I also like to use Sundays as cooking days. Recently I read on someone's food blog ( I don't know whose! Don't ask me these things! Probably if you offered me a million dollars to tell you, I couldn't) about how easy it is to make homemade butter. So, off I went!
A few years ago, if you'd have told me I'd be making homemade butter, I'd have said "F*$^ that!" Really. I have a potty mouth. A big one. Because butter is one of those things you just pick up at the store, like eggs and bread. Now, I can't make my own eggs--well, I guess I technically can, since I am female. I can make human eggs. But I want a chicken egg cooked up in a pan for breakfast.
...And now we've entered gross territory. Ew. How the hell did we get from butter to here? Sometimes I think I should seek professional help.
ANYhoo, I never knew how easy it was to make butter until I tried it. And guess what? It was easy! All thanks to my handy-dandy butter churner. See? I keep mine in the garage, next to the spittoon and the washboard.
Okay, not really! This is actually my handy-dandy butter churner:
I dumped in a pint of heavy whipping cream, and whipped the serious crap out of it. It whipped and whipped and whipped. And then, guess what it did? It whipped some more!
You'll notice there is a layer of Saran-Wrap over the mixer. This is necessary. Trust me. I didn't think it was as I was watching it mix and mix and mix and mix and nothing happened. But there is a very very small amount of time between the stages of "ohmygod this stuff is never gonna become butter!" and "ohmygod this is really butter!" Like, seconds. And when it does become butter, there is buttermilk, which makes a hell of a mess if you don't have Saran-Wrap. So you'll need this. Take my word for it.
See? Here's the buttermilk. And I have to admit something. It's embarrassing. I never really thought about what buttermilk was. I just kinda thought it was another milk product, like 1%, 2%, etc. etc.
Buttermilk is the milk you're left with when you make butter. I am such a genius. Here is my buttermilk:
And here is the butter!
After you beat the hell out of the cream, it clumps together like this, becoming a very, very pale yellow color. You'll want to strain it , reserving the buttermilk for something else, like pancakes! Then, you should knead it to get out the remaining milk so it's not soggy.
I tried to form a stick like you'd find at the store, but it's not really. It's more of a misshapen Android-borg type of shape. Does anyone know what the hell an Android-borg is? I think it's indigenous to the planet Zoloft.
Anyhoo, this is what my butter looked like after I kneaded it. It's ... rustic.
And here is my homemeade butter spread on the baguette I got from Bridgeport Brewery. They also have a bakery on-site.
The butter was very creamy and rich. Even more so than what you'd get at the store. You can taste the intensity and sweetness of the cream, since, after all, that's what it was literally five minutes before it was butter.
Don't be intimidated. If you have a mixer, you can make homemade butter. It's a lot of fun just to see the process from start to finish. Go for it!
1 comment:
I over-whipped some whipping cream once, while trying to make whipped cream to frost a cake. It needed to be really stiff in order to be spread and hold its shape, but I went too far and it got all clumpy. I didn't realize what I had done until I called my mom. :P But it is a fine line. A very fine line. Unfortunately I didn't use the butter for anything because I had added a bunch of sugar to it, which doesn't really go on a baguette.
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