Churning Our Own Cultured Butter

One of the fun things that my family does is make our own cultured butter and buttermilk.  

    First we skim the cream off the milk with a ladle or measuring cup?. Can you see the color difference between the milk and cream in both of the above pictures? The cream is really thick -- thicker than the heavy whipping cream that you buy at the store.

    We don't use a hand churn like some of our Amish friends do -- we just use our Bosch Mixer. It gets the job done in less than ten minutes, but you have to watch it carefully so you can stop it when its finished. 

Here are the three stages that we look for. (1.) Cream (2.) Almost butter (3.) Butter.

You can click on the photos above to make them bigger

    As you can see, the yellow globules of butter clump together slightly, but are still mixed in with the buttermilk. We take out the beaters and use out hands or a spoon to bring all the butter-clumps together into one large ball.

    After that we wash the butter in the sink. Don't use hot water! If you do you'll have no butter left by the end. Use cold water and squish and wash the butter until the water that you squeeze out is clear instead of white like the buttermilk. The colder the butter gets the stiffer it gets too so get it clean before before it grows too stiff

Then the butter is salted to taste and stored in a little glass container in the fridge. 

Before moving out to Amish country I thought all eggs were white and all butter was white. Oh I was mistaken. The best eggs are brown and the best butter is yellow :) Who knew?