Homemade Butter

I've been pretty curious to try my hand at making butter for awhile.
(Go ahead and picture me wearing my best bonnet & working away at churning butter.)

Except it's SOOOO much easier.

There are 2 ways to do it.
The first is an awesome upper arm work out. Put some room-temp heavy cream in a resealable container (plastic container, glass jar, etc) and shake.
Shake.
Shake some more.
Continuously shake your container for awhile. (I've heard it can take as little as 3-5 minutes, when I did it it took me 15-20 mins. But I also was impatient and didn't allow my cream to reach room-temp.)

You will know it's butter time when you can hear stuff sloshing around in there. (Yes, this is a technical recipe.)

I'm sorry I didn't take any pictures of my first attempt, cause, well, my hands were busy. Everyone else in the room was too busy doubting me.

The 2nd time, I got smart:

I know, I know it's not organic cream. The store I was at didn't have organic cream! I figured since this was purely an experiment it would be ok. Shh. Don't tell the organic police.

Pour in your organic cream. Because only people who take the time to actually make their own butter would use organic. And flip that puppy on. (I used the 2nd slowest speed, honestly going up any higher scared the beejizums out of me. Cream trying to escape the bowl.)

It'll start to get frothy.

And this is the point that I walked away because I get bored & distracted easily and only ran back to the mixer when I heard the distinctive sloshing sound.

And I had this...

BUTTER!!!

I would say this took a little less than 10 minutes. But again, I was too impatient to let the cream get up to room temp.

And do you see that liquid stuff in the bowl? That's buttermilk. (The stuff they sell at the stores in cultured buttermilk, this is the real deal!) I already have lists of things to make with buttermilk.

Pour the contents of your bowl or container through a mesh strainer. Remove your butter solids from the strainer and work it with a fork in a bowl. More buttermilk will come out. This is where methods vary, but I worked the butter with the fork, dumped it back into the strainer, then took it back out & worked it again. Probably 2 or 3 times.

Store your butter and buttermilk in the fridge.

The butter is good!! It could just be the simple extra taste of satisfaction, but I like the taste of satisfaction.

If you want salted butter, or want to get creative with flavored butter, add it to the cream before you start mixing or shaking. There's really no tried & true "recipe" that I could find. I think this is a more 'go for your own taste' thing.