I know I’ve blagged on about making your own butter before, but it really is so easy to do. We almost never throw away expired cream any more. I had a carton of pure cream (aka heavy whipping cream, 35% fat) which had reached its use by date, so I spent a few minutes this morning turning it into butter. There was about 400ml of cream which made 170g freshly churned, lightly salted butter. Life is good…
The cream went into my mini food processor in two batches (photos taken of the second batch, which is why the processor bowl is dirty). My machine has a little whisk attachment that fits over the blade. You could just as easily use a mixer with a whisk attachment, which is what we do whenever we have a larger quantity of cream. If we do use the mixer, we switch from the whisk to the paddle attachment about half way through.
Add a pinch of salt, if you like. We find this helps the butter keep a little bit better.
After a few minutes of pulsing, the cream will split, leaving fresh butter and buttermilk (whey). The cream will whip up, then collapse, then split.
Give the butter a quick rinse to wash off the sour whey. Note that the leftover liquid is actually buttermilk, albeit a much thinner version of the stuff you can buy commercially. When we make a large batch of butter, I save the buttermilk and use it for baking.
Then smack it around a bit on a chopping board to get any residual liquid out. We use gnocchi paddles and a wooden board placed at a slight angle over the sink, to allow the liquid to drain off. The butter sticks less to wood than it does to plastic.
Here’s the final butter, shaped and ready to be wrapped in parchment paper and stored in the fridge. Our homemade butter doesn’t keep as long as the commercial version, but we use it for everything from spreading on steaks to baking cookies. And there is almost nothing like super fresh butter in mashed potatoes!
I made two-thirds of a cup of butter this morning – from cream that was due to be thrown away. Even just typing that makes me smile..
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
As the saying goes … Waste not want not.
This is excellent and I have all those items in my kitchen so I’ve no excuse anymore. I am a butter addict … people ask be if I would like ‘toast with my butter’. And my 2 year old eats it straight too. It would be a triumph to make it.
Gillian, I’ve read that traditionally butter was made from cream which had been soured.
I’m never game to let it go too far past its expiry date (and it’s always kept in the fridge), but we’ve found that the cream which has soured a little has a lovely flavour to it. What it does mean though, is that we don’t throw expired cream out – we just turn it into butter.
We still buy most of our butter, but it’s always nice when we have some homemade stuff to serve with sourdough bread. And the thrill of eating butter which is only a few minutes old almost never wears off for me… :)
Celia
tell everyone how you make rum and raison ince cream… I know you know how. it’s delicious.
Here you go: https://figjamandlimecordial.com/2009/10/07/rum-and-raisin-icecream/
Quick question: Is it possible to over-beat the butter? I dont have a food processor, but heard you can do the same thing by putting the cream into a jar with a lid and just shaking it. I did that and got a very soft version of the 3rd picture. VERY soft. So I thought maybe it wasn’t ‘done’ yet; I kept shaking. Eventually, after an hour (quite literally), all I had was unseparated pudding-like stuff. All the liquid had been re-absorbed. But…had I stopped when I had the soft lump of butter, I’m pretty sure it would have dissolved when I washed it. Am I just over-thinking this?
Hi there – a friend once told me that this was how he made butter when he was growing up on the family farm, so I’m sure it works! I’m sorry I don’t know what happens if you continue beating after it’s split, we’ve never taken it that far. For what it’s worth though, you can also make this in a mixing bowl if you have an electric mixer, or even with a handheld whisk. When the cream splits, the butter is quite soft and squishy – it doesn’t really harden up until you put it in the fridge (and even then, it never hardens quite as hard as bought butter). Sigh…I’m not sure if any of that is helpful….
Wow, made my first batch today and my French husband who loves his French butter was very impressed! I’m on a mission now to perfect it & add salt flakes to the butter at the end as this is what we ate in France last Christmas & it was just divine! I’ll let you know how it goes!
Cool! Thanks for trying this out, Keri – you must have done a good job to impress the French husband! :)
Hi Celia, I am totally in awe of your blog! You are the absolute best and I can just spend hours looking through your very informative stuff! I have put a friend from work onto it also and now we are both addicted (not much work getting done!) and are both just going wow, wow, wow all day! I also put another friend of mine in Poland onto your blog & she was so happy to find your bagel tutorial as she had been looking for one for a while. Well done and please, never stop because you do such a great thing!
Best regards to you and your wonderful family!
Keri, thank you for leaving such a lovely and encouraging comment! :)
So happy you’re enjoying the blog and thanks for sharing it with your friends. I hope your friend has fun with the bagels! :)
Celia, why haven’t I found your blog before, I ask myself.
I always have the best intentions for left over cream as I usually only need about 80mls for the quantity of ganache I make, but never get around to using it before it expires.
I have to make 2 batches of cupcakes for a Halloween party so I will try to make my own butter with the left over cream.
Also, where did you get your gnocci board? I’ve been looking for one for a while (I’m in inner west Sydney).
Toni, they have them at Chefs’ Warehouse in Surry Hills – you might need to ask for them, as I think they were in a drawer somewhere when I bought them. You might also find them at Gina Cucina in Leichhardt, but you might want to ring first to check. Otherwise there’s a nice kitchenware wholesaler on Parramatta Road in Leichhardt that would probably have them as well.
We just had almost a litre of cream expire, and Pete turned it into a big log of fresh butter over the weekend. It’s a very nice thing to have in the fridge! :)
[…] such as breads, jams and biscuits. While trawling through her extensive blog, I found a post on how to make butter. I never knew it was so super easy peasy! All you needed was some pure cream (a few days […]