How to make homemade butter. How to make butter from cream
Please advise how you can make good oil at home? Does anything need to be added to it?
At first, I also couldn’t make good homemade butter, although my cow produced very rich milk. Having studied many books describing the technology of making oil, I developed my own, which is most suitable for use at home.
After milking the cow, I filter the milk through 4 layers of gauze and leave it to settle for about two days. Occasionally I ferment the milk, and then the sour cream can be removed after five hours. If I remove the top from one bucket, I immediately put it in the churn and churn. If a couple of buckets of milk have accumulated, then I mix the sour cream removed from them and certainly let it ripen for another 3-4 hours.
I place the ripened sour cream in a bucket of warm water so that it warms up to 110 (no less!). And when I’m in a hurry, I do it even simpler: I pour a glass of warm water into the skimmed mixture and into the butter churn.
There is no need to churn before creating a whole piece, because in this case the oil will not be washed out and there will be impurities in it. The process must be completed when grains of fat appear. That's when I start rinsing.
Each grain of oil is perfectly rinsed and freed from whey. How do they do it? After draining the whey from the churn, I fill it with water at room temperature and again crush the grains. Subsequently, I change the water again and beat the butter again. After rinsing it in two waters, I remove the fat with a slotted spoon onto a plate and squeeze it with the lid of a butter churn. And since the oil was in grains, it is perfectly pressed and shaped, becoming hard. After these manipulations, I take it out into the cold.
Homemade butter It’s great to keep it in a dark place, in slightly salted well water. But it is important that it be completely immersed in water. The oil can sit in it for 20 days, but the water needs to be changed periodically. You can, of course, keep it in the refrigerator, but there it comes into contact with air, which is why it decomposes more quickly.
In summer, the oil comes out rich and has a beautiful yellow color. This is because summer feed contains a lot of carotene (vitamin A), which gives the oil its bright yellow color. The winter product is light, which means it has a low carotene content.
Homemade butter from cream
I also make homemade butter from cream. After removing them from the milk (I don’t have a separator), I let them stand for 3 hours and start churning. Then everything is the same. In this case, you need to churn for a longer period of time than when using sour cream, but the butter comes out sweeter.
A very fragrant butter is obtained from melted sour cream - similar to Vologda - with a nutty smell. Ordinary sour cream is placed in the oven and left until it turns brown. Subsequently, it is cooled and placed in a churn.
For longer storage, you can prepare salted butter. In this case, you need to remember a simple rule: add salt in an amount of 2% of the volume during the churning process, and not after the butter is produced.
Butter makes wonderful ghee. I put the piece in an enamel pan without water. When boiling, I remove the foam, and in order for the non-fat impurities to settle better, I sprinkle a little salt. After about 30 minutes of light boiling, I scoop out the top part with a spoon or let it harden, and then separate the yellow part of the pure ghee from the lower whitish sediment.
You won't get good butter if you feed slop to a cow instead of grain fodder. I would like to make a warning regarding some foods. Feeding feed grains and peas to a cow will cause the butter from her milk to crumble. There is also no need to get carried away with compound feed.
Churn
And now about how to make a butter churn. This simple thing has been serving me for several years now.
To make a butter churn, you can use any significant container (not aluminum): a jar, can or tank. For example, I used a five-liter glass jar for this. The lid of my butter churn consists of two planks. The bottom board fits tightly into the neck, the top one covers the edges on top, for this reason it is 2 cm wider. The planks are connected with screws.
A hole about 8 millimeters in diameter is drilled in the middle of the lid to insert a rod - a wooden stick. A recess was made around this hole in the top board so that the sour cream removed from the jar during the churning process does not spread, but flows back into the jar. The rod penetrates freely into the hole in the cover. The diameter of this stick is one and a half millimeters smaller than the diameter of the hole.
At the bottom, the rod ends in a wooden cross with strips at both ends so that the cross is pressed tightly to the bottom of the can.
If the neck of the container is wide enough, the crosspiece can be tightly fixed to the stem, but if it is narrow, it is best to make a collapsible one and, for greater strength of connection, use a piece of fabric when assembling inside the container.
