going on. I haven't played around with fermenting buttermilk, so I can't say where the line between tasty and dangerous is, but I suspect it is not difficult to culture your own buttermilk. I recommend using it within a few days.

Another thought I had is that European-style butter is pre-cultured, so it has more of a tangy flavor than the American-style butter. I haven't tried this yet, but I suspect that if you were to take some Crème Fraiche and run it through this process, you'll get European-style butter. I'll try that at some point in the near future, but if anyone wants to give it a go and report back, I'd love to hear how it goes.

Butter and Buttermilk

Ingredients

1 Pint Cream (or however much you want, really)

Directions

Pour cream into a stand mixer with the paddle attachment.

Mix on low- to medium-speed until you have butter.

Pour as much buttermilk as you can into a container.

Under cold, running tap water, squeeze handfuls of butter until no more buttermilk comes out.

Repeat rinsing with the rest of the butter.

Comments

[deeba]

Great article and I'm so thrilled you make your own butter. Have been doing it for years, and that's just what I use in my baking! I also tend to make 1/2 cup {100gm} portions and freeze them. Bring it down into the fridge the previous night, and the butter is as good as fresh.

[Brian]

Thank you very much. Do you use grocery store cream, or something special and/or local?

That's one thing I didn't mention in the main article but probably should have, is that you can also alter the experience of your butter if you have raw milk and/or goat's milk to work from. If you have a source, you can try out different variations and easily compare just the difference between your sources of milk in your basic ingredients.

[Ben]

To minimize the amount of cream in your kitchen, try wrapping plastic wrap between the top of bowl and the mixer head. Then you can mix as hard as you'd like without splashing all over.

Also, try adding herbs to the butter once you're done. Your friends will be floored.