Thursday, August 24, 2006

butter me up

Did you know that you can very easily make your own butter? Using your kitchen mixer? Oh yes!

All you need is heavy whipping cream. You just put the cream (1 to 2 cups) in your kitchen mixer fitted with a flat beater or whisk (or you could use your processor). Set the speed to medium-high, sit back and watch the show.

You'll make whipped cream first, which is fun to do too. The whipped cream will get very firm. Then, suddenly, something very fun happens. The cream seizes and collapses. Everything sloshes around again and you'll see bits of butter. But wait...then a big mass of butter will form and separate from the liquid. That liquid is buttermilk...did you know that? Drain the liquid and press the solid butter to get more liquid out. You can add salt and herbs if you'd like. You can also press the butter into molds to make fun shapes. I like to form it into a half-sphere so that it fits nicely into my Haviland butter dome, and I put a little violet in the center.

How 'bout that? Butter without a churn!

6 comments:

Saucy said...

My mother and I did this accidentally once. Making whipped cream for a dessert, we got to talking and when we realized... it was too late!

Mama Urchin said...

I have also done it by accident, using a mixer to whip cream which was way more powerful than what I was used to.

Anonymous said...

That is so cool! Thanks for sharing that simple, yet fancy idea. I'm going to try it for my next gathering and impress the heck out of my friends/family.

Anonymous said...

yeah, i knew that. because it happened to me accidently. but i never thought of doing it on purpose. and now i'm vegan and there's no butter in my diet anymore ;-)

Anonymous said...

WOW. I did not know this! Homemade butter. I normally just can't wait to get the yummy whipped cream out of the bowl and on to my gingerbread, so there hasn't been much danger of me overbeating it. . . .

Just one more thing for me to do when I should be working!!! ;-)

Thanks for the conversation today, my love. It was just what I needed to help me get a bit of perspective.

xo, a

Geekwif said...

What a great tip! I've always been told when making whipped cream, to be very careful not to whip too much because it would turn into butter. Silly me. I never thought that I could intentionally make butter. I'm definitely going to use this! Thank you!