I Can't Believe It's Butter!

Really, it still fascinates me. Who knew you could actually make butter?? 

I did, and I've done it before, but this is different. It's from cows a mile and a half down the road, and it comes over in gallon glass jars.

Plus, due to self-inflicted mandates, it's our only source of butter from now on. Hypothetically. I have ideals, including self-sustanence in many different realms--one of them the realm of butter :) 

Butter was one of the first dairy products I intended to tackle mastery of in my new home. I approached my first experiment with dubious excitement. Thankfully, Dr. Seuss and my time-proven Mr. Blender gave me confidence.

They let me down. The only things I produced were failure and some nasty chunky-watery liquid. Great, the easiest thing on my list, and I was already struggling.

Oh well. It's not like I'm going to run out of milk anytime soon. 

So with our next gallon of milk came my next attempt, bolstered by actual advice and step-by-step instructions instead of making it up from what I remembered in passing conversations. AND, since I did succeed this time, I'm going to tell you how it works. 

After ladling the cream off the top of "rested" milk (a couple hours should be enough to get the cream and milk to separate), let it sit on the counter until room temperature. Longer than the 20 minutes I gave it my first shot; I've been leaving it for 4-6 hours. Dump it in the blender, and turn that puppy on.

It never got to that instantaneous transformation from cream to butter that I was looking for, but after a couple minutes the butter should start to collect at the surface. One blog I was checking out said to then pour it all through a strainer:

My strainer is very fine-mesh, intended for chai (not that I ever make that stuff), and all the butter did was conglomerate everywhere. I decided that was theretofore an unnecessary step, and today I just scooped the butter off the buttermilk and put it in a glass container. I smushed it around for a while (but definitely not playing with it), tipping out the rivulets of buttermilk as they escaped the butter. Towards the end I just captured the butter with my spatula and poured out the unwanteds. 

At this point I stirred in some salt (I would tell you the amount but it's hard to show you on the surface area of my palm, so I have absolutely no idea), and whoopdedoo, I gots butter! It even turned a gentle shade of yellow this time, which gives me some internal level of accreditation. I got about 1/2 cup of butter with 2 1/2 cups of leftover liquid--I'll tell you later about my experiment with that stuff...so not a fantastic ratio, but so worth it.

BUTTER!!!