I can’t believe it’s so easy to make your own butter!
As Lurpak hits £7.25 a pack, ROSE PRINCE tests a way to help your cash spread further
When I was at school in 1968, individual glass bottles of milk were delivered each morning to the classroom for our ‘elevenses’. One day, our teacher, Miss Mason, took the gold foil off each bottle, removed the cream plugs on top of the milk and put them into one jar.
She twisted on the lid and we then took turns to shake it. After ten minutes of vigorous agitation, the cream split into a whitish liquid containing large, floating clods of yellow fat.
Voila! We had made butter, Miss Mason told us, pointing to the lumps. I thought it looked rather disgusting but I never forgot that day; it was a basic lesson in chemistry.
In 1968, half a pound of butter cost 1s/9d — just over £1 in today’s money. Last year, the average price for a standard 250g block was about £1.75.
In the year to May 2022, however, this has risen by 13.3 per cent to £1.96, according to the Office for national Statistics, thanks in no small part to the ballooning fuel crisis.
And it is still rising. Last week, it was reported that a 750g pack of Lurpak ‘spreadable’ butter now costs a stonking £7.25.
Manchester mum Jo Rourke, 40, decided she’d had enough of this. Instead of spending a fortune on something as basic as spread, she decided to make her own butter from discounted cream and posted a video on TikTok that went viral.
her method was no different from the one we used in my classroom experiment in 1968. She put 36p whipping cream in a jar, added some salt, and shook and shook until it morphed into butter.
What Jo did not reveal, however, was how much butter her tub of whipping cream yielded. From the looks of it, her spoils may not have amounted to much more than a couple of tablespoons. even so, I decided to test the method myself.
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IFFERENT creams have varying fat levels: whipping cream is 30 per cent fat, double cream 48 per cent. The more butterfat in the cream, the more butter it makes. But, of course, the higher the fat content, the higher the cost.
I opted for double cream — I thought it best to use 900ml, to avoid turning out Jo’s tablespoon-sized portions.
In Sainsbury’s, I found 600ml pots for £1.98 (33p per 100ml). I also bought some good-quality Longley Farm Jersey extra Rich double cream, at £1.69 per 250ml.
So off I set on my butter-making adventure — just as I did in 1968.
Afterwards, I weighed the butter from both batches of cream and had very remarkable results. The cheaper double cream yielded 580g of butter from 900ml, costing £2.97. That’s 51p per 100g, while the cheapest ready-made butter is 70p per 100g. A win, no doubt about it.
As for the Jersey cream butter, it returned 480g of butter from 900ml of cream, costing £6.08. That’s £1.27 per 100g. So not a win, economically — though it’s a close call when it comes to the backbreakingly expensive Lurpak.
however, the quality was truly sublime. Yellow in colour, incredibly fresh-tasting and sweetscented, this was the butter of our forebears. The lower-budget butter that I made from the Sainbury’s double cream was white in colour; its smell was not unpleasant but it wasn’t so sweet. And while it wasn’t as good as the Jersey, I would be happy to spread it on my bread or cook with it.
So why are we not all making our own butter? I cannot stress enough how quick and easy it is to do. And it’s an excellent way to use up the excess cream from Sunday’s apple crumble.
You can use any natural cream — but not creme fraiche, as I have never got it to work. There are important reasons to keep butter in your family’s diet, even in hard times. For years, it was cited as a major culprit in heart disease.
This advice has since been revised and it is no longer seen as public enemy no 1.
Butter does contain saturated fat, but in a pure form, and also contains acids that protect the body against viruses, fight tumours and guard the gut from pathogenic bacteria.
Butter is also rich in vitamins A and D, which aid the absorption of calcium, benefiting bone health.
I’d certainly advocate eating it in place of a highly processed, additive-ridden spread.
And making your own makes it much more affordable.
So get your skates on and slide into butter churning.
Goodness knows, in these inflationary times, we need it.