Homemade Butter

This weekend my wife and I decided to try our hand at making butter. We heard it was easy, but weren’t sure what to expect. All you need is cream and a stand mixer. We poured in one pint of heavy whipping cream and set the speed on low for a few minutes:

When it gets frothy like the foam on a cappuccino, you can turn it up to medium.

When it starts to look like whipped cream, you can increase the speed even more. Be sure to stop the mixer every so often to scrape down the sides so all of the cream whips evenly. You can see it getting really thick here:

In this picture, you can see the buttermilk starting to separate from the butter:

You have to turn the speed back down at this point or else the buttermilk will start to splatter. We poured off the buttermilk three different times. The time to add extra ingredients like salt, honey, or herbs is after the second time you purge the buttermilk, when the butter has yet to fully stick together. We saved the buttermilk and my wife made some delectable buttermilk fantails.

Here I am squeezing the butter to make sure all the buttermilk is gone. If you leave some in, it will sour and spoil the butter:

From left to right, we made regular butter, roasted garlic and herb butter, and salted honey butter:

We used one pint of heavy cream per batch, and each pint produced a lump of butter about the size of a tennis ball. It’s not really cheaper to make butter than to buy it at the store unless heavy cream is on sale, but at least you have total control over what goes into the mix. Next time we grill corn, I think I’ll make some honey butter with herbs and Cajun spices.