Making butter is easy-peasy. Here’s how to churn your own – with some tasty buttermilk as a bonus by-product
All you need is some double cream, a whisk (ideally electric), some iced water and about 15 free minutes
Afew days ago, a friend of mine messaged me to say he had started making his own butter. I dismissed this as a very complicated process, and images of him sitting in his garden with an old fashioned churn came to mind.
I was wrong. All you actually need is some double cream, a whisk (ideally electric), some iced water and about 15 free minutes, which most of us can manage at the moment. Et voila, you have butter.
I had no idea that butter is essentially simply over-whipped cream. Every day is, as they say, a school day. So what do you need to make the delicious yellow goodness? The amount of equipment required is almost as limited as the ingredients list.
Equipment you need:
A whisk. Note: I used a stand mixer, which I appreciate probably made the task easier, but an electric hand or standard whisk and a lot of elbow grease can get the job done. A sieve
Two bowls
A spatula or wooden spoon A jug of iced water
Ingredients:
Double cream (the higher the fat content, the better the butter)
Salt (optional and to taste) Anything else you want to flavour your butter with
And, of course, as above, the iced water
Method:
Pour 300ml of double cream into a bowl, and start mixing. Start on low and gradually work your way up in speed if your mixer has the option.
Add the desired amount of salt – this is entirely to taste and depends if you want to use your butter to bake, or not. I added about 1 tsp for a noticeably salty taste.
Keep whisking at a high speed. I left my cream mixing for 12 minutes. It went from looking like thick whipped cream to a collapsed whipped cream to separated scrambled eggs. When the cream reaches a stage with distinct solids and a little liquid, you can stop.
Spoon the contents of your mixing bowl into a sieve over a bowl. You will notice that a liquid separates out into the bowl; that is buttermilk, put it to one side. You will be left with your butter in the sieve.
When you are satisfied that all of the buttermilk is out, move the sieve with butter onto a second bowl and pour iced water over it to rinse and ensure absolutely all of the buttermilk is gone. You can do this by hand, by squeezing the butter (which will be easy to ball up at this stage), or by pressing it down with a wooden spoon or spatula.
When all of the liquid is gone, you are done. Transfer the butter to a small dish. The butter will store in your fridge for up to six weeks.
The 300ml of cream I used produced 125g of fresh butter. Now what is buttermilk? Arguably, the best part of this entire process is the buttermilk by-product, as this can be
quite hard to get your hands on in UAE supermarkets.
So make sure to sieve your freshly churned butter over a bowl and squeeze out every last millilitre of buttermilk that you can.
Buttermilk is a fermented dairy product, the liquid left behind after churning butter out of cultured cream. It is a low-fat, tart, acidic product that makes for a great cooking ingredient.
The acid tenderises meat, which is why it is often called for in fried or roasted chicken recipes. It also works to kick start baking soda, which makes it excellent for pancake and soda bread recipes, resulting in a well-risen, light finished product.
The sour taste also lends well to creamy sauces and salad dressings, or in fruit smoothies.
Now, if you need me, I will be splitting my time between making unnecessary slices of toast, dreaming up creative butter flavours, and making batches of buttermilk pancakes or fried chicken.