Butter, At Last!

Every now and then I skim the cream off my raw milk to make butter.  But something always seems to go wrong, and I give up for a month or so.  The first time I made it was the best – I put all the cream into my Bosch mixer, ran it on speed 2 (out of 4), and after an hour (of mixer noise!) finally got butter.  The lesson I should’ve taken away from that was next time, run it on a higher speed.

 

I tend toward airheadedness, though, so I decided that next time I would use a blender or food processor since it might work better in a smaller space.  Well, I tried both of those with no success – just a splitting headache and an irritable husband afterward.

 

Last week I decided to save the cream from two weeks’ worth of milk and try again in the mixer at a higher speed.  I used to get a gallon per week, now I just get half a gallon, so there’s really not enough cream in a half gallon to make it work.  And all of those things together were magic – after half an hour I had butter!

 

 

(Ignore the indentation from my fingers – I was too excited about this to smooth it out before I took a picture.)

 

I’m not going to give a tutorial here about how to do this, since I’m definitely not an expert.  But if you Google “how to make raw milk butter,” you’ll find plenty of resources.  I let mine sit at room temperature on the counter for 12 hours (which is supposed to improve the flavor), but other than that, I followed the general instructions.  Now I need to figure out what to do with the leftover buttermilk, since I can’t cook with it (on account of D’s allergy).  Anyone want some buttermilk?