I fill the jar 1/3 full with sour cream. You can cook up to 800 grams of butter in it at one time. I knock it down for 20-30 minutes. After the container is filled, I lower the rod with the cross inside, press the lid tightly into the neck and, lifting the rod up and down, churn the oil. This is the technology.
If you make butter from fresh cream, the buttermilk left after churning will be sweet. If the cream is no longer so fresh, but old, it will be sour.
Butter
Both types of buttermilk are used to prepare different types of bread products, muffins, some soups and fruit drinks.
The quality - taste, color, smell of cream - depends, first of all, on the cow's pasture. Milk can be very sweet or unsweetened, and its taste can change throughout the year - we noticed from the neighbor’s cow, whose milk we always take. :-)
Whatever milk you use to make homemade unsalted butter, it will always turn out great. It would be good, fresh milk, but what taste it has is not so important here. :-)
In India, butter is still churned almost the same way as thousands of years ago. Fill a large clay pot halfway with aged cream collected over several days. Then, using a special device (it consists of sticks and ropes fastened together), a wooden whorl is manually rotated, due to which the grains of oil are knocked together into flakes. Today, a food processor has greatly simplified the process of churning butter. You can quickly whip up one or two liters of cream in one go.
Churn.
If you only have homemade milk (and not ready-made cream), you will have to first get the cream, and then the butter. The cream forms on its own, rising to the surface of the milk, which should be carefully collected with a spoon or slotted spoon. But before infusing the milk, you need to strain and cool it, and then pour it into a wide container. And then you can beat the butter by hand or using a mixer or blender.
Another great invention - separator: cutting off heavy cream from milk. We haven’t tried using it yet, but we’re looking into it. It makes the process of extracting cream from milk very easy. .
The milk in the separator (cream separator) is poured into the drum, which begins to spin. Under the influence of inertia, the liquid is pressed against the walls, displacing fat towards the center. The cream collects in the middle of the drum and the skim milk collects at the sides. Thus, the two products are separated from each other, flowing out through their own tubes. With the help of a separator, excess liquid is removed and only the oil remains, and if you beat it manually, you will also have to infuse and squeeze to drain the excess liquid, and this is a long process.
There are also separators for oil - they are similar in principle to cream separators. Only fluid is removed, and the fat rolls in the separator until it forms an oil lump.
An old grandmother's method is to churn butter using a simple device called a butter churn. First, churning - continuously moving the pestle up and down. Then pour the contents into a bowl of cold water.
Oil mold.
We collect the oil that has floated to the surface with a large wooden spoon and place it tightly in a special wooden mold with a tricky bottom. Cover the mold with a lid and place it overnight in the cold in the glacier, in the basement. In the morning, take out a block of butter with an unusually delicate taste. :-)
Wood for churn and molding is best used birch. The oil will be fragrant and store well. Probably, molding can be done from birch bark.
Cooking this way is perhaps the best thing - hand churning gives the butter something that no mixer can give.
Cooking time for butter in a food processor or mixer: about 10-20 minutes.
Yield: 570-800 g of butter from 1 liter of cream.
Melted butter
Take cream cooled to about 15°C. Insert the metal whipping attachment into a food processor, pour in the cream, close and turn on. As you churn, the cream becomes thicker and thicker, and eventually grains of butter begin to separate. Add ice water (about 125 ml) and crushed ice (a couple of cubes) - this will help the butter churn into large lumps.
Drain the buttermilk and use your hands to squeeze the whey out of the butter. Rinse the cleaned lump of butter under running very cold water and place for storage in a container with a tight-fitting lid.
If you want, you can make salted butter: add regular salt or seasoned salt for flavor. The butter can be stored in the freezer, unopened, for up to three months. Or you can melt it - make ghee - then it can be stored for six months even in the room.
Instead of a food processor, you can use an electric mixer or a mixer. A grandmother in a neighboring village who keeps goats (the milk is fatty and very tasty) does it quite simply: she collects the cream in a jar, then closes it with a lid and shakes the jar in her hands for several minutes. The oil is excellent. :-) So goat milk also produces excellent butter.
