I have a bi-weekly habit I’d like to pass on to you: making your own butter. It’s amazingly easy to do, and delivers a solid high of kitchen happiness.
So in this day and age, why would you make your own butter?
Honestly- this butter tastes unlike anything you’ll buy in a grocery store. It has a fuller flavor of creamy butter that is much more aromatic than store bought butters. This heady fragrance means that you too need to be conscious of your own butter’s timeline- make your batches smaller and frequent and it will be fresher.
As good as all that sounds, this butter-maker will let you in on a secret… I do it for the buttermilk. This eponymous treat finally delivers the full understanding to its name with one small sip. I should warn you though. Once you’ve tasted this elixir, you’ll be hard pressed to leave enough leftover from your sip for making buttermilk pancakes!
Homemade Butter Process
I once made butter in elementary school, shaking a jar of cream that we passed around the classroom. Once it started to sound thumpy in the jar instead of splashy, our teacher took over and gave us all slices of bread with a smear of our butter.
Lucky to be a grown up now, you can use your stand mixer to whip this up instead of shaking a jar for 10 minutes. This method lets you witness an interesting set of transformations in your cream:
- it quickly moves to whipped cream, then breaks (always a good process to do on purpose instead of accident!) down slightly,
- a couple minutes later it breaks again looking like white curds in liquid… but you’re not there yet.
- The final breakdown of the cream will sound splashy in your mixer bowl, and look distinctly different from the previous breakdowns. This final time, the curds will be slightly golden in color, and will be clumping readily on your beater in a sea of the most luscious buttermilk you’ve ever tasted.
Remove the butter chunks to cheesecloth, and squeeze out the remaining buttermilk. Hey- look what you’ve got in your hands… it’s butter!
How to store your fresh butter: topped with water
To keep your butter the freshest tasting, its going to be best served in an oxygen free environment.
I accomplish this by pressing walnut sized pieces of the fresh butter into a 1 cup sized wide mouthed glass mason jar. Press in the butter pieces so that there is no air trapped in the bottom of the jar, or around the butter.
If you choose to salt your butter, this would be a good time to massage your chosen salt into each butter piece, or butter layer.
When all the butter is smoothed into your jar, top it off with cold water and screw on the lid. This water layer will aid in keeping your butter air free- thus preserving its fresh taste longer (this is kind of like a French Butter Bell). Pour off the water each time you use your butter and top it off with a new cool layer when done.
How much butter will you get?
The yield of butter from cream is rather straightforward. One pint of cream yields 1 cup of butter and one cup of buttermilk. One cup of butter is 2 sticks, which is half a pound.
This homemade butter will be the perfect match to warm cornbread, steaming buckwheat pancakes, homemade bran muffins, cinnamon laced french toast…
I think you get my drift. I don’t need to convince you that butter is good!
More hot links for homemade butter
- Splendid Table: my inspiration, Lynne’s homemade butter procedure.
- The Traveler’s Lunchbox: once you’ve gotten comfortable with your homemade butter, come join us over on the cultured butter side. You won’t regret it.
- Mahanandi: repeat after Indira- clarified butter is not ghee. Having homemade ghee in use by your stove will yield a new round of tastiness to your cooking.
- Accidental Hedonist: now that you’re a connoisseur of all things butter, consider Kate’s post of types of butter a checklist to work through.
- Chocolate and Zucchini: don’t forget this special treat! So its not made with cream, its still a butter. Get carried away with Clotilde’s recipe for making Beurre de Cajou (that’s cashew butter, but it sounds better Clotilde’s way).
25 Comments
Yum! I adore butter–and homemade is just lovely! I used to make a lot of butter back when I made a lot of bread… the two seem to go so beautifully together!
Sigh- don’t they though. We are lucky to have this culinary power!
We should make a special promise to ourselves to gift a non-culinary friend (you know what I mean), or one who’s simply time pressed, a loaf of fresh bread and a small jar of fresh butter.
I bet we could really make someone’s day.
–McAuliflower
Thanks for the excellent tutorial! And a pint of cream is a whole lot cheaper than butter, too.
I have one question: do you refrigerate it? Because (I think) that the point of the butter bell is to have it at room temperature. I know lots of people leave their butter out with no ill effects.
On a side note, we have made peanut butter the same way! Shaking a container of cocktail peanuts in the can for a long enough time gives you peanut butter. Well, it was at a bar for a birthday party and being used as an impromptu musical instrument when we discovered this…but still.
HI Peggasus. You’re right I don’t refrigerate it.
Making peanut butter the shaker way sounds a bit long in process. But your version of doing it in a bar with friends sounds like fun!cheers
McAuliflower
Homemade butter is so delicious. There’s really nothing like it. I’d love to give this a try. How long do you think the butter will last (assuming we don’t eat it all), and assuming it is stored properly with the cold water on top)? Great post! I enjoy reading your blog!
Hi Cara,
Hmmm, good question- they usually get used up within a week, week and a half. I don’t know how long it will last at room temperature, unused. I’ll have to research how butter goes bad.
I tend to make this butter with a special occasion in mind: friends coming over, recipe that wants buttermilk and butter, fresh bread. Hence, how mine get used up quickly.
If I feel I won’t be using my butter in a timely manner, I do one of two things:
- make ghee out of it (which has a long shelf life. Also- spiced ghee’s can be made: just add aromatics to the heating butter for special flavored batches.
- pour off the water, over the top layer with wax paper and stick the jar in the freezer
I’m going to chew on this answer a bit longer too Cara.
