Making Butter

This is the way I make butter. There are lots of ways to make butter, but it always starts with cream.

You can get heavy whipping cream from the store, or you can skim the cream off non-homogenized milk, which is what we do.

You may notice that the milk, cream, and butter look very yellow. Our cow has something called the Jersey Gold gene. It's not an official name, just a term that old-time farmers use. It means that Echo's milk has a yellow color, and the cream and butter are a golden color.

It takes a few days to separate the cream from the milk in a 2-gallon beverage dispenser.
Cream rises to the top, and milk settles on the bottom.
I drain off the skim from the bottom each day, and add milk from the previous day into the mix.
By the third or fourth day we have almost half cream!

After skimming the milk from the bottom, I use a ladle to get the cream off the top.
I ended up with about 12 cups of cream, and 3 quarts of skim.
The skim milk is more like store-bought 2% milk than store-bought skim milk.
This method doesn't get as much cream out of the milk as a traditional separator does.

I let the cream sit out until it comes to room temperature (about 70-72 degrees).
This ages the cream a little bit, which helps it turn into butter faster.
Cold cream turns into whipped cream.
Warm cream seems to skip the whipped stage and go right to butter.
I'm not sure if that's true for store-bought heavy cream,
but that's the way it works with cream from our cow!

I use the whisks in my stand mixer. You can see the grains starting to form in the cream.
The mixer has been going for about 1 1/2 minutes, which isn't very long.

Now it looks like big grains!
This mixer does such a good job up until this point.
The whips don't do a good job forming the butter into a mass.

I have a Kilner Butter churn, which I love!
But it takes longer than the stand mixer to turn cream into butter.
I let the stand mixer do part,
then I put it into the churn to finish it up.

It takes less than a minute to get the butter into a nice clump,
all ready to wash. It takes about 15 minutes to use the churn to make butter without the mixer.

Yes, I need to wash the butter!

I drain off the buttermilk into a jar.
I'll add it to my cultured buttermilk later.
This buttermilk is not like buttermilk from the store.
The buttermilk in the store is cultured, like yogurt.
This is a little like the whey that comes from making cheese.

I put the butter into a bowl that has ice and water in it.
The butter is quite soft at room temperature so it's hard to wash.
The ice water firms up the butter quickly.

You can see there is still milk in the butter.
I knead it with the spatula and the milk comes out easily.

It takes about 3 rinses before the water is clear and the butter is washed.
It's important to get as much buttermilk out as you can because the butter will last much longer when it's clean.

9.1 ounces of butter from 4 cups (1 quart) of cream.

If you want to add salt, now is the time to do it. Salt is important if you want butter to last longer, and  most people like the taste of salted butter. You'll need to add it to taste, there isn't really a recipe to tell you how much to add. I add about 1/2 teaspoon to 8 ounces of butter. If I'm using it for cooking, I don't add any salt.

It makes great cookies! 

Yum!
You don't need your own cow to make butter.
You can use heavy whipping cream from the store.

Here's Echo ready to come in for milking.
She gives us about 4 gallons of milk every day!
That's plenty of milk to drink and make cheese,
and lots of cream to make butter and ice cream!

If you're interested in cream separators and how they work, here's a good link to get you started.

Goat's Milk Butter

I have been curious about making butter with goat's milk. I've heard it isn't as fast as making butter from cow milk, but I wanted to give it a try.

It was much easier than I thought it would be! Here are photos from my second batch. One of these days I'll get good at taking photos one handed, for now there are still a few fuzzy ones.

It takes a few days for the cream to separate from goat's milk. This milk is about 4 days old. It's hard to see in the photo where the cream is, that's why my finger is there.

At first I tried scooping the cream off the top with a spoon. That didn't work for me. So I tried using a turkey baster! That worked really well. If you use a turkey baster make sure the tip of the baster is right at the top of the cream and don't suck up the cream fast or you will get lots of milk, too.

I put the cream from the top of the milk into a regular quart canning jar and screwed the lid on tight. I shook the jar back and forth--but I didn't shake it hard and fast, I rocked it back and forth gently, but hard enough to get the milk to hit each end.

Make sure that your cream is a little cooler than room temperature before you start shaking it. It turns into butter much more quickly that way. My milk was about 60 F when I started. The temperatures I've read are between 55 F and 66 F.

The first time I tried the butter I gave up after about 20 minutes of shaking. I went out and milked and did some other chores and left the jar on the counter. When I remembered the project sitting on the counter, I checked inside. I was so surprised to see a ball of butter! This time it didn't take nearly as long and I think I'm getting the feel for the change in sound and feel when the cream turns into butter.

I let the butter sit in the buttermilk over night. I didn't have time to wash it and I thought it would be fine to leave it. It was! The next morning I took the butter out of the jar and rinsed it in cold water in the sink. I mushed the butter a little in the water so the milk would separate out of the pockets in the butter.

I rinsed until the water ran clear. It took about 4 times. I learned that I have to be a little gentle with the mushing part, or I end up with more butter on the sides of the measuring cup than I do in a ball.

Final product! Yay! 

I was so surprised! I was really amazed! This tasted like sweet, creamy unsalted butter! It didn't taste goaty flavored, either! It tasted different from the butter we buy at the store, but I think that's because it was so fresh.

The butter is very white. I read that is because goats are more efficient with their use of food and all the carotene has been converted into Vitamin A. A cow isn't as efficient so some of the carotene finds it's way into the cream which is why cow milk is yellow.

I used the milk that I had skimmed the cream from to make some mozzarella. It worked just fine and it doesn't seem any drier than the full fat mozzarella! I'll use the milk leftover from making the butter in bread, just to see how it turns out. I might try to turn the leftover milk from the butter making into buttermilk by adding some cultured buttermilk to it. I wonder if someone let the leftover milk sit out and 'ripen' like making clabbered milk? Hmmm..... more experiments to try!

I probably won't make alot of butter this way. But I probably will make butter this way for special occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas and parties without little kids.