Homemade Butter

So I love Facebook for so many reasons. It keeps me in touch with friends near and far. I learn things. I get to play games. But ...I get awesome recipes too, like this one.

Homemade Butter

Brilliantly, you can make butter in a food processor. Or a blender. Or a stand mixer. Basically, whatever you have that can beat the heck out of cream will do the job for you, and it doesn't take long at all.

I bought two pints of organic (or regular) heavy whipping cream and poured that on into the food processor. (That is four cups.) The only other ingredient you need is salt to taste.
Go ahead and start processing. After a while, the cream turns into (no surprise here) whipped cream. Keep on going.

A minute or so later, the cream looks almost a bit grainy. But still delicious.

After a minute or so more it starts to get really curdled looking and then finally, this is the exciting part, the buttermilk starts to separate from the butter. Yup, I said it, butter!

Let it go a bit more to be sure the cream has completely separated. Then it is time to strain the buttermilk off of the butter. We put a strainer over a large bowl and dumped it all in there. The buttermilk goes into the bowl (and we saved it for use in future recipes.)

Pick up your mass of butter and knead it a bit to squeeze the rest of the buttermilk out. It is surprising how much is still in there even though it seems rather firm.

Now that you've squeezed the excess liquid out, you can mix in the salt, if you like. We kept half of ours unsalted, and then added about 1/4 tsp of kosher salt to the rest. We probably got about two or two and a half cups of butter out of the four cups of cream. Cover it and store it for up to two weeks.


Note: I have yet to make this but I will let you know how it turns out as soon as I do.

ENJOY!