Butter is the most valuable food product. The main types of butter contain 81,582.5% milk fat and no more than 16% water, in which a small amount of proteins, carbohydrates and mineral salts are dissolved. The high taste and structure of butter ensure its good digestibility (up to 98.5%). The high calorie content (6.6-7.5 kcal per 1 g) and the content of vitamins A and D determine the value of butter as a food product. However, it contains relatively few polyunsaturated fatty acids (no more than 5%), therefore, with a balanced diet, it is necessary to combine it with liquid vegetable oils
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Homemade butter tastes noticeably better than store-bought commercial butter, and it only takes 20 minutes of work to make. To give the butter a special flavor, which it does not naturally acquire in all regions, add fermented milk bacterial cultures to the cream to make it more sour.
Ingredients
Heavy cream
Bacteria for buttermilk extraction, yoghurt or mesophilic cultures (optional)
Salt (optional)
Finely chopped herbs, garlic or honey (optional)
Steps
Part 1
Preparing the cream- Do not use cream with added sugar.
- The cream's fat percentage will tell you how much butter you can get from it. It is recommended to take cream with at least 35% fat content.
- To find local sellers of fresh natural cream, you can try looking for advertisements in local newspapers and notice boards.
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If you will be using an electric mixer, chill the large mixing bowl as well as the container of water.
A cold bowl will keep the butter from melting. A second cool container of water may also be helpful at this stage, especially if the tap water comes out warm. Pour the cream into a bowl.
Do not fill the bowl to the brim as the cream will expand to include air bubbles before it turns into butter.
Add bacterial cultures to the cream to enhance the flavor and make the butter easier to whip (optional). If you have added fermented milk cultures to the cream, leave it at room temperature for 12-72 hours, checking its condition every few hours. Cream that has begun to sour will become a little thicker, foamier, and acquire a sour or pungent odor.
Part 2
Extracting butter from cream-
Whip the cream. If you have a butter churn, rotate the crank for about 5-10 minutes. A high-quality butter churn quite easily and effectively whips cream into butter. If you have an electric mixer, use the whisk attachment and run the mixer on low to prevent splattering. Otherwise, seal the cream in a glass jar and shake it. If a mixer usually whips cream in 3-10 minutes, then shaking in a jar produces butter in about 10-20 minutes.
- To speed up the extraction of oil by shaking, first add a small clean glass ball to the jar.
- If your mixer only has one speed, cover the bowl of cream with cling film to prevent splatters from flying around.
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Watch how the cream changes consistency. During the whipping process, the cream will go through several stages.
- At first they will become foamy or slightly thicker.
- Then the cream will begin to hold its soft peak shape. When you remove the cream from the mixer, there will be a slight rise on its surface with a sloping top. It is at this moment that you can increase the rotation speed of the mixer.
- The whipped cream will then form an elastic texture.
- Next, the cream will become grainy and take on a very pale yellowish tint. Reduce the speed of the appliance before the cream starts to separate to prevent splashing.
- Eventually, there will be a sudden splitting of the cream into butter and buttermilk.
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Drain the resulting buttermilk into a separate container and save it for use in other recipes.
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Start by getting fresh heavy cream. Heavy whipping cream has the highest fat percentage, making it easier to successfully turn it into butter. To give your homemade butter a unique flavor that store-bought butter lacks, try purchasing fresh, raw cream at your local farmer's market. If this is not possible, among the remaining options, the best taste will be butter from long-term pasteurization cream (for 30 minutes at a temperature of 63-65 ° C), followed by butter from short-term pasteurization cream (for 15-20 seconds at a temperature of 72-75 °C) and the last one will be butter made from ultra-pasteurized cream (instant heating to 85-90°C without holding).
Continue to knead the butter and drain the liquid as it appears. Stop creaming the butter when the mixture looks and tastes like butter, or when the liquid stops coming out of it.
For a number of my friends, this same phrase evokes completely different associations. Hearing it, they imagine a simple, healthy product, but at the same time they compare preparing oil at home with a huge headache. Yes, not everyone understands that making homemade oil is quite easy.
