Before I left for my CISSP prep class earlier this month, I saw cheap heavy cream at the grocery store. Cheap, as in 50 cents a quart cheap. I had always wanted to make butter at home one day, so I figured that the cheap cream was a sign and we bought a few cartons.
We used the KitchenAid to make our butter. Here’s what we did:
Here is what we started with: 3 quarts of heavy cream and a mixer.
Using the whisk attachment on the mixer, we whipped the cream to a stiff peaks state and then kept an eye on the bowl as the mixture started to “break” into small butter globules and buttermilk.
After pouring off the buttermilk, this is what was left. At this point, the is still quite a bit of liquid in the butter. If left alone, that liquid will so sour and ruin the butter. The easiest way to remove the liquid in question is to fill the bowl with cold water and knead the butter until the water runs clear. I had to replace the water in the bowl several times before this happened.
At this point, my hands were getting tired from all the kneading.
Since we wanted to use this butter for eating/cooking, we added the appropriate amount of salt (1/4 teaspoon table salt for every 4 ounces of butter) and portioned it into 8 ounce “sticks”.
We wrapped our freshly made butter in wax paper and stashed it in the deep freeze.
We also froze the buttermilk (after straining any errant butter globules out) and have used it to make some killer pancakes in the weeks since.
For our $1.50 purchase of cream, we got 8 sticks (2 lbs) of butter and a quart of buttermilk. Score!
I highly recommend doing this at least once! The resulting butter is great and tastes marvelous on homemade bread or anything else you use butter for.
