I promised the story of making butter but have failed to go back to it. I figured, since I have nothing else to talk about, now would be a good time to share.
One of my absolute favorite television programs is Good Eats. Our TiVo records each episode that airs, and I often go back and rewatch older episodes that have been recorded again. A few weeks ago, I was watching an older episode ("The Case For Butter") and Alton Brown did a quick demo where he put heavy cream into a food processor and turned it into butter. Immediately, my brain went to work. Can I do this? Is there any reason to do this? If I decide to make my own butter is that voice of reason, better known as a wife, going to try to stop me? Eventually I decided the answers were, "probably", "Is there any reason not to?" and "of course" and that I wouldn't do it.
Not long after that, Melissa's sister, L, came to visit. While we waited for Melissa to finish getting ready to go see Harry Potter1, L decided she wanted to watch some Good Eats. We had already watched the most recent episode, so she asked what other episodes would be good. Since the episode is one of the most informative, I suggested the butter episode I had recently watched. When we reached the portion of the episode in which he makes the butter, she looked at the TV, surprised, and said, "Wait a minute, so..."2 By the time we left for the movie, we had talked Melissa into it and made plans to get supplies after the movie.3
There are other ways to make butter4 but here is how we did it (with pictures):
Obtain cream. We used heavy whipping cream. The key here is that the more fat in the cream, the more butter you will have at the end.
Put the cream into a mixing bowl, perhaps like the one for this mixer. (The test tube spice rack is entirely optional)
Decide if you want your butter salted. I added a half teaspoon or so of salt to our butter, since I knew we wouldn't use it up too rapidly.
Begin whipping. Just act like you are making whipped cream (but without adding sugar). You know how people say not to over-whip whipped cream? There's a very good reason why, and in this case you want to completely ignore that advice. When you keep agitating the cream past the point of being whipped cream, you begin to separate the fat and the liquid that were in the original cream (it took us about 20-25 minutes for this to happen). Keep beating until this separation happens and you end up with distinct solid and liquid elements5 in the bowl. Like this:
Remove the solids and place them on cheesecloth (or in our case, paper towels in a colander) to help remove any of the remaining liquid. Your dog may look on longingly at this point, but it is not required (even if it is cute).
Once the butter has drained a little more, put it into a container for storage and put it in the fridge or just start putting it on some bread.
In the end, you are left with a big hunk of butter that tastes...well, like fresh, creamy butter.
It was fun, tasty and perhaps a little pointless, but I'm certainly glad we did it. Now if I can just get Melissa to let me try making bacon...
1 One disadvantage of having only one bathroom in a house is that you spend a lot of time waiting for everyone else to get ready.
2 As you might guess, the success of my unintentional nefarious plan was met with much evil laughter and dry-washing of hands.
3 Don't you love how I'm portraying Melissa as against me having any fun? Apparently she's the Marge to my Homer in this post.
4 The easiest being, go to the store and picking up the package of Land O'Lakes.
5 The solids are, of course, the butter. The liquid is buttermilk. Actual buttermilk. It's very thin and apparently not as tart as the buttermilk you buy at the store. The buttermilk from the store has nothing to do with butter, it is cultured buttermilk, which is just milk to which certain bacterial cultures have been added. I imagine you could use the buttermilk from this process for anything you use cultured buttermilk for, but we just threw ours away.
August 02, 2007
We Could Have A Butter Eating Contest
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12 comments:
While reading this entire buttermaking post, I pictured you and Melissa dressed in Colonial attire. It really added a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to the experience!
Very cool! Makes me want to try it someday - we only have a hand mixer though.
How long did the butter last? Did it have time to go bad, or was it devoured?
I remember making butter by shaking cream in a Mason jar in Girl Scouts. Homemade butter just seems so pure and natural and delicious. I want to make some now! I would also like to know how long it lasts. I am one little person and I don't eat huge amounts of butter. Can you freeze it?
I'd never try this. As soon as my wife found out that butter was just the fattiest fat parts from a fatty milk drink (with salt!), all butter would be banned from my house for the rest of time.
(I'd like to extend my thanks to Alton Brown for his episode about how mayonaise is made by dripping pure oil into eggs. Thanks to that debacle, my sandwiches are now very, very dry.)
So, this butter... where does it rank on the butter yum scale as compared to grocery store butter?
Danielle,
I wasn't at work, so we can be pretty sure that I was wearing a polo shirt and jeans. Not quite colonial. I did have on a powdered wig, though.
MC Etcher,
A hand mixer would work fine, you would just have to hold the mixer. As for how long it lasts, we made it arond 4 weeks or so ago and we still have some, which is just fine. We do keep it in an airtight container when not in use.
Srah,
You can always freeze butter if you make sure it is safe from the other stuff in the freezer. Alternatively, you could buy one of the 1/2 pints of cream and you would only have at most 4 oz. of butter (the equivalent of 1 stick)...probably less. Also, you could do what we did and just plan things to go with butter. We had bread on hand for when the butter was done, waffles the next morning so we could put the butter on them, and so on.
Maine,
Mayonaise is no good anyway. Your sandwiches are better off without it.
Make her watch the episode about butter. He talks about how it is better for you than margarine, includes some fatty acids that are considered good for your heart and essentially completely natural. How does the butter rank? If I'm having bread with butter on it, I would prefer the flavor of the "European style" butter, which is made from cream that has had bacterial cultures added to it to convert the lactose into lactic acid. Compared to other non-cultured butter, it was quite good, just as good as the stuff we'd normally get. The only downside was that it isn't in the nice stick shape, so you don't get pretty little pats.
I remember doing this with the kids when we were teaching them from the Prarie Primer (Go Laura Ingalls Wilder!) We did it the arm busting way by shaking it in a container - YOW! and then using a couple of drops of juice from a carrot that had been diced to make it yellow. Did you colour yours?
Pol,
Nope, no coloring. The faint yellow tint is just the color from the cream. (Apparently this has to do with the type of diet of the cow it comes from. The cow that stands in a barn eating feed pellets usually gives pure white while the ones that graze tend to have more color...or so I've read.)
If I owned a mixer I'd be tempted to try this.
I can barely make a sandwich and you're handing out instructions on how to create butter. I feel somehow inferior..
Now, I vote for the making bacon post. For it's funny to say making bacon, in a highly immature way unless I'm confusing my immature sayings. Making bacon. Dammit. Now I just need some bacon.
Alton Brown goes to my mama's church. I wonder if he'll make butter for the next big service?
That did look like fun. Unfortunately I doubt it will make it into my cooking portfolio unless it can be made with chocolate chips?
It's times like this that I wish we lived closer. There's nobody at all here who will make butter with me. (Wow, that sounded really, and I mean REALLY, gay. Weird.)
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