How to Make Homemade Butter

Making butter is a great way to use up any heavy cream that you have leftover after making another recipe. Here are simple instructions for making homemade butter in a jar. You will start with a jar and some heavy cream, it does not matter what size of jar you use but you want to fill the jar halfway. The higher fat content you have in your cream the better this will work so make sure you pick the one with the highest fat content.

Put on the lid and star shaking, make sure you shake it really hard so it slams against the top and bottom of the jar. After about two minutes of shaking, open the jar and you will see that you have whipped cream. Close the jar and continue to mix for another six minutes until it starts to turn a little more solid which means it is close to being butter. The liquid will start to separate from the buttermilk and the butter itself.

You can strain off the buttermilk and save that and use that in a recipe later. Take the solid part and put it in a mixing bowl then pour in a little cold water to rinse off then use your hands to fold it into a little bowl. Discard that liquid and pour more cold water, shape it again and repeat this process until the liquid in the bowl is clear. What you will be doing is rinsing away all the buttermilk so you have nothing else except pure butter.

Place your butter in a jar or bowl and you are ready to go. If you want salted butter, you can add a little bit of salt with the cream before shaking. You can also turn this into amazing compound butter and add herbs, honey, or all sorts of different flavouring to give yourself a real gourmet treat. There is nothing quite like homemade butter and making it is a fun activity.

Ingredients;

• 1 pint-sized (16 oz) mason jar
• 1 cup heavy cream (38% fat content)
• Cold water

Instructions;

1. Pour heavy cream into the mason jar, filling it half-way full. Screw the lid on.
2. Shake mason jar for approximately 5-7 minutes. After the first 2 minutes, you’ll have whipped cream.
3. Keep shaking until you hear that a lump has formed inside, and shake an additional 30-60 seconds after that.
4. Remove the solids from the jar. The remaining liquid is buttermilk. You can save that for other recipes, or discard it.
5. Place the solids into a small bowl. Pour cold water over the butter and use your hands to squish it into a ball. Discard water and repeat rinsing 2 times more.
6. At this point you have butter. You can add in things like salt, honey, and herbs to create flavoured butter, or serve in its pure form as is or refrigerate it.
7. The addition of these other ingredients is what will change the colour of the butter to yellow or white.