Cheers
McAuliflower
This reminds me of my 6th grade trip to Springfield where we visited a cabin and someone was churning butter. I miss those days! And I love whipped butter. Nicely done.
How cool! I’m an addict so this is going on my to-do list. Can you use the non-fresh type (I don’t know what the proper word in English is)?
Oh my God, you just took me back 25 years…When I was a kid, we lived on a farm outside of Eugene and had a milk cow. We often had more milk than we could drink, so we soon learned to make yogurt and butter. But it has been a long time. Thanks for a nice trip down memory lane. 
Wow, this sounds absolutely delicious. I want to make some today! A question though: milkfat-percentage-wise, what kind of cream do you use?
Good and a bit tricky of a question Fiona,
Here in the United States, my grocery stores generally have only one type of cream available: “Heavy Whipping Cream”. I understand this means diddly squat in Canada, for example, where milk products are more clearly labeled by fat percentage.
The cream I used is ~36% milkfat. We’ve previously looked into American terminology for cream labels: heavy cream vs whipping cream. It proved to be a helpful discussion for making ice cream bases too.
–McAuliflower
This is such a timely post…a great reminder of something I love. I can’t wait until the chives come up around here…I love mixing chives in and then rolling little butter balls in the purple flowers. Thanks!
Ooo- I can practically smell your idea!
–McAuliflower
WoW! This sounds wonderful and the buttermilk part perfect! So, is cooking with the butter acceptable or not? I can’t wait to try this =D
Of course it is. However, just like any other butter, this will have milk solids in it that burn with an application of high heat (unlike ghee).
cheers
–McAuliflower
I made butter after I read your post about it and it was one of the most fun, satisfying things I’ve done in my kitchen ever! What a great idea.
Hmm, I’m a thinkin’ that I’m going to have to add this to my culinary adventures. Not that I don’t have lots already planned. My current project is mastering meringue cookies. I’m almost there. Of course, I have some fabulous whole-wheat millet bread setting next to the toaster. Jessica got me that Wild Fermentation book for our 2 yr anniversary …. and it’s got me thinking of a whole new set of projects.
Yea! I’m glad. I still haven’t attacked anything in that book yet (ginger beer any day now…). Well aside from making a keifer that didn’t work because I heated the milk too hot (mmm burnt flavored keifer). Now I’m thinking of making butter out of keifer’ed cream.
cheers
–McAuliflower
[...] Points posted a tutorial last week on how to make your own butter at home. Gavin and I tried it this weekend. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in the [...]
What a great idea! I’m going to make my first foray into bread-baking this week, and homemade butter sounds like the perfect complement.
Hi. Just stumbled across your site and have added it to my bookmarks. Great place to be.
I am a retired chef/restaurant owner now living joyously in a small village in central Spain.
Making your own butter is a simple and satisfying experience. The only comment I can add is that your butter will as good as your cream. An Irish friend of mine says that Irish butter is so superior because of the way the cows graze and what they eat. Makes sense to me. So I guess that if you bring over a quart of Irish cream you will get Irish butter!
Hi Richard,
Fresh cream would be great! I’ll take some
cheers,
McAuliflower
Grew up making butter and my Mum sold it and was much sort out for the sweetness and freshness of her butter.
After we got to take off the buttermilk, we would add water and salt and wash the butter, and repeat until the water was clear. That way the butter stayed fresher and sweeter much longer as all the milk had been washed out..
I still have the butter pats ..two pieces of wood like rectangular bats, with lines on them. We would put the butter into a rough shape and then pat it into place with these and mark it attractively.
Thanks Jane
I’ll try washing my butter next time.–McAuliflower
I love discovering that something such as this is so simple! Thank you!
What if we’d like to make a salted batch; do we simply throw in table salt in the cream prior to beating?
Hi Eric,
I mention in the directions that salt is added at the end- kneaded into the butter when it is packed in storage containers. Adding salt to the cream doesn’t necessarily mean it will come out in the fat/butter, it may come out in the buttermilk.
–McAuliflower
I’ve made butter once before, although it was quite by accident. As I was in the middle of a dinner party, the thought was quickly waylaid, so thanks for jogging my memory.
MMMMM, I love butter as well! Thank you so much for this simple method of making butter.
I stumbled upon your page and thought it was a wonderful idea. After several days, I finally buckled down and did it. Super easy and delicious! I felt same giddy rush I felt in kindergarten shaking that little jar. My girlfriend has just put in an order for garlic butter, which I assume can be made just by adding garlic and garlic powder at the end. Thank a bunch.
So glad you got the butter rush Eric!
Garlic butter sounds great- we can use minced garlic, with shallots in there too. Another fine variation would be to roast the garlic first.
Looking at other garlic butter recipes online shows yet another version of including a touch of alcohol in the butter. I saw variations using vermouth or brandy with the garlic. Hmmmm.I know what I’m off to explore…
–McAuliflower
my friends would love this
I love you.
I made this and then baked chocolate chip cookies.
Best Cookies Ever.
I”ve got to say I’ve never thought about making my own butter. I have let the whipping cream go into the first stage you mentioned, now I know just to let it keep on going and make the butter. More reasons to keep heavy cream in the fridge.
Great blog, by the way. So glad I found it.
Mary
I’m going to make this this weekend, along with biscuits! I’ll be speedwalking the rest of the weekend to burn it all off, but I’m determined to have fun with it. Thank you for posting such great notes and tutorial!
I have read your post about butter and it was one of the most fun, satisfying things I’ve done in my kitchen ever! What a great idea.
