Butter Making!

Food Bloggers the world over have been playing with making butter from whipping cream for a few years now. How could I resist?

It is actually quite simple, and has a few nice benefits, one of them being that it really helps reduce your waste. Sadly, the tinfoil covered wax paper that covers most bricks of butter are not recyclable. But, here in Vancouver, you can buy organic whipping cream in these glass re-usable/returnable bottles, significantly reducing the amount of your waste, and it actually produces more organic butter than what you can buy in the store for the same price. There is one drawback though, which I will explain in a little bit.

I've tried this a few times now, and find that the extra effort it takes really goes the distance when you have baking to do, like around your sister's birthday...

I start with the organic whipping cream, the colder it is, the faster it will whip up. I like to use my little Braun hand blender, with the whisk attachment at first.

I'm baking a cake, which I want to ice with whipping cream, so I remove the amount that I want for the top of the cake once it is whipped to the "soft peak" stage. And then I continue whipping.

At some point (maybe three minutes) the whipping cream becomes too thick for my whisk attachment, and it will stop.

This is when I change to the blender head. The Germans call these type of blender's "Stab and Stir,"  I think this name is really descriptive. I keep blending for another three minutes, approximately.

And then, the butter milk starts to separate. Its really amazing, all of a sudden you start to notice watery milk at the edges of you bowl, and then, BOOM, you have yellow butter and white butter milk.

Filter your butter milk out through a cloth, it could be a cheese cloth, but I just use a clean dish cloth.

Put all the butter into a pile and use your spatula, spoon or paddle to try to squeeze all of the butter milk out of it. Remember that disadvantage I mentioned at the top, well, if you don't get all the buttermilk out, which is REALLY hard, the butter will go bad within a few days. Maybe you can try salting it to preserve it for longer? Partly because of this, I will be using this method only for baking.

What I love about this method is that you can get 3 wonderful, organic baking ingredients from only one packaged consumer product. The Butter (in the measuring cup,) Butter milk, almost exactly one cup of each, and about a cup and a half of Whipping Cream. How nicely cost effective, but more importantly, what a waste saver.

And of course, I made a cake. Before I discovered this method, I didn't like making cakes from scratch, because I'd be required to buy buttermilk, something I'd only use a little of and probably waste the rest.

Something else I learned through this is, fresh buttermilk does not taste sour at all, it just tastes like milk.

Try it yourself, its fun, and in a way, you sort of feel more connected to our farmer/pioneer past.