I was not one of those first grader’s who got to make butter in their class with the nice teacher. Lucky bastards. I only found out how easy it was to make butter about a year and a half ago when I read Oishi Eats’ post about her lil students making it in class. I was like whoa, that’s so cool. Who knew making butter was so easy? When I was in first grade I was still going to elementary school in Korea and let me tell you, there was no butter making projects involved.
butter fat
buttermilk
So I did it finally. Made my own butter. I was motivated by the chance to use Organic Pastures’ raw cream. I’ve had their da bomb raw milk before so I knew the cream would be bomb too. The thought of having homemade raw butter was very exciting. I picked up the $10 (yes $10 per pint!) bottle of raw cream and got to work at home. Butter is formed when fat globules are agitated and break allowing the liquid fat to combine together into a mass (On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee). You can agitate the cream by bottle and hand, the manual way. I used my standing mixer with the paddle attachment. I just let the machine keep rolling a moderate speed while I watched on the side doing double duty washing dishes. And to my amazement the fat and the buttermilk were starting to separate.
After the butter mass formed I drained out the buttermilk and rinsed the butter with cold water to rinse off any additional buttermilk on the surface. Then kneaded the mass a bit to squeeze out the trapped buttermilk. After that was done I folded in some fleur de sel. Of course I had to test out the butter right away. I toasted up a slice of Milton’s classic white bread and spread some of the freshly made salted raw butter. Oh my goodness, the flavor of the butter was mind-blowing. Rich, sweet, buttery. Buttery butter. It had so much flavor, not having had that pasteurization thing done. What a simple pleasure with immense satisfaction.