Why make homemade butter?
Making homemade oil should be done by those people who love themselves and natural products. Of course, if you eat high-quality store-bought butter, nothing terrible will happen. But you should be aware that this product, unlike homemade butter, is not made from cream alone.
Oil producers are allowed to add dyes, bacterial preparations, preservatives, flavors, emulsifiers, stabilizers, etc. to their products. Do you want to eat fresh bread in the morning, spread with stabilizers and preservatives? No? Same thing. And it is not a fact that the oil you purchased contains only what we have listed. It may consist of more unexpected and dangerous components. Do you still think that preparing butter at home is a whim or stupidity? Hardly. Well, then let's learn how to make healthy butter.
Homemade butter from collected cream in a jar in 15 minutes
To prepare about 80 g of amazingly tasty and healthy homemade butter, you will need about 300-330 ml of cream. You can collect them from homemade fat milk. Just take a small ladle or mini ladle and skim off the cream that is on top of the milk. Of course, you can select them with a spoon, but this will drag out the collection process, and our task is to make homemade butter as quickly as possible.
Pour the collected cream into a half-liter jar. If you want to whip butter at home using a jar, you need the cream to occupy no more than two-thirds of the container. So if you have approximately 330ml of cream, a 500ml jar is the ideal vessel for whipping your homemade butter. Beating a larger amount of butter at a time, taking a lot of cream and using a larger jar, will be a little more difficult and longer. It is better to choose a container with some kind of corrugated areas or notches, because when using a jar with smooth walls, you risk breaking the vessel with unformed oil. A jar with a hermetically sealed lid is especially good.
So, pour the selected cream into the jar and close it with a lid. Take a glass container and start shaking the cream so that it hits either the bottom of the jar or the lid with which it is closed. After 5-10 minutes, you will notice that small particles of oil begin to form on the glass. Shake the jar for another four minutes. If you open the lid and see an already formed piece of homemade butter, you can stop shaking and start washing the creamy product.
First, drain the cloudy liquid (buttermilk) from the jar, then rinse the oil under running cold water. You can rinse homemade oil directly in the jar until clear water runs out of the container. In this simple way you can prepare butter at home in 15 minutes.
Attention: The milk from which you remove the cream should be at room temperature. If you whip the cream too warm, the butter may turn out runny. But working with a cold product will take much longer. Then the beating may take 20-25 minutes.
To keep homemade butter longer, it needs to be lightly salted. After this, the butter should be wrapped in foil and placed in the refrigerator.
Butter in a jar from store-bought warm cream in 4 minutes
You can whip butter in a jar of cream in five minutes or even a little faster. But for this you better buy heavy cream. Of course, even very fatty, but cold cream will need to be whipped for at least 15 minutes.
Before you start making homemade butter, chilled cream should be kept out of the refrigerator for about 10 hours so that it warms up evenly and well. After this, you will have to shake the jar for about four minutes. When the oil is clogged, you need to carry out all the steps mentioned above (drain the buttermilk, rinse, add salt, etc.).
Homemade butter in a modern manual butter churn in 3 minutes
Not everyone wants to shake a jar that is not suitable for churning homemade butter, even for those very 5-15 minutes. Many simply consider it undignified to cook a product in a vessel not intended for this purpose. If you are also not interested in this process, then you can buy a modern manual mini-churn. To be honest, it also resembles a jar. This type of butter churn is closed with lids on both sides. The cream is poured from the side where the silicone gasket with holes is located.
To prepare 125 g of butter you will need 220 ml of farm cream. You simply slowly pour in the cream that seeps into the jar through the holes mentioned above and let it settle. It’s good if the air temperature in the house where the cream is stored reaches 25°C. The cream should sit in the churn for about 8 hours. After this, you just need to shake the churn for about three minutes.
Now open the lid on the side of the churn that is intended for pouring in the cream. Squeeze a few tablespoons of the remaining liquid through the holes. After this, pour a little water into the churn and rinse the oil. After draining the water, open the churn from the back. Take a spoon and remove the oil.
