Recipes

We wanted to share how to make butter and buttermilk quickly and easily! Making homemade butter is rewarding because you can make some pretty and creative displays and more – or just have fun making your own butter. It also tastes so creamy and fresh! There nothing like homemade fresh butter on a warm piece of homemade bread.  It is super-comfort food

All you need for this recipe is whipping cream – in fact, it can’t really be called “a recipe” because it takes just one ingredient and is so simple to make!

You will also need a way to whip the whipping cream vigorously.  Here are some fun and practical ways:

1. A glass jar with a lid and shake it vigorously for 10-30 minutes.  Our kids like to help and they pass the jar and it is a fun experiment for them too.  They do tire out, even passing between 4 of them, so one of us usually finishes it off!
2. A Blender
3. A food processor (our preferred method).

The process for how to make your own butter and buttermilk is around 15 minutes total.  If you are using a food processor, there is not much hands on attention required and only takes about 8-10 minutes!

How to make butter and buttermilk the easy way:

• Pour the whipping cream in the food process and start your machine.  Let it run for about 8-10 minutes or until it looks a little yellowish and separates like this:

• Once it gets to this state, you will want to drain the buttermilk off into a bowl

• Then I like to run the food processor for another minute or two after pouring out the buttermilk for any final separation

• Once it has ran for another minute, I finish it off by squeezing the butter with a spatula to allow and final buttermilk to drain off.  I squeeze several different times after folding it over between each squeeze.

• Then simply scoop the butter out of the mixing bowl and refrigerate.  It will be very soft, but it will set to a hard set once it is refrigerated (like butter from the store – hard from the fridge or turns soft on the counter!).  We store it in a BPA-Free plastic bowl with a lid.

Also, you can use the butter in this soft state to either make a flavored butter or to mold it into shapes that you would like! We like to make butter shapes for special occasions (and sometimes just because the kids love it!).  We like using the silicone food molds as they are much easier to work with and easier to release the butter, etc.!

We are using heart shapes since it is close to Valentine’s Day You can make individual shapes, or even one large shape.  As an example in this case, we could have used a large heart cookie cutter on a glass square pan and filled to the top of the cookie cutter with the soft butter and then refrigerate until hard.  Then we would have one large heart shaped butter!

You can see a whole slew of silicone molds for your butter whether large shapes or individual shapes for all seasons and occasions on Amazon HERE.  Some of these are really great prices and include free shipping too!

Finally, we love to use flavored butters on our different homemade breads. You can literally make so many numerous combinations, but here’s what we gravitate to most often:

• Garlic Butter – mix into your soft butter to taste with garlic powder or even fresh garlic minced!
• Herb Butter – mix into your soft butter your favorite combinations of dried or even finely minced fresh herbs
• Chive Butter – mix fresh or dried chives into your butter
• Honey butter – mix honey to taste into your butter
• Fruit butters – we have also mixed jams with the butters to make a fruity combination
• The possibilities are endless!

So, the next question is……Is it cheaper to make my own butter vs. buying it at the grocery store??

This is a GOOD question.  If you want to buy fancy butter in different shapes – then doing this yourself will most likely always save you money.  But honestly, we don’t do this often.  Most of the time we are making butter, it is because it is CHEAPER and because we will eat it no matter the pretty shape.

Here’s the criteria for making your own butter to save money:  Find out whether the whipping cream on sale?  Is the butter on sale?

With the above process, we used one pint of whipping cream.  This normally sells for around $2 each pint but you can regularly get it on sale for at least $1.50 or less.  So how much butter can you get out of one pint of whipping cream?  This pint makes around 1 cup of packed butter (or a little more). This would be equivalent to 2 sticks of butter. In addition, you also receive that nice buttermilk, which ends up being around 1 cup as well!

So the REAL answer to the question of “Is it cheaper to make my own butter?” is really going to depend on the sales each week.  If your store has an awesome butter sale, then buying the butter will probably be cheaper. If your store has a great whipping cream sale – then stock-up, make your butter and freeze it which means lots of savings for the next month or two! Also, watch for markdowns on both the regular and organic whipping creams.  We see these go on markdown quite frequently and this means even cheaper butter when you find those deals!

And the final question is…..What do you do with your homemade buttermilk?

You can google “recipes with buttermilk” and you will get tons of ideas.  We are going to reserve this for the next post to share what we have made with it, but we also want to hear some ideas from you too!

What recipes or ideas to you have that call for or use buttermilk? Also, share with us any of your own ideas for other  flavored butters you have made or molds you like to use.

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