make your own butter...

recently i made my own butter for the first time and it was SO easy, i don't know why it took me so long to try!

i first saw instructions here involving your stand mixer but my friend recently told me about a much easier way to do it if you're not making a lot. so all you need is -

heavy cream (i prefer raw cream off the top of my raw milk. read all about the benefits of raw milk here. but you could easily do this with any milk!)
a jar with a tight fitting lid
salt (optional)
about 15 minutes of time

all you have to do is pour the amount of heavy cream you want to use into your jar and seal the lid tightly (i used about a cup and a half of cream for my first time). make sure you have a big enough jar as your cream will expand significantly during this process. this amount of milk filled my quart jar halfway originally and if i did more cream than this i would move up to a larger jar for sure. the milk needed all of this room to do it's thing!
shake the jar for about 10 minutes. you will see the cream go from regular cream to thick, frothy cream, to a whipped cream and then finally "break" and some little clumps of white appear. then i kept shaking it for a minute or two more and the clumps formed into one big clump.
at this point i poured off the buttermilk into another container, this is now perfectly good, raw buttermilk. then i put some really cold water into my original jar with the butter and shook to "rinse" the butter. i poured off the water after a minute or so of shaking and repeated this step 3-4 times, until the water was mostly clear.
then i pressed the butter between two paper towels to squeeze out as much of the water as i could. this left me with a nice chunk of raw butter and a half of a pint of buttermilk.
at this point you can add salt to taste, which also acts as a preservative to slow down the spoiling process. just knead the salt into the clump of butter. homemade butter will spoil faster than store-bought because you can't get out all of the butterfat. but freezing it in small sections will also help to keep it fresh longer.

what a frugal and healthy new way to make one of our favorite foods! and read here why we think butter is better!