Making butter

I want to start making butter with milk from a friend's herd. This video is a lovely way to learn!

I was making small-batch butter at home for a while... For a little taste/test, put some cream in a large mason jar and shake until separation occurs and chunks form, then strain through cheese cloth. It takes a while, but nothing beats fresh butter - especially if you know the source of the milk!

Not exactly like the butter I made accidentally while trying to whip cream.

Growing up, we use to live next to some farms that would turn their own butter. We'd go a few times a year to get it from there and we use to be able to turn it and make our own when we visited. Never really tried it on my own completely. This video seems to have some good pointers (only watched a handful of it).

I make butter with a big bowl and a whisk. I can comfortably churn around 2 litres/half gallon of cream this way, where as making it in jars you need a jar with at least double the capacity to the amount of cream you start with. An old wooden butter churn like the one in the video would be perfect though, these turn up often here in antique shops.

When I've cultured the cream it turns to butter more easily, and the culturing helps the cream to keep longer if you get delayed with making butter from it. Recently I was given 16 litres/4 gallons of cream, I kept this at around 10c/50f for over a week while I made one batch of butter a day because I'd cultured it by adding 4 tablespoons yoghurt per litre/quart of cream. I wonder if the cultured butter at the end keeps better as well.

Homemade butter is the best! Ghee is a great way to preserve it for longer and make it into a great roasting/frying fat.

Loved the video. I wish I lived there☺️

My mother got her childhood dazey butter churn and we churned a lot as children (of course, we also bought milk direct from the farmer down the road, and had lots of skimmed cream to use!  we also had to pasteurize it ourselves at that time by law which was not as much fun, lol).  I found a reasonably priced hand crank churn, much the same style but slightly smaller for ONLY $39 (!!) at www.thegrommet.com.  They have some useful hand powered gadgets, prices are not too bad, but the butter churn is my favorite!