Have you ever thought about how butter is made? For me, it’s one of those things that I’ve always just both from the store. But did you know you can make it at home pretty easily? All you really need is one ingredient! Well two, if you want to make it salted.
Now, when it comes to butter, I separate it into two types, cooking butter and eating butter. Cooking, or baking butter, is the kind I use in most recipes. For instance, in a brownie or a chocolate chip cookie, the butter isn’t really the star. For these recipes, I would just use a store bought block of unsalted butter, not a fancy cultured butter or a homemade butter. Those are for eating. Smeared over a nice sourdough slice or a bread roll, were the butter can really shine. But of course, you can use this butter recipe in any recipe, just like you would store bought butter.
Now this recipe technically gives you two for the price of one. With one carton of cream, you’ll get the fats from the cream (the butter) and the buttermilk. Depending on the fat percentage in your starting cream, you may get slightly different yields than me. But, with a 500 mL carton of cream, I got 6 oz of butter and about 1/2 cut of buttermilk.
I used my KitchenAid mixer for this recipe, with the whisk attachment. You can also use a hand help mixer with the beater attachment, but a stand mixer is easier (and less messy).
Note, this butter may not last as long in the fridge as a store bought block. But you can always freeze some of it and use as needed.
I hope you give this recipe a try! It’s really cool watching your liquid cream turn into a sloped block of butter and just really gratifying making something that you may normally just buy.
Homemade Butter
Equipment
- Mixer
Ingredients
- 500 mL Cream 35% fat or more
- 1 tsp Salt Optional
Instructions
- In a clean stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, pour in the cream.
- Mix cream on low speed, slowly increasing to medium, until stiff peaks form.
- Keep bring the speed up to high and keep mixing. The cream will start to look curdled. At this point, place some dish towels over the top of the mixing bowl to minimize splashing.
- Keep mixing until all the fat is together (and will likely be stuck on the whisk attachment) and separated from a white milky liquid.
- Strain off the white liquid (buttermilk) if you want to keep it.
- Remove the butter from the whisk and place run a bowl full of ice water.
- Knead and massage the butter in the ice water. Once the water gets cloudy, dump it out. Repeat until the water is clear. That's how you know you washed out all the buttermilk and your butter will last longer in the fridge.
- Remove your butter from the ice water and sprinkle salt onto (optional. Knead it in.
- Place your butter in a airtight container and store in fridge for 1-2 weeks.