Churning Butter

A few days ago, I had the joy of witnessing firsthand the miracle of homemade butter as I churned it for the first time. Lushiously creamy, fresh and absolutely addictive butter is easy to make, tastes fantastic and makes a lovely gift for friends!

Yield: About 1 lb. of butter, and approximately 2 cups of buttermilk

Ingredients:
-1L Warm Heavy Cream (35% or higher)
-About 1tsp Salt (optional)

Making butter is as easy as easy can be, two methods tend to be particularly well suited to the home environment.

The long way:
1)When settling down to watch a movie or to have a long conversation or such, pour the cream into a large jar, leaving at least 25% of the jar empty, the more space, the better.
2)Shake (very) vigorously, you're basically attempting to slam air into the fat fluffing it up, as if you're whipping it.
3)The cream will achieve the consistency of whipped cream after several minutes, let's say 10ish or so...that's not good enough...keep shaking!
4)Eventually, the cream will form into a solid ball (butter) and liquid will ooze out of it (buttermilk), at this point keep shaking until there is a large amount of liquid buildup, drain the liquid out, keep shaking the butter solids.
5)When the liquid no longer forms in large ammounts and only draws off in a fine sweat, rinse the butter in cold water, shake, rinse again.
6)After about 15-20 minutes of shaking and rinsing, tadaa!!!! You now have lovely fresh butter, add salt to taste!

Easy way:
1)Put cream in bowl, whip on highest speed with a mixer
2) Whip until buttermilk separates completely from butterfats
3)See steps 4,5, 6 of the long way, replace shaking with beating.

Mmmmm butter...

Use the buttermilk for anything, it's wonderful in pancakes or even in the Maple Pear Scones mentioned earlier!