Homemade butter

I read a post over on Design Sponge about homemade butter and got inspired. This is another thing that I knew could be made, but never occurred to me to do. I'm sorry, but I'm not spending an hour shaking a jar or standing over a butter churn. I'll walk to the store and buy it there, thank you very much. But Ashley at Design Sponge made hers in a food processor. That sounds way easier and doable, but my food processor is teeny tiny. I read in the comments and learned that you can use the Kitchen Aid and that's what sold me.

I started with a pint of heavy whipping cream and beat it on low with the paddle attachment of my mixer. You could probably just start on high, but that's going to get messy quick. On started on low and turned it up as it started to thicken. For a long time it was just cream sloshing around in the bowl and I kept thinking it wouldn't work. After about 10 minutes, it got to a thick, whipped cream stage. I turned it up a notch and walked away to fold laundry. Two minutes later I heard the buttermilk splashing over the sides of the bowl. Very quickly it went from the whipped cream stage to separated butter and buttermilk. I poured the buttermilk off and froze it. I'll probably make biscuits or red velvet with it.  Then you press the remaining liquid out of the butter and you're done. In about 20 minutes you've got beautiful delicious butter. And you're really only doing something for 5 of those minutes. It's a whole lot easier than I expected.

I had the fresh butter on a bagel that night and have been using it for a little over a week. I've sauteed with it and used it in mac and cheese and it's all great. I've noticed a few differences. On toast it tastes more "buttery" than store butter, but when you cook with it the flavor blends better. It also melts faster than store butter. Plus think of all the things you can make with it; herbed butters, honey butter, spicy butters. I think I'm going to make sage butter to rub on the Thanksgiving turkey, a long way off I know, and spicy butter with chili powder for corn on the cob this summer.

I'll admit that I might be a convert. I'm not going to rush out and buy butter molds just yet, but I think I'm going to try out homemade over store-bought for a while. It's about half the cost of buying equal measures of butter and buttermilk. One pint of cream yields a cup of butter and a cup of buttermilk. This round I just got the crappy ACME store brand cream as a test. I plan on getting good organic cream for the next batch. I'll let you know if it's different.