Salt the prepared homemade butter and place it in the refrigerator to cool. Having such a special device, you can make not ordinary homemade butter, but with the addition of various ingredients. For example, girls can beat butter with honey. But men will like homemade garlic oil.
Let's go back in time or cook in a wooden churn
You can also look for a wooden churn. Not only does such a butter churn look quite colorful, it will also give you the opportunity to remember how you used to make homemade butter with your grandmother (well, of course, if such a thing happened in your life).
A wooden butter dish usually consists of a mortar into which sour cream is poured, a lid that prevents the whipping product from splashing, a pusher, and some kind of stick (which is used for whipping). This stick, at the end of which there is a round piece with holes or another figure, is inserted into the hole on the lid. After you pour the sour cream into the mortar, put on the lid with a stick inserted into the hole and begin to beat the butter.
Remember that you cannot fill the churn to the top with sour cream, otherwise it will come out and splash. It is better if you fill the mortar by a third with sour cream. Beat homemade butter in a mortar for 15-20 minutes.
If some of the sour cream still comes out, you can collect it and, opening the butter can slightly, return the escaped product to its place. When the sour cream stops jumping out and you hear squelching sounds, this can only mean one thing - the butter has been whipped to such an extent that the buttermilk has already separated. Work a few more minutes and you can pull out the oil.
Food processor instead of butter churn
If you urgently need to get about 250 g of butter, for example for baking a cake, and you don’t have time to heat the cream, you can use a food processor. It will quickly liquefy even chilled cream into butter. Many food processors come with a special blade for whipping butter.
To make butter in a food processor, simply pour the cream into the bowl of the machine and begin beating it until the buttermilk comes out. Almost 250 g of homemade butter is obtained from 400 ml of market heavy cream. When the oil is ready, pour it into a colander and rinse. If you didn’t use all the butter when preparing your baked goods, you can wrap the remainder in parchment paper and put the natural product you made yourself in the refrigerator.
Making butter at home with a mixer
To prepare 450 g of butter, you will need about a liter of not too thick sour cream. From fattier sour cream you can get about 600 g of homemade butter. This method is good because using a mixer, as well as a food processor, you can quickly make butter from a chilled dairy product.
Before putting medium-thick sour cream in the refrigerator, it is better to pour it into a bowl in which you will then beat the butter. At first, the speed of the mixer can be set higher, but after a few minutes, when the sour cream turns into buttery crumbs, reduce the speed of your hand-held machine. Otherwise, everything will start to fly apart in different directions.
Beat the butter until the crumbs begin to float in the whitish water. After this, drain the oil in a colander to get rid of the liquid, but do not rush to crush it into a solid lump. Only after thoroughly washing the butter crumbs under cold water can you begin to form balls from homemade butter. Wrap the pieces of butter in cling film and place in the freezer.
Prepare butter in a saucepan from frozen cream (waste-free production)
There is no special need to whip frozen cream in a food processor or mixer. Yes, and whipping completely thickened cream using technology is a little problematic. This can be done with a regular tablespoon.
To get 400 g of homemade fatty butter, you will need half a liter of thick store-bought cream, a saucepan, a spoon and a little time. Pour the cream into the saucepan and start stirring it. After a few minutes, the cream will set even more and the stirring process will become more intense. You basically just have to carefully squash the cream against the side of the saucepan.
This task seems a little tedious at first, because you don’t know how much longer you will have to knead the thick cream. But when you see how the buttermilk begins to stand out, you realize that there are only 5-6 minutes left before the process is completed. You need to get rid of this escaping water, as in previous methods of preparing oil at home. Don't rush to pour it into the sink, because you can collect the buttermilk in a bowl and, replacing milk, make delicious baked goods. It turns out that 500 ml of heavy cream, if handled correctly, will provide you not only with 400 g of butter, but also with 100 ml of buttermilk for charlotte.
To quickly get rid of the released liquid, tilt the container slightly while kneading the cream near one side of the saucepan. This will allow the buttermilk to run to the opposite side of the pan without mixing with the butter. You can get homemade oil using this method, without haste, in 10 minutes. Since you are unlikely to eat 400g of fatty butter quickly, it would be wise to freeze some of it.
