Occasionally we buy raw milk from a local dairy farm. It's an amazing farm and it's fun to go and see the different kinds of animals! If you were to picture a farm from the storybooks, this is the farm! By buying raw milk, you get the cream! Since I had never separated cream before or made butter for that matter, I was a rookie at this but believe me, I WILL do this again! Probably EVERY time I buy milk from them! If you don't have access to raw milk, that's ok - you can do the same thing with heavy cream bought from the store!
At the farm you have to bring your own container so I use my glass sun tea jar with a spigot. Then, when you are using it, the cream all goes to the top and you can use the milk down at the bottom. It has the consistency of 2% milk that way. When the cream gets close to the spigot, it's time to make butter!
I have no idea how other people do it, I'm sure there are different ways but this worked well for me. I used a ladle and scooped the cream off the top. I was surprised at how thick it was! But it was really easy to tell when it stopped being cream and started being milk because the milk looked a little different and thinner in coloring (more transparent) compared to the cream. That was my biggest fear - that I was going to be shaking milk forever and not getting anywhere.
I scooped it out and put it in a pint canning jar with a lid - One gallon of milk gave me about half a jar of cream which became about 3/4 of a stick of butter and half a cup of buttermilk.
Then I started shaking and shaking and shaking. By the way, I thought this would be a great project for the kids to help me with, turns out it is - but only for about 5 shakes - then it's all mom. Just to prepare you! I shook it for about 13 minutes when all of a sudden it was no longer making the splash sound in the jar and started making a glug glug sound. I opened it up to peek and it was firming up! I was ecstatic!!! I shook for another 3 minutes or so and then it looked like this!
Within another MINUTE from this point it stated to make another sound - this time a MAJOR splashing sound! I looked down and WOW! It had become a ball with buttermilk splashing around! It had completely separated! Yes, I was amazed!
And here is the finished product! I tried rinsing it with cold water to get the rest of the buttermilk out but I don't really see the point and probably won't do that again since I think it separated enough in the jar. I put it in a container and we're going to try it on homemade rolls tonite! YUM!
Let me know if you try it and how it turns out!!! It's really fun and the kids were just as amazed as I was how it went from being milk to butter! Oh and a little bonus - if you were to keep doing this every week as you buy the milk, you will get arms of STEEL!! But trust me, if I can do it, you can too!
In HIS Grip,