How to shape homemade butter
If you want to get a perfectly smooth piece of butter with a beautiful shape, then you will need a plate and sleight of hand. Place the butter, separated from the buttermilk, washed and squeezed out of water, into a deep plate. The piece should be of such a size that it can roll slightly across your dish. Now start tossing the oil a little. This will knock out excess water and make the surface of the product smoother. The oil must not only be tossed, but also rolled over the plate. Using a plate, you will get a piece of butter, free of residual water, with a smooth surface and a regular oval shape.
Recipes for making original homemade butter
It has already been mentioned that you can make homemade butter with garlic or honey. But these are not all products that go perfectly with butter. Let's do something unusual and make delicious homemade butter with peppers and onions for men, with orange zest and cranberries for women, etc.
Homemade Butter with Peppers and Onions
Cut half a red bell pepper into pieces and fry in a frying pan until soft. After this, put the pepper in a food processor, add 100 g of homemade butter and a few stalks of green onions. Add salt and ground black pepper to taste.
Place the thoroughly ground mass on parchment paper or foil and roll into a small sausage. Now our original oil needs to be cooled in the freezer.
Homemade butter with cranberries and zest
To prepare sweet homemade butter, in addition to 100 g of the freshest butter, you will need two tablespoons of cranberries, the same amount of maple syrup, and a large spoon of orange zest.
Place butter and cranberries in a food processor. Wash the orange and finely grate its skin. Pour the syrup over the butter and strawberries, add a spoonful of zest and chop all the ingredients well. The resulting mass, just like the previous one, is placed in foil (baking paper), rolled into a sausage and frozen.
Homemade oil for gourmets
Both boys and girls will definitely like this homemade oil. First of all, you need to get the same 100 g of homemade butter. You can get it using any of the methods mentioned (using a food processor, mixer, hand churns, jars, spoons with saucepans, etc.).
So, for a gourmet snack, in addition to butter, you need to have Parmesan. To prepare the original sandwich butter, four tablespoons of grated Parmesan is enough. Place the butter and Parmesan cheese in a food processor and add sun-dried tomatoes (two tablespoons). The finishing touch is basil leaves. Take no more than five leaves. That's it, our ingredients are ready for grinding.
The resulting gourmet snack also needs to be wrapped in paper or foil, just like sweet butter with syrup or savory with pepper.
Homemade herb butter for meat and potatoes
I don't know about you, but some people love to eat steak fries with herb butter. To prepare this creamy masterpiece, you need to mix 100 g of butter with a spoon of lemon juice, two pinches of salt, rosemary, parsley and oregano (1 tbsp each). The butter is served chilled.
To make butter, you only need heavy cream (from 33%). The yield of the product is very small, for example, from 1 incomplete glass of cream you get 25 g of butter. Well, consider how much high-quality oil should cost in stores. If its selling price is lower, then it is clear that the oil contains some additives that increase its volume.
In production, butter is made using powerful whipping devices; at home, you can use a mixer. Since the mixer attachments are small, it is more convenient to make butter from small portions of cream, for example, a glass. For whipping, it is better to use narrow dishes with high edges.
1. So, pour the cream into a container and beat with a mixer at speed 2.
2. In the first stage of whipping the cream, it turns into a light foam with bubbles that pours from a spoon.
4. The mass gradually thickens and is no longer so easy, but still falls off the spoon when you turn it over. The mixture should be beaten further.
5. Now the cream resembles the consistency of cottage cheese with a yellowish tint.
Before the butter is ready, you need to beat the mixture a little more with a mixer.
6. It is easy to notice that small pieces of butter stick to the mixer blades.
7. At this time, the butter and separated milk are already clearly visible in the cream, the mass is very splashed, so the high edges of the mold are very important.
8. Now you need to put the butter on a sieve so that all the milk is drained. It can be used for other purposes.
9. The example shows how much oil is obtained as a result. It took no more than 10 minutes to prepare this amount of oil. Now you need to put it in the refrigerator so that it cools and hardens.
